User:Vox Sciurorum/Scots CFI draft

On Wiktionary we treat Scots as a separate language descended from Middle English, and Middle Scots as part of Scots rather than a separate language. Scots entries present special challenges.


 * 1) There is the usual difficulty of documenting a primarily oral language when most literature and official records are in a different language.
 * 2) There is the problem of distinguishing Scots from dialectal English when speakers may not make the distinction themselves.
 * 3) A lot of what is passed off as Scots on the Internet is in fact a caricature of Scots written by people who don't speak the language.  See the long discussion on meta.wikimedia.org.

The standard reference for Scots words is the Dictionary of the Scots Language, abbreviated DSL, with the shortcut template R:DSL. You may also find scots-online.org useful.

Here are some basic rules to ensure reliable Scots definitions. If you are a native speaker of Scots please disregard any rules that seem overly strict, put  in your Babel box so others understand you are a native speaker, and come to the Beer parlour to introduce yourself.


 * Do not add a Scots entry unless you have seen the word written in a source you are confident is Scots. Do not anticipate what the word might be or extrapolate from apparently regular differences between English and Scots.  As a language of everyday life Scots may not even have words for some foreign places or technical concepts.
 * Do not trust Scots Wikipedia. In some languages finding a word on that language's Wikipedia is reassurance that the word is real. Not so for Scots.
 * When adding a Scots entry, include a dictionary reference or quotation (not just a use example).

If a request for verification is placed on a definition, the following language-specific criteria for inclusion apply.
 * 1) A word is sufficiently attested if it appears once in any work published in Scots between 1450 and 1700.  Put sco before the definition to classify it as an obsolete word.  When searching DSL these are words from A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue.
 * 2) A word is sufficiently attested if it appears once in the following major works of Scots literature:
 * 3) Scots works of  (Some of his works are apparently not considered Scots.  Do we list them or drop this category?)
 * 4) The  Bible translation The New Testament in Scots.
 * 5) (There must be more, but maybe the following criterion is good enough.)
 * 6) A lemma (the main spelling of a word) is sufficiently attested if it has two durable citations.  In addition to the usual rules for citation, quotations in DSL are counted as long as the R:DSL template has been placed in the references section.  It is not necessary to copy them to Wiktionary.  Some, possibly most of DSL's sources are not available online.  We have decided to trust DSL.
 * 7) An alternative spelling or inflected form can be attested by a single use.

For example, one of the definitions of is the past participle of. The references section includes dae. On DSL the 2005 suplement to the entry for dae has two uses in this sense. The sense is adquately supported. The definition may be misleading because this is evidently a rare form of the past participle, but we don't remove it just because it is not the usual conjugation of dae in written Scots.