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The following extracts from "Ulster-Scots: A Grammar of the Traditional Written and Spoken Language" by Philip Robinson (Published for The Ulster-Scots Language Society by The Ullans Press, 1997), are provided by permission of Philip Robinson and The Ulster-Scots Language Society. Copyright: Philip Robinson, 1997. All rights reserved. No part of these extracts may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Ulster-Scots Language Society. |
0.4 Ulster-Scots: documentation and sources
On investigation, the range of published sources and documentary archives for Ulster-Scots is remarkably extensive and diverse. Writing in Ulster-Scots was sometimes produced unselfconsciously as part of the author’s usual form of literacy. Otherwise, Ulster-Scots was selfconsciously (that is, deliberately) written to be different from the ‘normal’ literacy of the author.
‘Unselfconscious’ Ulster-Scots literature
Unselfconscious writings are of two sorts: those in which the writer has been schooled in Scots and writes Scots naturally (for Ulster this period only lasted a short time); and secondly those in which the every-day, schooled English literacy of the writer contains significant incidental elements of Ulster-Scots linguistic interest. Writings of this second type normally display considerable differences from contemporary Standard English although the writer has not deliberately introduced such features. The vast majority of this documentation is ‘naive’, for although the intention of the writer is to write in ‘English’, Ulster-Scots features are incorporated in spite of the ‘education’ of the author. The study of such a corpus involves a process of selective linguistic archaeology, and the documents must be carefully scrutinised and ‘quarried’ for Ulster-Scots linguistic information.
Early Medieval (Pre-Plantation sources)
Only a few scraps of ‘Old Norse’ runic writings survive from the Viking period in east Ulster, most notably a runic inscription on an abbot’s grave slab at Nendrum, Co Down. However, numerous Old Norse elements survive in the place names of east Antrim and east Down, indicating the possibility of an Old Norse sub-structure to the Germanic linguistic tradition in east Ulster. Some of these place names, such as Olderfleet, Sketrick and Strangford, survive from our later medieval documentation.
From the early Christian period throughout the ‘early Medieval’ period the surviving documents in Ulster are mostly in Latin, with some bits and pieces in Medieval Norman-French , Gaelic, and Middle English. Sparse though it is, the documentation in Middle English provides Ulster-Scots with its next archaeological layer. The peculiarities of Ulster Middle English require specialist research, but it is apparent that the ‘English’ fragments among the 14th and 15th century correspondence of the Archbishops of Armagh, along with the records of medieval abbeys, manors and boroughs (such as Carrickfergus), contain some features which survive in later Ulster-Scots. Surveys, such as the Papal Taxation of 1306, reveal scores of Middle English townland place names in east Ulster that were subsequently Gaelicized in the 15th and 16th centuries.
With the influx of Lowland Scots in the late 1500s and early 1600s came not only our first substantial Ulster-Scots documentation but also the beginning of the corpus of Ulster-Scots literature.
The Plantation record
From the end of the Medieval period (about 1550) until about 1650, state and official writings were no longer written only in Latin or Middle English, but increasingly in more recognisable forms of Early Modern English. The quantity of other documentation from this period –in the form of letters, wills, legal agreements and surveys – is enormous. From the Ulster-Scots perspective it falls into two groups: the ‘English’ record of English settlers; and the ‘Scots’ record of Scottish settlers.
In the first group, the ‘English' documentation of this period is of only passing interest, although it is clear that some Middle English forms and some contemporary English dialectal features which survive in Ulster-Scots can be illustrated from these records.
From this same period, however, we have a significant corpus of Scots writings in Ulster. Before this time Scots had become the state language of Scotland, and it was in the medium of Scots that literacy was taught in Scotland. Even some Ulster letters of the late 1500s (before the Plantation) were written in Scots. It is hardly surprising, therefore that most of the Scots settlers had had their education in Scots, although they arrived after the Union of the Crown under James VI of Scotland. James VI became James 1 of England and Scotland in 1603, an event which itself diminished the status of literary Scots.
So it is that the Ulster-based body of Older Scots writings from this period forms the first full Ulster-Scots literary corpus. The linguistic information from this corpus is not simply to be ‘quarried’ from among the English material but is, in essence, Ulster-Scots. This distinction, although important, is nevertheless one of degree, for these Ulster-Scots texts, like all Scots writings of the 16th and 17th centuries, were becoming increasingly Anglicized, with English and Scots forms often being used interchangeably. There can be no doubt that the King James Bible of 1611, in conjunction with a preference for English as the language used by Church and State, encouraged the perception of written Scots as ‘inferior’ to its closely related sibling tongue, English.
Second generation Scots settlers in Ulster were taught literacy not in Scots but in English, so that the period of full, written Scots (as a schooled literary language) was relatively short. Subsequent full Ulster-Scots writings are therefore the product of those whose literary skills had been schooled in English but who then made various attempts to articulate their spoken language, deliberately and consciously, in a ‘Scotch’ style.
Eighteenth and nineteenth century letters and minute books
Within the continuing unselfconscious written record of Ulster-Scots in the later years, the most productive documents (from a linguistic perspective) are the letters and other writings of those individuals whose ‘education’ had been least successful. These records were not intended by their writers to represent the Scots tongue, but the English written ‘standards' of the day. The most interesting, from an Ulster-Scots perspective, are the informal, naive letters of the marginally literate. However, even those letters written by well-educated people can be surprisingly rich in Ulster-Scots grammatical features. American research on Ulster immigrant letters has already revealed much of linguistic interest. Some features of letter-writing follow very conservative formulas, such as the opening and closing sentences: the writers, presumably, copied the style and forms they read or heard themselves, and so ‘archaic’ literary forms could survive over a long period.
