Scots Wikipaedia

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

Kevin myers is hardly a neutral observer. He is a highly partisan commentator with a major political axe to grind who is not above at the very least misquoting if not downright fabricating statistics to support his cause (He hates the Irish language amongst many other things).
I have direct personal experience of both the UK and Irish education systems and the Irish secondary-level one (in it's present form, I only left tertiary level education 6 years ago) is superior.

For get about Kevin Meyers-- that's not the subject at hand, no matter how much you may wish to disparage him. Take off the rose coloured glasses and look at the hard facts: Only about 12% of the Irish population can be considered as "literate" in the Irish language despite having spent at least an hour a day, for twelve years, "learining" the language in school. Sure he may have a few words of social Irish, but the average 30-something couldn't fill out a DSS form, or pass the written portion of the Road Test in Irish, if called on to do so. Worse, almost a quarter of those leaving school today can't fill out those forms in English without assistance. If, as you say, the secondary education system where you live isn't as good as the Irish system, all I can say is God help you. Your schools must be turning out a generation of dolts.

But here's the whole point of it.

Like it or not, for political, cultural, or economic reasons we are English speakers, and it does no one any good to have schools turning out students who are unable to function in the real, work-a-day world, in English, especially when that bit of their education is given short shrift because of some lofty-- although possibly misguided-- "nationalist" ideal. Whether we are talking about Scots, Lallans, or Irish, the bottom line is this: it doesn't matter how good--or bad-- they are in that language. If they can't read, write, and comprehend English, they are going to be doomed, if not condemned, to the lowest end of the social scale.

[thanmuwa]

For get about Kevin Meyers-- that's not the subject at hand, no matter how much you may wish to disparage him.

I am disparaging his made-up statistics. And if you want to forget about him, why are you using his figures yet again?

Take off the rose coloured glasses and look at the hard facts: Only about 12% of the Irish population can be considered as "literate" in the Irish language despite having spent at least an hour a day, for twelve years, "learining" the language in school. Sure he may have a few words of social Irish, but the average 30-something couldn't fill out a DSS form, or pass the written portion of the Road Test in Irish, if called on to do so.

See above, where I also talked about how poorly the Irish language is taught. By the way, first hand experience is usually referred to as "evidence", "rose tinted spectacles" would more accurately refer to using the wild ramblings of an opinion columnist piece as fact. Hint: if a newspaper article is called an opinion piece it means there is even less of a constraint on it to be truthful than in the rest of the paper....

Worse, almost a quarter of those leaving school today can't fill out those forms in English without assistance.

See above, that figure of 25% is plucked from the air and "functionally illiterate" is a phrase so ill-defined as to be essentially meaningless anyway.

If, as you say, the secondary education system where you live isn't as good as the Irish system, all I can say is God help you. Your schools must be turning out a generation of dolts.

"My schools" (I presume you mean schools in the UK) do appear to be pretty poor. 10 year old kids appear to be struggling with books I read when I was 6. On this side of the Atlantic, the perception is that things are even worse over there, that US schoolkids are too busy smuggling guns and drugs into school to worry about education, but I have no idea how true that is.... Comparisons to other European education systems certainly seems to come out poorly for the UK.

But here's the whole point of it.

Like it or not, for political, cultural, or economic reasons we are English speakers, and it does no one any good to have schools turning out students who are unable to function in the real, work-a-day world, in English, especially when that bit of their education is given short shrift because of some lofty-- although possibly misguided-- "nationalist" ideal. Whether we are talking about Scots, Lallans, or Irish, the bottom line is this: it doesn't matter how good--or bad-- they are in that language. If they can't read, write, and comprehend English, they are going to be doomed, if not condemned, to the lowest end of the social scale.

Again, you are implying that being an Irish speaker means that you are therefore poor at English. That, quite simply, is untrue. They are not mutually exclusive. Unlike Homer Simpson, for most people learning another language doesn't make the first one fall out...
Again giving a personal example, I had all those lessons in Irish. The Irish was taught poorly (on this mr myers, you and I are in agreement), so my Irish is not as good as I would like, to my regret. However, my English has most certainly not suffered for it and I have a much higher standard of English than the majority of my UK colleagues, (who in the majority of cases only speak one language). My sample regions (areas in which I have worked/studied) are Belfast, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Hull, York, Southampton and London, so reasonable comprehensive.
My point remains that proficiency in another language doesn't hinder and may well help your English. For example, most medical terms have either a Greek or Latin root.

