Scots and Its Literature.
Roy, G. Ross
Scots and Its Literature is a political book: "No apology is
made for the overtly political stance taken in several of the
papers," Derrick McClure tells us in his introduction. The politics
of language is so bound up with history that no clear rules exist, as
residents of Alsace, Belgium, or Canada can attest; on the other hand,
the predominant condition of English in India is well recognized. The
Scottish example owes much to the politics of education, and not a
little to the politics of socioeconomics. The author has collected here
fourteen essays - which cannot, of course, all be discussed - dealing
with Scots language and literature.
McClure is unusual in being an Ayrshireman who has written on all
three of the languages of Scotland. An essay devoted to the debt of
Scots to Gaelic begins by reference to the "received" view
that there is little influence involved, citing the fact that in John
Barbour's Bruce (c. 1375) only eight words are of Gaelic origin.
But the place to look for these words is the Scottish National
Dictionary, which lists words in use after 1700. Recently Roderick
Macdonald has determined that many words in current use have a Gaelic
origin.
One of McClure's major concerns is the use of dialect and its
limitations: "Since the dying out of . . . Middle Scots . . . the
Scots language . . . has existed only as a group of dialects." Any
dialect is adequate for its speakers, but when it comes to writing, a
major author must "go beyond the range of a spoken dialect."
The poets whom McClure cites (Burns and MacDiarmid among them) certainly
did reach beyond their local dialects: Burns added a glossary of 249
words to his first edition, which was intended for his native Ayrshire;
MacDiarmid used a dictionary of Scots in order to enrich his poetry. But
in Burns's day no one in Scotland felt any hesitation about
speaking Scots, although poor Boswell certainly paid a price for doing
so in the presence of Johnson. Today, though, McClure maintains that
Scots is "ignored by the mass media and discouraged by the
educational system."
In "Language and Genre in Allan Ramsay's 1721 Poems"
McClure studies the verse in terms of how Scottish it is. He concludes
that Ramsay happily employed both Scots and English, recognizing that
this gave his poetry greater depth. It is a pity that the essay does not
extend to the second volume of the poems (1728) in order to examine The
Gentle Shepherd, because in this play Ramsay employed the interplay of
the two languages in a manner not heretofore exploited, and McClure
would surely have had perceptive things to say on this topic.
There are also essays devoted to language in Scott, James Hogg, and
John Gait, whose Annals of the Parish and The Provost are studied for
their interweaving of Scots and English. By the second half of the
eighteenth century not only were the professional classes
"bilingual" (McClure's term), but because of widespread
education so was everyone else, since school texts and the Bible were in
Standard English.
Perhaps of more interest to readers of WLT is "Scots and Its Use
in Recent Poetry," in which the author distinguishes between
"thin" and "dense" and between "literary"
and "colloquial" writing. Examples run from Tom Scott's
"At the Shrine o the Unkent Sodger" to Stephen Mulrine's
"Nostalgie":
Howkit frae some howe in France, their banes Lig here the day in this
pregnant shrine Heich abuin Embro's traffic, on the Castle cleuch:
Haw, the George Squerr stchumers huv pit the hems oan Toonheid's
answer tae London's Thames.
Scott's use of a less regional language contrasting with
Mulrine's typically Glaswegian diction should be noted, although,
oddly, Scott was also born and raised in Glasgow - more proof that few
apt classifications of the language can be made.
We must be grateful to Derrick McClure for opening new vistas on
Scottish language and literature with this erudite volume.
G. Ross Roy University of South Carolina
