From Inglis to Scots » Older Scots

New FRLSU volume out: FITS team on reflexes of Germanic *a in Scots

Joanna Kopaczyk — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 11:07:01 +0000

Fresh off the press – “The emergence of Scots: Clues from Germanic *a reflexes” by Rhona Alcorn, Benjamin Molineaux, Joanna Kopaczyk, Vasilios Karaiskos, Bettelou Los and Warren Maguire. The paper forms part of the 5th online FRSLU volume Before the storm: Papers from the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster triennial meeting, Ayr 2015, edited by Janet Cruickshank and Robert McColl Millar at the University of Aberdeen.

The volume also features another chapter by our FITS team member, Warren Maguire, on Epenthesis in liquid+consonant clusters in Scots.

FITS Team at the AMC Symposium

Joanna Kopaczyk — Tue, 24 May 2016 15:21:56 +0000

The AMC Symposium, organised by the members of the FITS team and the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics, gives us a wonderful opportunity to share our research with fellow historical linguists. FITS Team members are involved in the following presentations:

Rhona Alcorn and Rob Truswell: A Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English
Warren Maguire: The phonology of early nineteenth-century Tyneside English as revealed in Thomas Wilson’s The Pitman’s Pay
Benjamin Molineaux and Joanna Kopaczyk: L-vocalisation in fifteenth-century Scots: The earliest spread of a ‘characteristic’ Scots feature
Daisy Smith: The predictability of {-S} abbreviation in Older Scots manuscripts according to stem-final littera

The abstracts can be found in the Book of Abstracts, and for the full programme, see this link.

A.J. Aitken’s “Collected Writings on the Scots Language” now available online

Benjamin Molineaux — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 10:50:47 +0000

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