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

The inescapable fact is that the numbers mentioned by Meyers (and my, my, but doesn't he get up your nose?) have been reported in other Irish papers (The Irish Times, for instance) and accurately reflect the findings of the Irish government.

I have not implied that Irish speakers are necessarily poor at English. I have, however, stated the opposite to be true. In point of fact kids attending Irish language schools generally don't do well in English because it is assumed that they will learn all they need by watching television... English is poorly taught in the "gaelscoileanna".

As far as your "gun and drug smuggling" comments go, I am sure that you have probably offended any number of teachers on this forum, and leave it to you to decide if you should make amends for what I can only assume to be a lapse of judgment in your attempt to show some sort of superior standard of education in the UK.

I do agree that speaking more that one language probably does enrich one's use of English-- although I find that I sometime lapse into German construction if I am in a hurry writing.

[slohairt]

I’ll address the side argument going on here, and then back to the original topic.

IRISH

The validity of whether or not to teach Irish is a pointless debate. It is the first national language of the country, and to suggest it be dropped in favour of other practical studies and better proficiency of English is a remnant of the thinking that helped put Irish into its present situation. Obviously the language has not been taught properly, but it has also suffered from these major problems:

Lack of money to devote to proper bilingualism: Ireland was an impoverished country for a long time and there simply wasn’t enough money to spend on language restoration. To compound this, the Gaeltachtaí were/are economically depressed regions with a very high rate of emigration, both to lands beyond and to the English-speaking regions of Ireland. I think now, perhaps, one will see things change for the better.

Social Stigma: There was/is a widespread belief that Irish was an inferior language to English. This belief not only pervaded the lower classes, but was firmly believed by most of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Interestingly, in the past this wasn’t always the case. The invading Normans were assimilated rather quickly and adopted the Irish language. Though not really documented, I’m sure many Anglo-Irish landowners actually had a working knowledge of Irish, though probably not by choice but by necessity. In fact, Elizabeth I had an ‘Englishe-Iryshe-Latin Primer’ prepared for her by Christopher Nugent! (You can see an image from this phrase book in The Irish Language by Máirtín Ó Murchú.)

Illiteracy: Though Irish was the majority language of the country (even well into the 19th Century), the British authorities installed an educational system which completely ignored this. Many Irish speakers were illiterate, so when the time finally came to officially teach Irish, there were precious few who could read and write it well. This is especially saddening as Irish is Europe’s third oldest literary language after Greek and Latin.

Irish also has the disadvantage of being up against English, the business language of the world which many non-English speakers wish to learn. Are there any advantages to learning Irish? Sure. It is the first official language of Ireland and is the ancestral language of the large Irish diaspora. It would also assist in the learning of other Celtic languages, especially Scottish Gaelic and Manx. No language is useless to learn.

SCOTS

Scots (or Lallans, the Doric, Buchan Claik, or whatever else you want to call it), has the additional disadvantage of being considered a ‘half-language’. People claim it is a peasant ‘patois’ or merely a dialect, but the only thing which truly defines a language is recognition. Now that the Scottish Parliament and the UK government have recognized Scots as a regional language, that old argument is really finished.

Some will say, “I live in Scotland, and I never hear people using those words,” but they are missing the point entirely. What organizations like Scots-Online.org or even Scots Wikipaedia are trying to do is establish a written standard for Scots, something which has occurred in the history of most languages. Scots was on its way to becoming standardized until the Act of Union in 1707. From then on, many ‘forward’ thinkers adopted English in their efforts to become what they termed “North Britons.” Obviously they didn’t succeed, but they have left the language in a difficult position.

There is also some difficulty in determining the number of speakers because many people regularly switch from English to Scottish English to Scots in the course of their day-to-day conversations. Even the Scots they do use may not include a very large vocabulary and is often erroneously regarded as slang. Only with a structured written standard, complete with dictionaries and other educational literature, can the language be properly taught.

Yes, Scots is, for the most part, is mutually intelligible to English-speakers, but many languages within a related group can make this claim. To call Scots English is to call Scottish Gaelic Irish.

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

I think that most agree that the way Irish is taught in school is a near abject failure.

The government spends more money on teaching Irish, on maintaining commissions to make sure that new housing developments use only Irish names, etc., than they do on just about any other cultural activity. In fact, more money is spent teaching Irish than is spent on teaching all other European languages, combined.

