Table Of ContentSpelling ScotS
the orthography of literary Scots, 1700–2000
Jennifer Bann and John corBett
Spelling Scots
e
The Orthography of Literary Scots,
1700–2000
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Jennifer Bann and John Corbett
© Jennifer Bann and John Corbett, 2015
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun - Holyrood Road
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The right of Jennifer Bann and John Corbett to be identified as
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Contents
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Acknowledgements iv
The IPA Chart v
1. Introduction 1
2. The Consonants of Older Scots 16
3. Older Scots Vowels 39
4. The Development of Modern Scots Orthography 59
5. From Orthoepy to Activism: Orthographic Interventions 76
6. Cluster Analysis and Scots Orthography 97
7. Applying Cluster Analysis to Scots Poetry 111
8. Applying Cluster Analysis to Scots Prose 127
9. Promoting Literacy in Scots 139
Appendix: Wordlists Used in Cluster Analyses 147
References 152
Index 159
Acknowledgements
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This volume began as part of the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (1700–1945)
project, which was developed by the Department of English Language at the
University of Glasgow between 2007 and 2010, and supported by the Arts
and Humanities Research Council. We are grateful to our colleagues in the
project team for their advice and patience, particularly Dr Wendy Anderson,
Mrs Jean Anderson, Mr David Beavan, Professor Christian Kay and Professor
Jeremy Smith. We are immensely grateful too for advice and detailed criticism
given by long-s uffering friends and by anonymous reviewers; they have saved us
from a number of errors. Those that remain are, of course, entirely our respon-
sibility. The team at EUP has also been unfailingly supportive through the long
gestation of this project.
Since leaving Glasgow, John Corbett has benefited from time given by the
University of Macau to make progress with this research. He was also supported
by a Start-U p Grant (SRG020- FSH11-J BC) that enabled him to make research
trips to Glasgow. We are also, of course, indebted to our family for their con-
tinuing support and good humour, particularly Augusta Rodrigues Alves, and
Gordon and Sarah Barr.
The IPA Chart, <http://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/content/
ipa- chart>, is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-S harealike
3.0 Unported License. Copyright © 2005 International Phonetic Association.
The IPA Chart
1
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Introduction
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This book is an account of the evolution of the spelling system, or orthography,
of Scots, the language of lowland Scotland. Substantial written records in Scots
survive from the fourteenth century and they are evidence of a distinctive lan-
guage that was used in speech and as a language of written record in the Scottish
kingdom until the end of the sixteenth century; thereafter broader written use of
Scots declined. Written Scots was, however, revived, largely as a medium for
literature, in the eighteenth century, and it has been used by a very large number
of poets, novelists and dramatists ever since this ‘vernacular revival’ occurred. It
thrives as a literary medium today. The way in which Scots has been fashioned in
writing, however, has always been characterised by a wide range of variation and
diversity in spelling. The present volume surveys the main reasons for this varia-
tion and diversity historically, and suggests ways of understanding and exploring
it with a view to encouraging literacy practices in Scots.
The topic of this book is complex, and debates on Scots spelling can
quickly become heated. Our hope is to synthesise and extend the considerable
scholarship on Scots orthography, to set the debates about Scots spelling in
a historical context, as well as to suggest a means of tracking the distribu-
tion of particular Scots spellings through a small corpus of modern literary
texts, with a view to considering approaches to the teaching of literacy in
Scots. Previous detailed discussions of Scots orthography (e.g. Agutter 1987,
Aitken 1971, Aitken and Macafee 2002, Kniezsa 1997, Macafee and Aitken
2002, Smith 2012) have focused on the Older Scots period, up until 1700,
though Jones (1995, 1997, 2010) discusses the modern period, from 1700
on, and Eagle (2014) gives a lucid summary of Modern Scots spellings and
contrasts in detail different proposed spelling reforms. In many respects,
the orthography of Scots and English are similar, and the present study has
drawn on some detailed discussions of English spelling, particularly Venezky
(1967, 1970, 1999). Detailed discussions of English orthography have also
been given by Scragg (1974), Salmon (1999), Upward and Davidson (2011)
and, in a more popular vein, Crystal (2012).
2 Spelling Scots
Sources of Information
The major resource for those studying Scots orthography remains the two great
dictionary projects, the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, which covers
the Older Scots period, and the Scottish National Dictionary and its supplements,
which cover the period from 1700 to 2005. Although the two dictionaries were
informed by differing editorial principles, they were combined in the online
Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL, <www.dsl.ac.uk>), completed in 2004
and upgraded in 2014. This electronic edition is the major source of information
for this volume, though Chapters 6 to 8 also draw upon the online Corpus of
Modern Scottish Writing (CMSW, <www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/cmsw>).
Studying Orthography
At the outset, it is necessary to establish what orthography is, what it does, and
to introduce some key technical terms that appear throughout this volume. A
naïve view of a spelling system is that it serves solely to map sounds onto written
characters, or letters; this view is forcefully challenged with respect to English
by Venezky (1967: 77):
For centuries philologists have approached the study of English orthography
with the purblind attitude that writing serves only to mirror speech, and that
deviations from a perfect letter-s ound relationship are irregularities.
The study of orthography, Venezky (1967, 1970, 1999: 5–10) argues, involves
understanding a number of issues. The two main goals of orthography are to
identify and classify the written characters used in a spelling system and to
account for their combination.
As Abercrombie (1949) observes, ancient accounts of Greek and Latin spell-
ing considered litera (the letter) to have three characteristics: the figura, or
written form of the letter; the potestas (‘power’ or ‘force’) that refers to possible
pronunciations of the letter; and the nomen or ‘name’, by which certain letters
can be identified. Thus <e> has a written form, or figura; its potestas can be
accounted for by the various ways in which <e> is pronounced in context; and in
discussions we identify the letter by its nomen, which can be represented by the
phonemic symbol /i/. The distinction is still a useful way of thinking about the
relationships between spellings and sounds: the relationship between figurae and
their potestas remains the main issue in orthographic study.
The written characters, or figurae, used in a spelling system are now usually
referred to as ‘graphemes’; they are indicated by angled brackets, for example
<t>. Sometimes a combination of two or more characters maps onto a single
sound, in which case we refer to them as ‘digraphs’, for example <th> or <oi>,
or ‘trigraphs’ such as <quh>. There can also be variation in the form given to
a particular grapheme: different variants of the same grapheme are referred to
as ‘allographs’, for example <g> and <ɡ>. Although a grapheme might have a
variant form, or allograph, it is the visual or graphic form of the character that
ultimately determines whether or not it is a grapheme. In the history of English
and Scots spelling, two allographs can become separate graphemes; this is true
