Speaking of Scots language...!
"First book in Harry Potter series translated into Scots" (BBC news article)
Awww. This makes me happy.
"Mr and Mrs Dursley, o nummer fower, Privet Loan, were prood tae say that they were gey normal, thank ye verra much..."
Friday, November 10, 2017
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Say It in Doric
Today our professor gave us a lecture in Doric. By which I mean: He gave a lecture, and the language that he was speaking as he did so was Doric.
Doric is the variety of Scots spoken in this region of Scotland, the Northeast. Scots, in turn, is a language related to English (unlike Gaelic, which is a very different language). I've seen Scots described as a language...or a dialect...it seems to be one of those gray areas where linguists can debate endlessly what constitutes a language and what a dialect. My professor just referred to it as the "vernacular."
This came up when we were in class, working on topics relating to the provision of bilingual English/Gaelic library services in the western parts of Scotland where Gaelic is spoken. And our professor started talking about Scots, and how there hasn't been as much support for maintaining it as there has been for Gaelic. Then it turned out a couple years ago he gave a lecture in Doric (he grew up speaking it, switching between Doric for home and English for school) and he asked if we'd like to hear some of that lecture.
We said YES. (Or at least, I did!)
It was so fascinating. (Both the content of the lecture – about Doric language, literature and culture – and simply the fact of getting to hear so much Doric spoken at a stretch.) I would say I got the gist of pretty much everything he talked about, even if I certainly didn't understand every word, and I'm very pleased about that.
To give you an example of how different Doric is and isn't, here's the title of the talk:
Fa div ye think ye are
Or fit we hiv forgottin tae mine aboot
(translation: Who do you think you are
Or what we've forgotten to remember)
You can see how it's in some ways recognizable as English or at least English-adjacent, but also has very different vocabulary and pronunciation. ("What" becomes "fit," "when" becomes "fin," "who" becomes "fa," etc. – so there are regular patterns of vowel shifts and such between standard English and Scots, but the overall result ends up looking quite different between the two languages.)
SO COOL! Definitely another thing I would not have gotten to learn about if I'd gone to grad school in Boston.
Doric is the variety of Scots spoken in this region of Scotland, the Northeast. Scots, in turn, is a language related to English (unlike Gaelic, which is a very different language). I've seen Scots described as a language...or a dialect...it seems to be one of those gray areas where linguists can debate endlessly what constitutes a language and what a dialect. My professor just referred to it as the "vernacular."
This came up when we were in class, working on topics relating to the provision of bilingual English/Gaelic library services in the western parts of Scotland where Gaelic is spoken. And our professor started talking about Scots, and how there hasn't been as much support for maintaining it as there has been for Gaelic. Then it turned out a couple years ago he gave a lecture in Doric (he grew up speaking it, switching between Doric for home and English for school) and he asked if we'd like to hear some of that lecture.
We said YES. (Or at least, I did!)
It was so fascinating. (Both the content of the lecture – about Doric language, literature and culture – and simply the fact of getting to hear so much Doric spoken at a stretch.) I would say I got the gist of pretty much everything he talked about, even if I certainly didn't understand every word, and I'm very pleased about that.
To give you an example of how different Doric is and isn't, here's the title of the talk:
Fa div ye think ye are
Or fit we hiv forgottin tae mine aboot
(translation: Who do you think you are
Or what we've forgotten to remember)
You can see how it's in some ways recognizable as English or at least English-adjacent, but also has very different vocabulary and pronunciation. ("What" becomes "fit," "when" becomes "fin," "who" becomes "fa," etc. – so there are regular patterns of vowel shifts and such between standard English and Scots, but the overall result ends up looking quite different between the two languages.)
SO COOL! Definitely another thing I would not have gotten to learn about if I'd gone to grad school in Boston.
Wednesday, November 1, 2017
Libraries on the Move (Literally)
Okay, mobile libraries are officially my new favorite thing. What an amazing way to provide a lot of service to a really wide (rural, low-population density) area. And they all seem so very, very cheerful about it!
(Yes, I got sucked into watching yet another charming short video about one of the mobile libraries in the Outer Hebrides. And you know, just saying that – that my research for an assignment led me to the looking into the mobile libraries of the Outer Hebrides – really drives home that that's not something I would have gotten to learn much about if I'd done library school in Boston or New York, is it?)
If you feel so inclined, and if you want to be seriously impressed by how much a library can do with quite little, check out the Lewis Mobile Library:
Or, for that matter, the Harris Mobile Library:
(There's a wonderful little bit of Gaelic spoken in the Lewis one. And charming shots of schoolkids filing into the library van to check out books in the Harris one. Some of the roads the van is traveling in that Lewis video are single lane, with periodic pull-out spots for those rare cases when there are actually vehicles traveling in both directions at the same time – that's how remote some of these places are.)
Also, because I can't ever go long without pointing out how awesome Orkney Library is, I'd just like to mention that Orkney's mobile library is named "Booky McBookface" and it tweets out which of Orkney's islands it's going to visit each day. E.g.:
(Yes, I got sucked into watching yet another charming short video about one of the mobile libraries in the Outer Hebrides. And you know, just saying that – that my research for an assignment led me to the looking into the mobile libraries of the Outer Hebrides – really drives home that that's not something I would have gotten to learn much about if I'd done library school in Boston or New York, is it?)
If you feel so inclined, and if you want to be seriously impressed by how much a library can do with quite little, check out the Lewis Mobile Library:
Or, for that matter, the Harris Mobile Library:
(There's a wonderful little bit of Gaelic spoken in the Lewis one. And charming shots of schoolkids filing into the library van to check out books in the Harris one. Some of the roads the van is traveling in that Lewis video are single lane, with periodic pull-out spots for those rare cases when there are actually vehicles traveling in both directions at the same time – that's how remote some of these places are.)
Also, because I can't ever go long without pointing out how awesome Orkney Library is, I'd just like to mention that Orkney's mobile library is named "Booky McBookface" and it tweets out which of Orkney's islands it's going to visit each day. E.g.:
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