A. J. Aitken (1921-1998)

Few people could be said to have advanced our knowledge of the Scots Language, past and present, as did A. J. Aitken (1921-1998). He was one of the principal lexicographers of the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue, a lecturer on Scots at Edinburgh University, and a tireless researcher and advocate of all things Scots.  Through the extraordinary dedication of Dr. Caroline Macafee, and the collaboration of the Scots Language Centre, the majority of “Jack” Aitken’s writings on Scots have now been placed online, and are freely accessible.

Texts include a wide range of topics and genres, including academic papers on phonology, dialectology and lexis, pieces on Scots literature, biographical and autobiographical essays, overviews on the history of the language, letters to the Scotsman newspaper, and a number of other texts of both popular and technical interest. The re-edition of these writings not only brings them to a wider audience through digital distribution, but includes important updates, introductions and notes, to place them in context and link them with later developments.

This is fantastic news for the FITS project and for all of those interested in Scots. Braw!

Find The Aitken Papers at: http://www.scotslanguage.com/aitken-papers

This past Thursday, 9 July, our team met with members of its advisory panel to tackle a first set of data on the question of the Germanic source of Scots. We are extremely grateful to Donka Minkova, Roger Lass, Meg Laing and Julia Fernández Cuesta for helping us hone our analyses and for sharing their wealth of knowledge.  The least we could do was share a meal with them!
A revised and updated version of this work will be presented on 12 August at the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster in Ayr.  Watch this space!

Our team will be well represented at this event, with two talks and one keynote address.
Warren Maguire (project Co-Investigator) will give a plenary on Investigating the phonological history of southwest Tyrone English

There will be two additional keynotes:

Professor Jeremy Smith (University of Glasgow), Punctuating Older Scots: new developments from a pragmatic perspective

Professor Wilson McLeod (University of Edinburgh), Purism and diversity in contemporary Gaelic

The FITS team will also deliver two talks.

• Rhona Alcorn (Project Co-Investigator) will give a talk entitled Introducing FITS
• Benjamin Molineaux and Joanna Kopaczyk (Project Research Assistants) will give a talk called The Germanic sources of Older Scots revisited: A featural approach

Finally, Linguistics and English Language at Edinburgh will also be represented by a talk by Pavel Iosad, Michael Ramsammy and Patrick Honeybone: Preaspiration in North Argyll Gaelic and its contribution to prosodic structure.

See the rest of the programme here.

Have a look at the new issue and the article here.

The FITS Team’s first official meeting on 05 November, 2014

With the arrival of two new research assistants, Joanna Kopaczyk (previously at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań) and Benjamin Molineaux (previously at Oxford), as well as a new doctoral candidate, Daisy Smith, the work on the AMC’s From Inglis To Scots project has begun in earnest.  The four-year FITS project is funded by an important AHRC grant and will focus on the sounds and spellings of Older Scots.

The team is completed by the project’s principal investigator, Prof. Bettelou Los, two co-investigators, Rhona Alcorn and Warren Maguire, as well as a programmer and database manager, Vasilis Karaiskos.

The FITS project aims to account systematically for the diversity of spelling attested in varieties of Scots between 1380 (the date of the earliest materials) and 1500. It will thus refine and significantly extend current knowledge of the phonological history of Older Scots. Our dataset consists of spellings recorded in the corpus of tagged texts compiled for A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots, I: 1380–1500 (LAOS). FITS will focus on spellings of morphemes of Germanic origin in particular.

Watch this space for more information on this exciting project!

New post-doctoral research staff for the FITS project: Benjamin Molineaux and Joanna Kopaczyk

The new AHRC-funded project, From Inglis to Scots: Mapping sounds to spellings (FITS) has acquired two new Research Assistants: Joanna Kopaczyk and Benjamin Molineaux. Joanna joins us from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, where she has been Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of English.   Ben comes to us from Oxford University, where he recently completed his doctorate in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology.

The rest of the team, already at Edinburgh, include Bettelou Los (PI), Rhona Alcorn (Co-investigator), Warren Maguire (Co-investigator) and Vasilis Karaiskos (Programmer).  Last but not least, the project also brings in a new doctoral student: Daisy Smith.

Daisy Smith is the new AHRC-funded doctoral candidate within the AMC’s FITS project

The team is very happy to welcome Daisy Smith as a doctoral student within its From Inglis to Scots project. Daisy was awarded a three-year AHRC-funded studentship to research the spellings and sounds of Older Scots inflectional morphology, thus complementing the core of the project’s work on the  language’s Germanic root-morphemes.

