Happy Burns Night !

Up here we'd just ask for whisky. But, if you look at the labels of Malts and Blends, most, e.g., Macallan (malt) or The Famous Grouse (blend), include the word 'Scotch'. The Trade body for the whisky industry is the 'Scotch Whisky Association'.
The description was used more in the past e.g. seemingly, in 1918, the Scotch Education Department became the Scottish education Department dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/scots
Looking down the list provided, in the Dictionars o the Scots Leid,  Scots, Scottish and Scotch were used interchangeably.
 

of course. We have a long trading history with our French friends and longstanding allies. It would be rather rude not to enjoy their fine wines and hospitality.

Shakespeare didnt speak old English Vinny. Old English is a German language , Shakespeare wrote and spoke early modern English. Half of which is French.

so pretty much the same as the weegies then . The only people who would ask for a scotch is foreigners. Do doric speakers use the term scotch in polite conversation ? 


Three quarters of Scottish distilleries are foreign owned , so im not sure them using the word scotch is an emblem of how Scottish they are  . Isn't the term scotch , whether it was used for education departments , or whatever , simply part of the process of creeping anglicisation in our culture over the modern era? 

 Wether its on the label of whiskey bottles  , or wether imposed onto an education department  , ive never heard scotch being used in polite conversation among west coasters. I have family up in caithness and Angus , weegies who have moved to those areas , and again it's not something ive come across elsewhere in scotland. 

 


Need to have a look moray. Perhaps it was in doric, but again in Glaswegian lallans , ive not come across it. The `otch` pronunciation of scotch comes across to me as a distinctly English , especially southern English , pronunciation . 

I was raised on Shakespeare from an early age - Mum (before children came along and ruined it) was an actor, and Lamb's Tales From Shakespeare and a huge box set of heavily truncated audio plays ("Argo Classics") were household fixtures. I've been seeing stage productions since I was five, and my own boys have been raised (or "indoctrinated"?) with the same appreciation.

Consequently, I find the language of the Bard as straightforward as the instructions for my toaster.

.. but I find Robert Burns far more of a problem. Even with his writing in a more accessible version of the Scottish dialect (often a mixture of "Lowland Scottish" & the more anglicised "Light Scottish") I'm pretty stumped by a lot of it - although I can enjoy the sound, and pick up on the meaning. (Proud owner of Mum's first edition of the Complete Works - which sits on the bookshelves next to a much-thumbed Scottish/English dictionary..)

Off to a (belated) Burns' Night bash this evening. Always fun, and with a pretty unusual twist - he's of Pakistani heritage (raised in Glasgow), and she's a Daughter of the Highlands. Curried haggis is far nicer than it sounds. (He even wears a "traditional" tartan for the occasion. Just to prove how ludicrous the whole Tartan Industry is, there are shops up and down the Royal Mile where they'll happily kit you out with your family plaid - whether you're a Mcmillan, a McAllister, a Patel or a Goldstein. I shall proudly wear my McDuff scarf..)

Apparently burns mother was a native gaidhlig speaker , his father from Aberdeenshire  ,and the Gaelic language still survived in Ayrshire in his day. I think his Scots dialect had undergone a tremendous change over the previous two centuries due to the process of anglicisation , and the laws enacted by the Stewart monarchs and their governments to erase both gaidhlig and Scots , and replace the language of the Scottish population with a standardised English . Many Scots today would struggle with burns native speech , so its no surprise you have problems reading it.