Dis ony o youse ken the Scots leid?

[O'Callaghan]

Scots developped separately and in parallel to English, which is enough to make it a language. However, much of what is spoken today is a hybrid of Scots and English, so it is hard to tell where one begins and the other leaves off.

In some examples it is nothing more than English with an accent and a few Scots words thrown in. OTOH, broad Scots refers to something more like Old Scots, or sometimes it just means a broad accent, depending on who is doing the defining. The large amount of similarity makes definition difficult,and I also suspect that it began to blur around 1707.

I have an anecdote about Scots that I'd like to share. Here's a nonsense phrase often quoted (rightly or wrongly) as an example of Scots:

'It's a braw bricht moonlicht nicht tonicht'!

Just for a laugh, I recited this to an American colleague (co-worker) once, when we were discussing all the languages spoken in the British Isles, and she couldn't work out what I had said. She turned around and asked our (Scottish) boss if she had understood me, who of course said yes and translated it as:

'It's a brave bright moonlit night tonight'

The American was incredulous that we both knew what it meant, but of course it's just a silly stock phrase, and with the exception of one word (braw for brave) it just relies upon one systematic difference, and historically 'gh' in English was originally pronounced as a guttural the same as 'ch' is in Scots (and in German).

You would also think that she might expect that a Scot would be able to understand it, and yet she seemed surprised by that. I assumed the Scottish boss would understand it when I said it, and thought that was a safe assumption. I am English (of Irish descent , obviously), and AFAIK I have no Scots blood atall, although I have some Scots relations and have been to Scotland many times.

I think the real reason our hapless victim was so stunned was that she didn't even realise a priori that any languages other than English were actually spoken in the British Isles. There are probably a lot of Americans that don't. Possibly more than a few English people don't either, sad to say, although one only has to drive across the Welsh border to be confronted with bilingual English/Welsh signs, but some people don't get out much.