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

• 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.

Benjamin Molineaux and Rhona Alcorn will represent the team, giving a paper on Grapho-phonological parsing of C15 Scots: A reassessment of the [v]~[f] alternation.

You can read the abstract for the talk here.

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.