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.

SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION

Some spelling rules have become more widely used than others in modern Scots and Ulster-Scots, but not to the point of providing standard spellings. Nevertheless, few Scots writers today would think of spelling words such as ‘head’ and ‘good’ in any way other than heid and guid. It was not always so, however, even for such well-known conventions. From the early 1700s through the next two centuries, writers of Ulster-Scots prose often used spellings such as ‘heed’ and ‘gude’ for ‘head’ and ‘good’. Other writers, especially those who were unaware of ‘correct’ English pronunciations, were content with ‘English’ spellings. Only in poetry, where for example ‘head’ might have rhymed with a word like English ‘greed’, can we see what the intended pronunciation was.

On the surface, the vast range of spelling variations to be found in Ulster-Scots literature suggests an anarchic ‘anything goes’ approach. Indeed, for unusual words which writers had rarely, if ever, seen in print, the spellings are especially varied. Some spelling variations have reflected local pronunciation, but by no means all. In the 1960s, Brendan Adams distributed a questionnaire from the Ulster Dialect Archive at the Ulster Folk Museum, asking for words used to describe ‘dusk’. The word dailigon or dayligoin, which derives from ‘day-light gone, or going’, was returned in more than 30 different spellings! Presumably none of these respondents had ever seen the word written down (although it certainly occurs in early Ulster-Scots literature). It is interesting to note that in the Scottish National Dictionary the word is given as dayligaun (meaning’twilight’), with this spelling cited only from Scotland, while dayligon, daylygoin, day-le-gone, dayligoin', day-lagone, dailygin and day’l-agaun are all cited in that dictionary from published Ulster-Scots sources.

Spelling variations in Ulster-Scots literature may also result from real differences in regional dialects of Ulster-Scots. Abune (‘above’), for example, is pronounced abain in north Antrim and Londonderry. However in mid and east Antrim, and in most of county Down, abin is also found. In Donegal and mid Down we hear (and read) abeen. Coup (‘tip over’) is pronounced cope in north Antrim and east Donegal, but cowp in Down and east Antrim. Marked differences occur even within county Down. Around the middle of the Ards peninsula the word owre (‘too’) is always iver - unlike elsewhere in the Scots-speaking areas of the county. In the same locality the number ‘four’ is fivver rather than fower. Respecting such local variations and dialects is not always possible in a work such as this. Inevitably, individual speakers will discover unfamiliar words and spellings in this book. Not all the ‘Ulster-Scots’ forms are (or were) found throughout every part of the Ulster-Scots speaking areas. Nowhere, however, will the reader encounter words or pronunciation that are not well attested either in a significant part of the spoken language or in the literary record. A distinction must be made between dialect differences within Ulster-Scots on the one hand and patchy survival of Scots forms on the other. It is not clear, for example, if the use of iver for owre in some areas is an ancient distinction, or the result of an erosion over the years from the ‘Scots’ form owre towards the Standard English ‘over’.

However, despite the apparent chaos, some conventions have gradually emerged, and a modern revival of Scots and Ulster-Scots writings has reinforced a desire for standardisation. A consensus has also emerged among Scots and Ulster-Scots writers in favour of spelling rules which show clearly that Scots is distinct from English. For example, although apostrophes at the end of words such as o’, wi’, ca’, awa’ (for ‘of’, ‘with’, ‘call’, ‘away’) are universal in the traditional literature, modern Scots writers have eschewed them, particularly where the apostrophe marks only the omission of a letter from an English spelling.

Ulster-Scots writings included many distinctively Scots orthographic conventions in the early 1600s, but slowly these were eroded in favour of modern English conventions. ‘English’ spelling and sound rules have long been favoured by writers as a means of representing how words from the spoken Ulster-Scots language should be pronounced. Obviously this is one of the results of 400 years of schooling Ulster-Scots speakers to read and write only in English. Ulster-Scots has survived, in many people’s eyes, as a spoken language only. The rich literary tradition in Ulster-Scots is largely unknown, particularly to the native speakers themselves. So it is that whatever conventions of spelling had been evolving in the 1700s and early 1800s were unfamiliar to later writers. Indeed, most native speakers of Ulster-Scots have never seen their own language in written form at all, and so when attempting to write, they usually adopt ‘phonetic’ spellings based on English vowel sounds.

Through time, local writers became more aware that words like ‘door’, ‘foot’, ‘night’, ‘I’. ‘tea’, ‘heart’, and so on are not pronounced dorr, fit, nicht, A, tay and hairt elsewhere in the English-speaking world, and so English spellings have been modified to approximate the Ulster-Scots pronunciation. The folk poets of the 18^th and early 19^th centuries, however, never thought that any reader might interpret their spellings as indicating an ‘English’ rather than an ‘Ulster-Scots’ pronunciation. This is revealed in the rhymes of their poetry: (eg tea is used rather than tay, but rhymed with stay; door is used rather than dorr or dure, but rhymed with moor.) Other examples of rhymes which indicate Ulster-Scots pronunciation from these poets include:

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The use of ‘ch’ spellings for ‘gh’ and A for I etc, are found much more commonly in the Ulster-Scots prose writings of the late 19^th and early 20^th century than in the 18^th century Ulster-Scots poetry.

In the following section of this chapter, the main spelling conventions used in this book are provided in summary form, for ease of reference. A fuller account of these spellings and their pronunciations, along with some others may be encountered in Ulster-Scots writings, is provided in the later sections.