Urgh....
Bit hungover this morning, which is shameful considering I only had four pints yesterday. Possibly the combination of alcohol and a very lamb madras has led to the onset of dehydration. Who knows. Anyway. I've just discovered I have 3,000 words to hand in today, and I hadn't even realised. Bum. So I'm going to keep this brief.
This week has been neither the most uplifting, nor the most fulfilling of the course so far. There was a real negative vibe out there over the last couple of days, and I had been mentally gearing up for a bit of an argument. Don't get me wrong - I enjoy a good verbal set-to as much as the next simian, especially if I can reduce it to the level of semantics v matt facts... Anyway, my personal beef over the last few days stemmed from a rather flippant comment made about some Scots dialect I'd used in a piece called Quality Time. I've been meaning to edit that up according to the comments I received in the class, but as yet I haven't had time. (It's what I promised to post a while ago, I just haven't gotten round to it. < NOTE to="self"> Stop prevaricating - playing music in pubs is no excuse< /NOTE>) The remark that upset me was along the lines of saying that the Scots dialect used in the piece was "made up language" and would be useful for a class on the subject (which was last night). I didn't really figure out why that rankled so much, but it hit me when we were sitting in the pub at the weekend. As these things tend to do after six or seven pints of Guinness. Oo, my head.
Language is a very political animal. I have a slightly post-colonial view of language, in that I see the assertion of a dominant or "proper" form of a language over other forms as an overtly aggressive action. Labelling dialectically correct language as being "made up" is extremely derogatory, and devalues the spoken form as less than the dominant "proper" form. English is perhaps one of the most widely spoken, and ultimately diverse languages on the planet - I would question the motivation of anyone who asserts a "correct" version of the language when the terms of that language are subject to change, and are subject to contemporary evolutionary forces acting against the authority of "correct" English. Scots is just one example of a spoken form of English that does not obey "normal" grammatical rules when spoken (in some ways these differences are older and more important than arbitrary lexical variations in pronunciation). In fact, when I've been writing Scots dialect (usually phonetically, but sometimes using the Grassic Gibbon trick of retaining the word order and cadences of the spoken speech whilst using the "correct" spellings of English words) I've become so pissed off with the wavy lines under everything I write that I've had to switch the Spelling and Grammar checks off. Computers know nothing.
Anyway, rant over. I'm just a wee bit passionate about the way that language works, and I was all ready to take great umbrage at being told that Scots is a fabricated patois. Unfortunately, the issue never arose, so I had nowhere to vent my pre-prepared arguments other than here. So, sorry about that, but these things are important. Well, they are to me.
This week has been neither the most uplifting, nor the most fulfilling of the course so far. There was a real negative vibe out there over the last couple of days, and I had been mentally gearing up for a bit of an argument. Don't get me wrong - I enjoy a good verbal set-to as much as the next simian, especially if I can reduce it to the level of semantics v matt facts... Anyway, my personal beef over the last few days stemmed from a rather flippant comment made about some Scots dialect I'd used in a piece called Quality Time. I've been meaning to edit that up according to the comments I received in the class, but as yet I haven't had time. (It's what I promised to post a while ago, I just haven't gotten round to it. < NOTE to="self"> Stop prevaricating - playing music in pubs is no excuse< /NOTE>) The remark that upset me was along the lines of saying that the Scots dialect used in the piece was "made up language" and would be useful for a class on the subject (which was last night). I didn't really figure out why that rankled so much, but it hit me when we were sitting in the pub at the weekend. As these things tend to do after six or seven pints of Guinness. Oo, my head.
Language is a very political animal. I have a slightly post-colonial view of language, in that I see the assertion of a dominant or "proper" form of a language over other forms as an overtly aggressive action. Labelling dialectically correct language as being "made up" is extremely derogatory, and devalues the spoken form as less than the dominant "proper" form. English is perhaps one of the most widely spoken, and ultimately diverse languages on the planet - I would question the motivation of anyone who asserts a "correct" version of the language when the terms of that language are subject to change, and are subject to contemporary evolutionary forces acting against the authority of "correct" English. Scots is just one example of a spoken form of English that does not obey "normal" grammatical rules when spoken (in some ways these differences are older and more important than arbitrary lexical variations in pronunciation). In fact, when I've been writing Scots dialect (usually phonetically, but sometimes using the Grassic Gibbon trick of retaining the word order and cadences of the spoken speech whilst using the "correct" spellings of English words) I've become so pissed off with the wavy lines under everything I write that I've had to switch the Spelling and Grammar checks off. Computers know nothing.
Anyway, rant over. I'm just a wee bit passionate about the way that language works, and I was all ready to take great umbrage at being told that Scots is a fabricated patois. Unfortunately, the issue never arose, so I had nowhere to vent my pre-prepared arguments other than here. So, sorry about that, but these things are important. Well, they are to me.