Can you understand scots

I understood all the examples despite not much exposure to Scots. Can someone translate for the benefit of those of us not from the blessed Isles? The bees are bouncing down the hedge along the lane, poking their noses in the dandelions.

On the other hand, Luther did produce two Bible editions in Low German, and look what happened. Sorbian-speaking in his time. A true story. I lived four years in Edinburgh. I had a Scottish girlfriend, who loaned her car to a friend who was off to be a journalist in Aberdeen.

Alas the car was totaled happily no one was hurt but Mary needed to go to Aberdeen to sign some papers and acknowledge that the dead car was hers. She had nae mair car, but she had me, so away we went. We had near enough direction this was , nae GPS nor Google Maps to the garage, but once inside the main part of Aberdeen, couldnae find the place.

We stopped to buy petrol, and I asked the man if he knew the place City Garage or some such on Kirkaldy Street maybe. He understood me, but I didnae follow a word he said.

So off she goes, and I see her having a try, and after maybe four minutes she comes back. Well, says I, where to? Says Mary, Damned if I know, I couldnae understand him. We went to a cafeteria, and we could not understand the folks behind the counter. Aberdeen is really tough, even for native Scots. Obviously, though, people do say they speak Geordie, usually meaning they have the accent, but without speaking the dialect of that name.

Well, I finally got a chance to hear all the Scots varieties as well as the five clips that Zythophile posted, though not yet the BBC ones. A few of the others I had to play twice to catch every single word. Their grammar was not: I only heard one grammatical deviation from Standard English, tellt for told , and even that could be classed as lexical in nature.

No singular verbs with plural nouns or the like. Thanks, aquilluqaaq. Dandelion is, however, a diuretic, which doubtless accounts for the French name. There is a more recent translation of the New Testament into Scots. I understand that it covers many dialects of Scots, and the only person who speaks English is the Devil. Pi t tleybed is not in the OED pissabed, n.

The dandelion, Taraxacum officinale , formerly well known for its diuretic properties. Reminds me of the parody Western Der Schuh des Manitu , where the good guys speak Bavarian to extents that vary with the situations, and the boss of the bad guys speaks an impressive Standard German that is impossible to localize more precisely than Germany as a whole or maybe even Switzerland!

There are many clips of this on YouTube. I think Lorimer who died in 67 made an alternate translation of the Temptation story like that, and his son who completed the work in 83 published it as an appendix.

This from a review back then; I do not have a copy, and so may well be mistaken. Alexander Bergs has published a full grammar of Modern Scots.

Hte starts by carefully distinguishing it from Highland English, Scottish English, and what he calls Present-day English or PdE, which means the RP accent of English English — a term of astounding parochiality, practically American in flavor, but all too common among British-trained linguists, who treat it as the reference variety of English rather than the speech of a tiny minority of a tiny minority of anglophones.

The first few chapters are available at academia. Quite similarly, most of what is said about German out there applies only to Standard German in part of Germany. David: Except that German is mostly a monocentric standard except in accent , whereas English is inescapably polycentric. An interesting bit of language drama: A young guy on Reddit claims to be one of the few remaining speakers of a highly divergent variety of Scots from rural Falkirk, and has been single-handedly trying to document it complete with his own innovative orthography: Focurc.

Defenders argue that such a survival is more plausible and dialectological description more spotty than you think, and that the risk of gaslighting an endangered-language speaker is unacceptable.

Any thoughts? My dialect is certainly not well documented. If your preferred feed is Twitter, you can follow languagehat to get links to new posts here as they appear. Expand Unit 3: Scots in education. Unit 3: Scots in education Unit content.

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Start this course now. Back to top. Search OpenLearn Create. Take a moment to click on the map and listen to people speaking different forms of Scots. Can you understand Scots? Valerie writing for children.

Sheila working in the bank. Nancy how Caithness people speak. Colin talks about what Doric means.