An MA in English Language and Literature from our own University of Edinburgh, Daisy is excited by the opportunity to rejoin the Linguistics and English Language department and continue her studies within the FITS team.  Her MA dissertation was on synchronic aspects of derivational morphology, so she is very keen to tackle inflection this time, as well as delving into Historical Linguistics, an area of studies she has always been interested in.

A brief summary of her doctoral project is given below.

‘ye saidis lettres’: A study of the Older Scots covered inflectional vowel

The focus of my PhD research is the inflectional morphology of Older Scots. Using the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (developed by Keith Williamson, also part of the AMC), I will examine a variety of legal texts dating from 1380 to 1500 with the objective of identifying factors conditioning scribal choice of orthographical variant in covered inflectional vowels, that is to say, those unstressed vowels which appear in an inflectional morpheme before a final consonant, such as represented by <i> in the Modern Scots askit, and <e> in the Modern English equivalent asked. This topic of research is not one which has been previously considered in great detail. The general tendencies characterising OSc inflectional morphology and differentiating it from that of Middle English have been described (see Minkova 1991, King 1997, Aitken 1977, Aitken and Macafee 2002, Bugaj 2002; 2004, Kopaczyk 2001), but as yet there has not been any attempt to investigate thoroughly the diversity of the covered inflectional vowel in OSc texts and account for its distribution. In a manuscript note made in 1977, Aitken stated that he had “regrettably not yet made the time to discuss […] prefix and suffix syllables”. In her 2002 editor’s preface to Aitken’s The Older Scots Vowels, Macafee elaborates that “without further data, [Aitken] did not feel that he could improve on the fullest account available, that of Kuipers (1964:76-9)”. Kuipers’ account is a descriptive chapter within a larger work analysing two Eucharistic tracts written by Quintin Kennedy, a sixteenth-century Scottish abbot and religious reformist. Since the completion of LAOS, it has been possible to access more than 1000 legal texts in OSc as part of a lexico-grammatically tagged corpus. I propose to utilise this “further data” which Aitken felt was lacking in 1977 and investigate the development of the covered inflectional vowel.

References

Aitken, Adam Jack & Caroline Macafee (2002). The Older Scots vowels : a history of the stressed vowels of Older Scots from the beginnings to the eighteenth century. Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society.

Aitken, Adam Jack (1977). How to Pronounce Older Scots. In Adam Jack. Aitken, Matthew Purdie McDiarmid & Derick Thomson (eds.), Bards and makars : Scottish language and literature : medieval and Renaissance. Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press. 1-21.

Bugaj, Joanna (2004). Middle Scots inflectional system in the south-west of Scotland. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 189

Kennedy, Quintin and Cornelis Henricus Kuipers (1964). Quintin Kennedy, 1520-1564: Two Eucharistic Tracts. Nijmegen: Drukkerij Gebr. Janssen. 76-79

King, Anne (1997). The Inflectional Morphology of Older Scots. In Charles Jones (ed.), The Edinburgh history of the Scots language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 157-181.

Kopaczyk, Joanna (2001). The Scots-Northern English continuum of marking noun plurality. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 36. 131-140.

Minkova, Donka (1991). The history of final vowels in English: the sound of muting. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 88-91.

The FITS project aims to account systematically for the diversity of spelling attested in varieties of Scots between 1380 (the date of the earliest materials) and 1500. FITS will thus refine and significantly extend current knowledge of the phonological history of Older Scots. Our dataset consists of spellings recorded in the corpus of tagged texts compiled for A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots, I: 1380–1500 (LAOS). FITS will focus on spellings of morphemes of Germanic origin in particular. For each such morpheme, we will:

• reconstruct a sound value for each unit of each variant spelling and identify the particular phonological changes (if any) by which that sound evolved from its Old English (or potentially Old Norse) progenitor.
• catalogue and describe, in a Corpus of Changes, each of the phonological developments referred to in our reconstructions. We will also index any orthographic changes evident in our source materials.
• annotate our analyses with ancillary information to facilitate the discovery of any regional, temporal or lexical patterns in the use of individual forms.

The results will be published online in a fully searchable database. This database will be linked to relevant information in two other large, online resources, namely LAOS and A Corpus of Narrative Etymologies from Primitive Old English to Early Middle English (CoNE).

The project also supports a PhD studentship which investigates orthographic representations of non-final vowels in Older Scots inflections and conditioning factors for each variant type.