Kirk, church, chapel?

[TheOfficialBren]

Perhaps I should have said:
Kirk- the local place of worship for the general public.

[M. A. C. Newsome]

According to the Concise Scots Dictionary the word kirk was used to refer to a church from the late 14th century on. So you are good for 17th century usage.

I would encourage anyone writing historical fiction set in Scotland who would like to get the Scots terminology correct to obtain a copy of the CSD.

[neloon]

The Scottish National Dictionary is available online.

http://www.scots-online.org/dictionary/

Or you could get in touch with me. My wife is a lexicologist and was/is involved in producing all the Scots dictionaries (and others).
Alan

[TheOfficialBren]

Neloon,
How would one go about learning Scots? I understand (correct me if I'm wrong) that it share similarities with English. Thank you.

[neloon]

Neloon,
How would one go about learning Scots? I understand (correct me if I'm wrong) that it share similarities with English. Thank you.

Bren,
I'm afraid the short answer is you need to grow up in Scotland and even then you need to cope with great regional variation. For example, in the Northeast of Scotland, "boy" is "loon" (thus my nickname) but that is not used elsewhere and would be unintelligible to (most) Glaswegians.
One could say that English is a dialect of Scots. Controversial? Well, when the Angles arrived in Britain, speaking Anglish, they settled in the Southeast of Scotland and Northern England. Over the centuries "English" Anglish spread south and mutated to
become modern English most of the change being complete by the 1500s.
But that change never happened in Scotland. In fact, for many centuries, what we now think of as Scots was called "Inglis" in Scotland. Naturally there is a certain commonality. For example, the Anglish word "toon" meaning a farm or settlement is still used in that sense in Scotland but became "town" in English. But Scots also acquired a lot of vocabulary from French (an "ashet" is a plate), the Low Countries ("dubs" is mud), Gaelic (the Northeast greeting is "Fit like" which comes from the "cia mar" in the Gaelic "How are you?") , Norse etc. So one might say " 'I quinie coodna get ungrotten" = The girl couldn't stop crying, where quine (girl) is the same as the Anglish word that went up in the world to become "queen" and ungrotten would be an obsolete Norse negative past tense of "greet"=cry.
Now, one has to be honest, except in country districts, Scots is very little spoken. Because it is indeed close to English, because after the Union of the Parliaments the way to get on in the world was to shed all Scotticisms (books were written to help Scots to do this) and nowadays, of course, because of the influence of London-based media, most urban Scots just speak English with a Scottish accent but with occasional Scots words thrown in. Shop assistants will frequently greet customers in perfect English but code switch (technical jargon!) towards Scots when they find they are speaking to a fellow Scot!
Unfortunately, Scots does not have the international aspect that Gaelic has (however small) and recent attempts to incorporate Scottish literature into the education system have met with political cries of "nationalistic" so we're stuck with a wee bit of Burns once a year and that's it.
Alan

[neloon]

Bren,
I think I'm going off topic (but still linguistic). I just looked up your profile and noticed that you "dig" kilts. Dig???
The Gaelic for "understand" is "duig" pronounced "tooick" or, on Lewis, "dig". It seems that when Highland immigrants arrived in the US and had to grapple with English, the locals heard them saying to each other "An duig thu?" = Do you understand?, and somehow "I dig this" or "I twig that" passed into US usage.
Just some useless information. It's all Arrowyn's fault!
Alan

[Chas]

The girl couldn't stop crying, where quine (girl) is the same as the Anglish word that went up in the world to become "queen"
Alan

Just to show how these things hang on in the race memory, the old farmers in Norfolk used to use 'quin' to mean a female of any sort.

As in -

"How big's your herd, Bor?"
Blast, Bor, it be 21 - 1 bull and 20 quin!

Regards

Chas

[Chas]

For those who are interested, Wikipedia, is not just written in English.

Here is the Scots Wikipedia -

http://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

This, from their front page -

"Wikipædia is a project tae big a free encyclopædia in mony leids.
This Scots edeetion wis shapit on 23rd Juin 2005. We hae 12,957 airticles the nou.
There's 16,417 veesitors/uisers here the nou."

Regards

Chas