One of the major problems that faces Irish teachers is that Irish lacks a standard of pronunciation. For wholly political reasons no one has had the balls to sit down and come up with a standard pronunciation for even the simplest words. When I was doing my 'fresher in Irish at Gael Linn our two instructors nearly came to blows over the difference in Donegal Irish and Kerry Irish of the pronunciation of "fuinneoig" (window).

As far as the problem of illiteracy is concerned, this is still a problem in Ireland, and has little or nothing to do with the Irish language, either then or now. The causes are deeply rooted in both politics and religion (as well as other socio-economic issues) and are really well beyond the scope of discussion on what is, after all, a kilt forum.

[highlander_Daz]

As Ive said before "Scots" is a representation of how some people speak in some parts of Scotland, there is miscnception after misconception about this type of "language" issue, if you went most places in Scotland and attempted to speak like the article suggests most people would be very puzzled, there is NO "scots language" no matter what Alex Salmond or anyone else wants to believe, its ENGLISH with slang and regional variations thrown in. As Ive said before there are so many misconceptions . I recently read one of the "Outlander" series of novels, and the Highland folk were all saying "dinne" "canne" wouldnae" , which is a shame as the books are excelent, this is akin to watching an episode of "Dallas" but all the characters having thick new york accents, very puzzling. Ive alwasy found when people type in phonetics "scots" slightly silly, it isnt representitive of how Scots speak, only a minority.
Imagine a forum that discussed Native ameican dress and culture, and I joined and typed in the style of Jay Silverheels.: "How, Kemo sabe, Me Scottish man um want to discuss pipe of peace" etc it would be rightly slated as a ridiculous stereotype. just my thoughts

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

As Ive said before "Scots" is a representation of how some people speak in some parts of Scotland, there is miscnception after misconception about this type of "language" issue, if you went most places in Scotland and attempted to speak like the article suggests most people would be very puzzled, there is NO "scots language" no matter what Alex Salmond or anyone else wants to believe, its ENGLISH with slang and regional variations thrown in. As Ive said before there are so many misconceptions . I recently read one of the "Outlander" series of novels, and the Highland folk were all saying "dinne" "canne" wouldnae" , which is a shame as the books are excelent, this is akin to watching an episode of "Dallas" but all the characters having thick new york accents, very puzzling. Ive alwasy found when people type in phonetics "scots" slightly silly, it isnt representitive of how Scots speak, only a minority.
Imagine a forum that discussed Native ameican dress and culture, and I joined and typed in the style of Jay Silverheels.: "How, Kemo sabe, Me Scottish man um want to discuss pipe of peace" etc it would be rightly slated as a ridiculous stereotype. just my thoughts

I'd have to agree. Writing "dialect" always slows down the narrative and takes away from the overall effect of the novel. Anything that "gets in the way of the reader" should be avoided, if at all possible.

[macwilkin]

I'd have to agree. Writing "dialect" always slows down the narrative and takes away from the overall effect of the novel. Anything that "gets in the way of the reader" should be avoided, if at all possible.

Not necessarily, Scott. If you have read the late G.M. Fraser's Quartered Safe Out Here or any of the McAuslan stories, his use of the Glesca and Cumberland dialects is quite effective, and not too hard to follow.

T.

[MacMillan of Rathdown]

Not necessarily, Scott. If you have read the late G.M. Fraser's Quartered Safe Out Here or any of the McAuslan stories, his use of the Glesca and Cumberland dialects is quite effective, and not too hard to follow.

T.

Gosh, Todd, I think this may be a case where the exception proves the rule. Seems to me that GMcDF generally eschewed the use of written dialect in his Flashman novels, except for comic effect. I can't recall if there's much dialect in Pyrates (not my favorite), and I think he went on a bit about "dialect" in his Hollywood History of the World -- but since I can't immediately lay hands on the book (well recommended, though) I can't say so with certainty.

What I can say with certainly is that a skillful writer can make anything work on the page-- within limits. I think we'd both agree that GMcDF was nothing, if not skillful to the Nth degree.

[Heming]

What about Sir Walter Scott? Did he write in English? Well, yes he did (sometimes), and he also wrote in Scots. There is great difference between the English and Scots he wrote. Scots is certainly a language, the statement that no-one speaks like that only suggests it's a dead one.