The same is true for official minutes and records of meetings. In the late 1500s, the official records of Carrickfergus Corporation still used a formula such as ‘At a meeting houlden in le session-house de Knockfergus’, revealing the persistence of Norman-French features in the written record centuries after they might be expected to have disappeared. Similarly, Presbyterian Kirk Session books frequently used Scots orthographic form such as qlk. (quhilk) for ‘which’ well into the 18th century – many years after ‘educated’ scribes would have been taught these forms.
‘Selfconscious’ Ulster-Scots literature
The only ‘full’ Ulster-Scots written record that is a product of schooling in Scots literacy belongs to the 1550-1650 period. However, Scots communities for the next 300 years were aware that their spoken Scots was a different language from that of the written English which pervaded all contacts with the State, Church and College.
The renaissance of a literature in Scots, both in Scotland and Ulster, was wrought by people whose first written language was English. However, the works of Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns were widely read in Ulster as well in Scotland, with early Belfast editions appearing almost simultaneously with those in Scotland. The Scots literary tradition of Scotland was integral to the Ulster-Scots literary tradition, while Ulster-Scots writers contributed significantly to this broader Scots renaissance in their own right.
Ulster-Scots poetry
Vernacular poetry, using mostly English syntax and sentence construction, was the literary medium for this renaissance which began in 1720. Ulster-Scots poets were publishing their ‘Scotch' poems and songs contemporaneously with Ramsey, well before Robert Burns was born. For the next 150 years, embracing the ‘Burns’ period of the late 1700s and early 1800s, scores of Ulster-Scots poets published separate volumes of their works. Most of this corpus is inaccessible today to all but the most determined students, for only a handful of the tens of thousands of individual poems and songs in full Ulster-Scots have been republished in this century.
The literary language of this Ulster-Scots corpus differs significantly from the unselfconscious Ulster-Scots writings of the early 1600s. Most of the Older Scots orthographic forms had been abandoned (or forgotten), but the wealth of the Ulster-Scots vocabulary was revealed for the first time. Many of the words used are clearly archaic yet they are not always to be found in the formal writings of the Plantation period because of the different nature of these two types of sources.
The kail-yard novels
From about 1830, popular taste in Scots literature began to turn from poetry to prose, largely as a consequence of the success of Sir Walter Scott’s novels. In Ulster, as in Scotland, many stories and novels were written with English connecting prose, but with at least some, if not all, of the dialogue in Scots. Many were serialised in local newspapers such as the Newtownards Chronicle and the Ballymena Observer. However, only a fraction of the serialised novels in local newspapers were republished later in book form. Ulster-Scots novels were not generally written in full Ulster-Scots, but belong instead to a broader ‘English’ literary tradition. However, the Ulster-Scots linguistic content of these works should not be underestimated, nor should the extent of their more general historical and cultural significance.
Full prose Ulster-Scots books, newspaper stories and ‘letters’
All full Ulster-Scots prose – even ‘letters to the press' in Ulster-Scots – were consciously written as ‘dialect’, ‘doric’ or ‘Scotch’ by people who were very articulate in literary English. It was common for well-educated Ulster-Scots – including many of the newspaper editors, publishers and booksellers themselves – to adopt a ‘country’ pseudonym and contribute all sorts of features in full Ulster-Scots prose style, as if it “wes jist writ doon the road A spakes”. In a sense, all this material is ‘spoof’, and it can be embarrassingly awful. It often had linguistic content of considerable interest to us in the late 18th and 19th centuries, although by 1900 it had become generally stereotyped and linguistically degenerate. Whether for better or worse, this material is an important part of the full Ulster-Scots corpus.
Some writers of this genre such as W G Lyttle in Co Down and Archibald McIlroy in Co Antrim produced not only small newspapers features but also complete books in full Ulster-Scots prose. These works must be distinguished from the kail-yard novels, where only the dialogue is in Ulster-Scots, for this prose also belongs to the core corpus of full Ulster-Scots literature.
. . . . .
Ulster-Scots literature, as a tradition in its own right, has survived some 400 years of schooling Ulster-Scots speakers exclusively in English language and literacy. The only form of learning about writing in Ulster-Scots available to Ulster-Scots speakers has been the reading of Scots and Ulster-Scots writings outside of school. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Ulster-Scots literary tradition has become less competent and less self-confident, partly because of the erosion of the spoken language and partly because of the increasing ignorance of earlier works in Scots and Ulster-Scots. In the absence of widely-available and widely-read Ulster-Scots and Scots literature, the ‘self-education’ process for the Ulster-Scots community is no longer adequate to ensure the continuity of this tradition.
Despite the richness of the Ulster-Scots literary tradition when it is uncovered, it cannot be used alone (or even predominantly) to reconstruct Ulster-Scots grammar. To undertake the latter, a disproportionate emphasis must be placed on what students of the language can observe of their own native speech. Normally it is the literature of a language which authenticates grammar through the visible evidence of its written record. Yet for Ulster-Scots this documentary evidence reveals a mixture of Scots and English which, for reasons discussed above, must be sifted carefully. Students must constantly set what can be discovered about the written structure of the language against what they know of the spoken tongue. Generations of writers attempting to write in Ulster-Scots have been unable to eradicate the influence of their schooling in ‘correct’ English grammar.
The extent to which the description of Ulster-Scots grammar which follows is personal and inward-looking will inevitably make it unsatisfactory for those with a different experience and understanding of the language. Hopefully, however, it will provide a beginning on which others may build. It has been written by an Ulster-Scot, not by a linguist. It will prove worthwhile only if it enables other Ulster-Scots to express themselves more confidently and more effectively in their native leid. It will prove successful only if it acts as a catalyst for more academic studies of the Ulster-Scots language.