I caught this radio show on BBC Radio 4 called Word of Mouth – 23.01.25 Word of Mouth with Jackie Kay talking about the Scots language, and as usual I started thinking about what she was saying. Her perspective was that the maintenance of a local language ensured the survival of a local culture, and her reasons seemed compelling. She talked of how each location and each Island had it’s own words and phrases, often citing them in the show, and how they added a sense of togetherness to the group that used them. I remain unconvinced though, that there is any usefulness to speaking when the possibility of being understood is rendered remote by the narrow scope of the audience.
It is useful to speak to people so that they know what you wish of them, and yes words and phrases will develop in isolation to then be different in describing an object or a process. What someone may call a cup of tea, another may refer to as a “brew”. The problem with this is that brew is a verb, it does not describe a thing it describes the doing of a thing, and although tea may be brewed it is not alone in that action, many things can be brewed, beer for instance. Samuel Johnson compiled a lexicography and by doing so he advanced science and reason, for the first time in Britain there was a codified way of making sure that what you wrote would be universally understood because there was an explanation somewhere of the meaning of words. People cannot collaborate without shared understanding, just like commerce cannot thrive without a shared sense of transactional or exchange value. Science is the result of shared understanding, and progress is the child of science.
Words are not things, the word chair cannot be sat on, the symbol 3 has no substance, it merely conveys to you and I how many individual things of a similar nature are present or absent. Words stand in place of things, for the purpose of conveying the nature of those things in the absence of those things. I could say to you “three chairs” and I would not need a chair, or three chairs, for you to understand the nature of what I am saying. You know, we agree, how many three is, and what a chair is. The difficulty in using a local language instead, one that represents a chair as “Dost” like in Scots, seems ridiculous if spoken to someone who is not a Scots speaker. Luckily 3 is the same, but one wouldn’t know what there were three of?
A mostly colloquial language provides power to the speakers only in that condition where it excludes persons who do not speak it, they are outside the tribe, and anyone who is outside the tribe is not the equal of anyone in it. That’s how tribes tend to work, they favour their members, strongly, and for the important purpose of establishing a relation that benefits and protects each member. But what purpose would it serve to attempt to communicate the idea of three chairs to a person and then not to use terms that they might understand? I can only speculate that the word that stands in place of the word that stands in place of the chair, Dost, would have to be before, or after, the utterance, explained to be standing in place of the word chair, and what sense would that make to expend such energy in the explanation of the surrogate word, when the word of shared understanding was available in the first place? I have seen this done with Latin, but with Latin there is often a purpose, in that the Latin phrase holds a lot of information in a short form as a phrase, and it may be of benefit to the communicators, all of them, to understand the sentiment of that phrase going forward. Plus, Latin is a worldwide language, it is not colloquial, so you can travel with it and find understanding among others of differing regions.
I wrote a few years ago about how language has an inherent purpose, that it conveys information. One of the most important aspects of a language is that the person, they who is using this form of information transportation, can be assumed as desiring to be understood. There would be little point in conversing if they did not. That seems obvious, but does not hold entirely true all of the time. I speculated previously as to why some folks deliberately use words to obscure truths and create misunderstandings. Here’s a link if you wish to read it Speaking so as not to be understood. Since information is power, then to give information is to give power, to share it, and some people do not want that, they intend to hold on to power.
My partner Em and I visited Northern Ireland, where we met the most awful bore of man who insisted on speaking the Scots words for things, I assume in the effort of showing off. Neither of us found this impressive since Scots is not a particularly attractive language, nor do either of us speak a word of it, nor did anyone in the party other than the bore. So each utterance then had to be translated, thus enabling the bore to occupy a lot of the conversation ,which we felt was his intent in the first place, to “hold court” as such. It is very difficult to disagree with someone when you cannot understand what it is they are saying, I felt also this was part of the bores’ motivation. We speak English, I am Northern Irish, and Em is Welsh, we try hard to understand each other by speaking the same language and using the same terms for things. In my country your evening meal is “Dinner” in Wales it is “Tea” so one of us has to break with our colloquialism, and since I live where Em is from, it is me. This makes sense, there is no codified language object for the evening meal in the English language, but there is for a chair and there is for three. You get my point?
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