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COPYRIGHT 2002 Adam Mickiewicz University Press
ABSTRACT
The present paper focuses on the Middle Scots verbal inflections in the Scottish south-west, the region called Galloway. The manuscripts from the local archives are still virtually unknown to a wider public, which causes much imprecision and doubt in describing the position of Galloway on the map of Middle Scots dialectal areas. This study has been based on a collection of burgh court records from the burgh of Wigtown, dating back to the early 16th century, and concerns verbal inflections: the present participle, the third person singular present, the present plural, the regular preterite, the regular past participle and the irregular past participle. The paper presents the features of the manuscript compared with the Linguistic Profile (LP) of Wigtownshire included in The Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English (LALME). The analysis exposes mistakes committed by the authors of the atlas in the verbal inflections and puts forward a revised version of the LP, based on the manuscript data.
1. Introduction and terminology
Scotland is and has been a country with a unique linguistic situation, stemming from its history and peculiar political and social developments. For the sake of clarity, some crucial notions have to be outlined briefly.
Even though the terms "Scots" and "Scottish English" are used in literature to represent two different varieties, one is often not aware of the difference between them. While Scottish English is a dialect, or rather an accent, of Modern English with a relatively short history on the territory of Scotland, Scots is a descendant of an Old English dialect, Old Northumbrian dating almost 1000 years back. This northern English dialect gained importance amongst the Scottish nobility and burgh inhabitants in the 11th-12th centuries and, unlike northern Middle English, started developing towards a prestigeous, independent variety in Scotland. Eventually, this process led to the emergence of a new national language -- Scots. Confusingly, until the late fifteenth century the inhabitants of the Lowlands called their language Inglis in order to distinguish it from Scottis -- the tongue of the Celts. The Celtic variety used to be the original language in Scotland, spoken by the descendants of Gealic-speaking Irish settler s, initially called the Scoti. The name "Scots" started to be applied to Inglis in the period of a growing national confidence, reflecting a general Rennaisance tendency in favour of vernaculars (compare the situation in Spain, France or Poland).
The crucial thing to remember is that the periodisation of Scots differs from the one of English. Middle Scots, for that matter, is a period shifted about one century forward with respect to Middle English. One needs to be careful and make sure not to look for parallels or contrasts in varieties written down at different points in time. The chart below illustrates this incompatibility.
When looking at the chart, one can notice that research into Scots from before the late 1300s is impossible for the lack of textual evidence. The most fruitful period to examine would be the l5th-16th centuries, the time when Scotland had its own all-purpose standard, with a variety of dialects, most of them written down in daily documents (letters, wills, local court records, etc.). In writings from this period one can observe pressures from different sources, be it the language of the powerful southern neighbour, Latinate influences from higher registers, Norse influences from the territories conquered in the past by the Vikings, or from the Gaelic substratum.
2. The database and the purpose of study
The corpus of the present study is a collection of burgh court records from Wigtown, situated in the south-west of Scotland. The Wigtown Burgh Court Book (Wgt Ct Bk) dates back to...
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