Appendix talk:Scots Swadesh list

The Swadesh lists for the other languages do not include the archaic, idiosyncratic, naive-phonetic, plain wrong and umpteen different marginal spellings where one literary spelling will do so why should the Scots one?

According to the Wikipedia article Modern Scots, Scots has prestigious literary conventions. Common sense would dictate to use those.


 * No, they do not, nor do I wholly disagree with your decision to undo the recent changes. But to call them "idiosyncratic", "naive-phonetic", and "wrong" is itself wrong, since the previously added spellings were from the Dictionary of the Scots Language here [] Leasnam (talk) 19:45, 25 February 2017 (UTC)


 * The Dictionary of the Scots Language records spellings that have occurred in writing both chronologically and spatially. No value judgement is made by the lexicographers themselves. The spellings recorded can be archaic, idiosyncratic, naive-phonetic or plain wrong. In the Dictionary introduction and in the entries for each letter of the alphabet explanations of what the modern prestigious literary conventions are can be found. Simply selecting spellings at random without any understanding of the historical and literary background of the language is not an informed way to prepare a Swadesh list for Scots.

BTW. A suitable IPA pronunciation for each word can be cut and pasted from []


 * That's why I didn't use it when I created the list. But speaking of standardized or correct Scots is a bit of an oxymoron isn't it ? Are there newer dictionaries in existence that seem to normalise it more ? If not for the pronunciation and the odd word here and there, it just looks like English :\ Leasnam (talk) 01:29, 26 February 2017 (UTC)


 * Newer readily available dictionaries have less space than one volume of the 12+12 volume Dictionary of the Scots Language so they can't include the full gamut of archaic, idiosyncratic, naive-phonetic, plain wrong and umpteen different marginal spellings that have been used over the centuries. They usually just list the contemporary prestigious literary spellings.
 * Hardly surprising that those just look like English. Ultimately Scots is a variety of English. The Swadesh lists for Danish, Norwegian and Swedish also look pretty much the same.


 * On Wiktionary, the consensus (as I last checked) was that Scots is a selfstanding language, separate from [Modern] English. But, I realise, that is debatable as the two share a recent common ancestor and have affected one another throughout their respective developments. It all boils down to which side of the fence one chooses to fall on Leasnam (talk) 18:57, 26 February 2017 (UTC)