In Scotland Wales and Ireland (UK bit)

[JazzAnnNonMouse]

Is it more common to have a very scottish Welsh Irish name or a more English easily pronouncible one in a say a class of kids?
Does this depend on areas eg close to borders are more anglicised? Or just those with english connections (family possible moves etc)
There are so many names that are so beautiful that I'd never heard of before reading them on here but theyre almost never pronounced how I expected

Scots and Gaelic are completely separate.

Scottish Gaelic is more similar to Irish. If you have never been exposed to any Gaelic/Irish you wouldn't be able to understand anything. It's as different to English as German or Greek.

Scots is dialect. The Scottish government are hell bent on getting Scots recognised as a different language because it suits their political agenda that Scottish people are completely differnet from the rest of the UK and should therefore be independent.

Scots is like what Robert Burns wrote. Yes there are different words and different expressions for some things but it's still basically English. Like the first two lines of Burns' "To A Mouse":

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!

Now you might not know what "sleekit" or "tim'rous" means, but you'd recognise that it's still basically English.

Interesting I never knew there was two languages spoken in Scotland- as well as English.

In school I think we were told that Manx, Scottish, Ulster Irish and Munster Irish were all dialects of Gaelic and therefore reasonably similar when spoken which has in fairness been my experience when speaking to Scottish people in Gaelic.

'Scots is dialect. The Scottish government are hell bent on getting Scots recognised as a different language because it suits their political agenda'

I've never really understood the idea that Scots is a separate language. Although I generally keep that to myself in order not to offend.

Cloeycat, neither is a dialect, both are languages and derived from different sources/language groups.

Scottish Gaelic is a language of the sub-group Goidelic, which is a sub-group of the Insular Celtic group.

Scots is a language of the sub-group Anglic, which is a sub-group of the Anglo-Frisian group, which is part of the West Germanic group. Scots is recognised as a language by every political body that has any say in Scotland including Westminster and th EU, as well as by linguists and historians.

On the name front, they affected each other because of the way names were adapted back and forth. For example the old Scots form of Janet was Jonat. This was adapted into Gaelic as Seònaid or Deònaid, then adapted back to Scots as Shona or Deona.

Thank you DrPiggle for the explanation on Holland/The Netherlands!

FrancisCrawford give us the gist of the whole Edinburgh vs Glasgow thing.
This thread has become so interesting!

Edinburgh is broadly seen as being posh.
Glasgow is broadly seen as being working class.

Each thinks they're the bees knees and the other comes a poor second.

That's about the size of it!

In response to an earlier poster, there is Gaelic medium education in Glasgow from nursery through to the end of secondary (i.e. age 18).

Scots is like what Robert Burns wrote

Jeez, my English is pretty bad today.....

I grew up in Edinburgh and now live in Glasgow. Each city has its posh bits and sink estates - just like anywhere. Historically though Glasgow has had more heavy industry like shipbuilding and engineering, whereas Edinburgh has been more about financial services and banking. There is the same sort of rivalry you'd find between Liverpool and Manchester.

I have no problem with kids at school learning Burns poetry in Scots dialect. Poems like Tam o'Shanter are world class. Also contains some of my favourite lines of poetry:

"But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white--then melts for ever; "

(And that is not Scots in any way, shape or form. It's English). I do agree that there is a definite class element to some Scottish words. I was brought up NEVER to say weans or bairns, and to speak properly. We live in a fairly well-to-do area and you hear expressions and words like minging, dreich, fankle, numpty or scunner all the time. But I never hear about someone "cleanin' the windaes", you'd clean the windows. Some of the words claimed as Scots words aren't really, they're just English words spoken in an exaggerated accent.

A lot of those Scots words and sentence structures are very prevalent in North East N Ireland too, brought by settlers all those hundreds of years ago. Eg 'Wean' is very common here, and it wouldn't so much be seen as a class thing as a town vs country thing. And people are forever saying things like 'my hair needs cutting badly' instead of 'I badly need my hair cut'. Which always leads someone to reply 'no, your hair needs cut well...'

This is very interesting because whilst I had always known that a lot of the words we use have their origins in Scotland, it didn't occur to me that the sentence structures might come from there too.

Treaclesoda - my mum's side of the family all come from Co Antrim and we have spent many happy holidays there. In the past there was lots of movement between Scotland and Northern Ireland which really are very close. I have always felt very "at home" in Northern Ireland and the way people speak is very familiar to me. Much more so than the way husband's relations from the North West of England speak, even though there was a lot of Irish immigration there too.

treaclesoda The Scots language derives from Northumbrian English, hence a lot of of common words and expressions, although Scots then went on to pick up influences from Flemish, Norman, Old Norse, Gaelic and Cumbric too, making it into the disticnt language it became in its heyday.

