Thocht-Polis, by Philip Robinson

  

Funny cow number 22, from FunnyPica.com

Full text of the poem: Thocht-Polis, by Philip Robinson.

1(a) Why was this text created?
  (b) What motivations does the author have for his style choices? (Extent of distinctive Scots vocabulary and grammatical aspects; neologisms and other innovative language use; spelling; distinctive form; imagery.)

Philip Robinson is well-known among modern-day Ulster-Scots enthousiasts, for his novels and poetry in the language and his position on various boards, societies and councils for Ulster-Scots (read more here), and importantly for the extensive Ulster-Scots grammar guide of his hand. As well as two published volumes of poetry he has three poetry weblogs, one for contemporary free-verse, one for humorous poems and one for poetry in traditional stanzas. The wide range of genres and styles suggests Robinson is consciously trying to expand the literary "reach" of the Ulster-Scots language.

He grew up in Boneybefore, which is not far from James Orr's native Ballycarry. His language use is similar to that of Orr, but with considerable differences in spelling and noticeable neologisms here and there. His own spelling is not consistent across or even within the poems.

"Thocht-Polis" is one of the poems in Alang tha Shore (published 2005), and it is also featured on his blog Mair rhymin Ulster-Scotch crack, the one with humourous poems, or as Robinson puts it "writ fur a bit o a lach". It brings opponents of the Ulster-Scots language on stage as "tha Flet-Earth Societie". To them everything is black or white, and hence they cannot understand the Ulster Scots, who fall between two traditions; they are "black and white" at the same time just like the Frisian cows.

Differences in spelling between Orr and Robinson's poems include such common words as the, I and they, spelled in that way by Orr. Robinson spells the article tha, the first person pronoun A and for they he variously uses the' (in "Whit ir the' at?" and "The' lach and rage"), they (in "Whuniver they thegither play", "They cannae thole" and "To bigger beece they turn't"). It isn't entirely clear what the distinction depends on, though most likely the' is the unemphasised version. The verse is written in iambic tetrameter, but the they spelling is variously used in the emphasised and unemphasised positions. The' however is only found in unemphasised positions. The spelling of the word what is not consistent either; in the online version of the poem it is spelt whit thrice and once whut. The version that was reprinted in Frank Ferguson's anthology of Ulster-Scots writing uses whit once, whut twice and once what. In other poems he uses quhit as a spelling too, e.g. in The Gaelic Archipelago.

Where Burns and Orr both use ca'  (for call) and a' (for all), Robinson uses caa and aa. He uses thocht while Orr spells this word thocht and roon where Orr uses roun'. Altogether Robinson uses a lot more spellings that mark the words as distinct from standard English. As said the discussed poems by Burns and Orr were both in relatively "thin" Scots. Yet the poem "Donegore Hill" by Orr which was in thicker Scots still contains the same spellings as "Death and Burial" does, it just contains more Scots words than the latter.

Why might Robinson be using more distinctive spelling? It may be just be an idiosyncratic thing; in an unstandardised language much is allowed. But the distinctiveness of his spelling choices seems to be in line with the general rule that the more suppressed a language group feels about their language use, the more they will try to emphasise the distinctiveness of their language. James Orr was writing before the education laws of the 1830s, with a nationalised corpus which enforced use of standard English in the classroom. These laws contributed a lot to the stigma against the Ulster-Scots language, as children were told from early on that their way of talking was wrong. Indeed Thocht-Polis is railing against the stigma on the language. In Tha Gaelic Archipelago, too, Robinson hints at the stigma in the lines "Ay. / Sorry - Yes. / We'r learnt we maun aye say YES."

The extent of distinctively Scots words in Thocht-Polis, as in ones that do not have a cognate word in English, is actually not that big. Gin is used, ocht, thole and blethers and the expression deil a haet. This is still more sistinctive language than used by other contemporary Ulster Scots poets. Charlie Reynolds in his poem Mae Mither's Tunge uses almost exclusively what John Kirk (2013: 283) terms "grammatical respellings" and "lexical respellings", or words which are part both of Ulster-Scots and English, but which are spelled to indicate the Ulster-Scots pronunciation:

Hae daen haes best tae change oor Tunge
Tae him its worth wus joost lake dung,
It wus English, English moarn til nicht
An oor ain mither tunge wus niver richt.

These poems seem to indicate that the distinctiveness of Ulster Scots from English has decreased considerably since the end of the 18th century, although the amount of distinctive spellings used has increased.


2 How successful was this text in reaching its audience?

Philip Robinson is well-known within the Ulster-Scots community for his efforts to promote the language. Outside of the community however he is hardly known at all. For instance, despite having published four novels and two volumes of poetry, Robinson does not at the time of writing have a page on Wikipedia, in English nor in Scots. Arguably though, his audience is those who are interested in Ulster Scots. A selection of his poetry, like Orr's, has been included in Frank Ferguson's anthology of Ulster-Scots writing.

The Irish Cottier's Death and Burial, by James Orr.

 A Highland Funeral, Sir James Guthrie, 1882. Taken from Glasgow Museums collections navigator.

Full text of the poem: The Irish Cottier's Death and Burial, by James Orr


1(a) Why was this text created?
  (b) What motivations does the author have for his style choices? (Extent of distinctive Scots vocabulary and grammatical aspects; neologisms and other innovative language use; spelling; distinctive form; imagery.)