Some of the words claimed as Scots words aren't really, they're just English words spoken in an exaggerated accent.

And that is the Scottish Cringe in a nutshell!

Sorry your thread got somewhat derailed, OP, hope you got a satisfactory answer to your original question.

I'm really glad I started this thread now even if in the beginning I got told off a lot

It's been so interesting and tbh I think I helped the derailing by asking lots of questions!

Thank you all for teaching me so much! Though I'll be honest I'm still not much wiser on names and pronunciations....

OP you were given a tough time at the start of this thread, especially given you were just seeking knowledge! I hate when Mumsnet gets aggressive, it puts people off asking things in the first place.

In answer to the Neeve/Nee-uv thing - it's partly down to accent I suppose, if you listen to some Irish accents it'll become more clear - I don't know if you're acquainted with - the wee girl on that would pronounce it Nee-uv, but a lot of Niamhs would say Neeve.

The Scots thing - it's a language and has many different dialects within it. This website is great, it gives you loads of info about it and gives you lots of soundbites to listen to.

Luna I agree that there's a load of similarities between English and Scots but that's a particularly English excerpt you've chosen. In the same poem you have:

But Tam kend what was what fu' brawlie:
There was ae winsome wench and waulie,
That night enlisted in the core,
Lang after ken'd on Carrick shore;

I doubt my English DH would have much chance of understanding that! Awesome poem though, my favourite Burns. I'd also agree that sadly there is a class element involved in the use of Scots. My parents generation often received the strap for speaking in Scots at school, which boils my piss as not only is it a fantastic, very expressive language but it's part of our culture and when you look through the generations you hear a marked difference in the dilution of Scots. My great grandparents spoke either Gaelic or Scots (depending on the side of the family) but none of my generation speak Gaelic (something I hope to change one day) and only four out of 13 of us understand broad Scots, six of us use Scots mixed with English in every day conversation and the rest might recognise words like 'wee' or 'bairn' but that's about it. Most primary and secondary schools here teach some Scots poetry, secondary schools study Scottish literature (ironically as part of the English curriculum) but this isn't necessarily written in Scots, just by Scottish authors.

I would absolutely recommend reading some of the Scots versions of the Julia Donaldson books - here's a link to the Gruffalo being read on YouTube!

I'm Irish and I just can't rhyme Saoirse with inertia. Seer sha rhymes with ersha (not a word)
Where the hell is Saoirse Ronan from if she thinks Saoirse and Inertia rhyme

I think some Gaelic names are pronounced differently depending on if you are talking to the person directly or referring to them in the third person ie. Mhairi is pronounced Mahri in one case but Vahri in the other, it's the same with Seamas and Hamish, non native speakers didn't understand this when they adopted the names hence the confusion. I can' t remember which way round it is though ( Scottish Gaelic BTW).

I always thought Scots counted as a language because it developed in parallel to English from a similar root rather than branching off from English or being a degraded version.

Now that's confused matters even more! How strange that a name - that which we identify people by - would change whether you were talking about them or to them... maybe they're all were just super sly and names were like secret codes. ;-)
Is it still the case that names change depending on whether you're talking to them or about them?

LucyBabs Saoirse is Seersha to me, I am baffled by Ms. Ronan saying it rhymes with inertia but maybe she figures it's as close as it's going to get??

OP Irish changes so much around the country that it can be very confusing. I heard a very interesting guy recently saying that years ago (as in 150+) two men could meet in the Midlands, one speaking Donegal Irish and one speaking Cork/Kerry Irish and neither would be able to understand the other based on accent and pronunciations.

My mom is from the East coast of Ireland, I'm from the West. She physically can't say the name Caoimhe the way I do. I say Quee-va, she says Kee-va, she struggles to do the Qu sound, entertains me greatly :)

And don't get me started on those who say "you say MOM? That's so American!". It's bloody not. It comes from Irish, my Nan was born in 1922 and said it, she wasn't exactly sitting I front of Nickelodeon copying it!

HOW IS IT POSSIBLE FOR PEOPLE NOT TO HAVE A BASIC GRASP OF THE GEOGRAPHY THAT MAKES UP THE COUNTRY THEY HAVE LIVED IN ALL THEIR LIVES?

Sorry just had to get that off my chest.

Life. I'm so baffled I can't even spell.

Oh don't start that again donatella. The threads become much more interesting since then.