The poem can be seen as a challenge to Robert Burns' poem "The Cotter's Saturday Night". That poem is a story in the pastoral tradition, in Spenserian stanza (ababbcbcc; iambic pentameter except for last line which is iambic hexameter), which describes an idyllic Saturday night in a Cottage home. A cott(i)er is someone who has been given the use of a cottage in exchange for labour rather than rent. Carol Baraniuk argues that Orr's poem is a protest against the romantic image Burns sketches of rural life: "Orr seems implicitly to oppose the Scots Bard’s idyll, choosing rather to articulate the Ulster-Scots community’s experience of poverty, injustice and marginalisation" (2009).

D. Sibbald (2007) notes that Burns wrote his poem with a genteel urban audience in mind, as demonstrated by its dedication to Robert Aitken, an Ayr lawyer. Sibbald goes on to argue that in trying to please the high-class audience, Burns ends up posturing too much, as evidenced for instance by his choice of a traditionally English stanzaic form; he gets quite sentimental and tries to imitate other authors too much. Whether this is true or not is a matter for literary critics; however it can be seen that Burns' use of Scots in the poem is quite "thin"; the poem is largely intelligible to the English-speaking reader, with Scots words used to evoke a rural atmosphere. Indeed stanzas 13 through 17, which describe the Bible reading in the cottage, contain hardly any distinctive Scots terms at all. Sibbald notes that this is appropriate, as "the Scottish rustic of the period would in fact move into the language of the King James Bible on such occasions". If the poem was indeed intended for a high class, the choice for a "thin" Scots could be understood as a way of accommodating the audience, with Scots after all being seen as the language of the poor and rural.

That Orr's poem is a response to Burns' one is clear from his choice of a similar setting and main characters, the same poetic form (spenserian stanza), and a similar usage of "thin" Scots as compared to some of Orr's other poems. In "Donegore Hill" the use of distinctive Scots words is much more dense than in "The Irish Cottier's Death and Burial". He does not use English terms in the latter for things he indicates with Scots terms in the former; rather, he uses more formal or abstract terms in the latter for which he uses terms shared between Scots and English; look for instance at sentences such as "Thy grievances through time shall not be scorn'd", or "Deceiv'd by hope, they thought till now he'd mend". The language in "Donegore Hill" is less abstract or formal. While both poems contain a lot of imagery, "Death and Burial" takes a more explanative, interpretative tone whereas "Donegore Hill" seems to present the raw reality of conflict in harsh, slang-like terminology. Thus we find such phrases as "chiels wha grudg'd", "Some hade, like hens in byre-neuks", "lea the daft anes", "Hags, wha to henpeck didna spare". It is not clear whether Orr intended "The Cottier's Death and Burial" for a more genteel audience than "Donegore Hill" was intended for; rather, it seems he chose a more 'thin' Scots in this poem (a) because Burns chose a similar variety of language in "the Cotter's Saturday Night", and (b) to make the poem sound more respectful and moderate, as befitting to its subject matter: a funeral. The people in the poem, too, feel that Scots is not appropriate to the formality of the situation: they try in vain "to quat braid Scotch" (to stop speaking it) when the minister comes in (stanza 5).

Although the formality level of the variety of language in Orr's and Burns' poem is the same, some of the Scots words used differ between the two poems, which could be an indication of Orr self-consciously writing in Ulster Scots rather than Scots Scots. Where Burns talks of a neebor town, Orr uses nyb'rin town. Orr talks about a glaikit wean and Burns about expectant wee-things, though this may have been needed to keep the meter intact. Burns says his subjects spier (= pry) one another for their welfare, but those of Orr speer. Orr uses owre twice but Burns keeps to o'er. Orr uses the word freets (n.), which is included in Fenton's dictionary of Ulster-Scots (meaning superstitions), but not in the Online Scots Dictionary (Eaton, 2000). However, there are more similarities than differences; both authors use belyve, to gar, ben and bairns, aft, wha and frae among others.

The Funeral of Shelley, Louis Edouard Fournier, 1889. See Liverpool Museums website.

2 How successful was this text in reaching its audience?

James Orr published his poems in the Belfast Newsletter and the Northern Star, which indicates that his audience were liberal to radical readers. "The Irish Cottier's Death and Burial" was published in a posthumously published collection compiled by his friends (Ferguson 2008: 135). The group of Weaver Poets that Orr is commonly seen as a part of (Herbison 1996:4) never achieved quite as much fame as contemporary Scots, English or southern Irish counterparts, such as Burns, Allan Ramsay, Jonathan Swift or Samuel Johnson. Stephen Dornan (2005) theorises that this group has been caught in between two paradigms: they were not Scottish enough to be included in collections of Scottish poetry, but not Irish enough to be seen as part of the Irish canon. He says: "The anomalous and problematic position of Ulster Scots literature has tended to mean that it has been at best marginalised and often completely excluded from studies of Irish literary history." Ivan Herbison (1996) further suggests that the Weaver poets never became very succesful because they were (unjustly) viewed by contemporary critics as imitators of Burns.

Case studies: textual analysis

For the third and last chapter of the dissertation I'm going to analyse two sets of texts with plenty of help from secondary sources. The first set will be some poetry in Ulster Scots. I have not quite decided yet which poems exactly but I think I will read one or two Rhyming Weaver poems and a modern one, probably by James Fenton. The second set will be official translations of government documents into Ulster Scots. Dr John Kirk has written at least two articles with close readings of what he calls "Ullans" texts (with a somewhat unusual definition of "Ullans", namely that it is a constructed, inauthentic language based on Ulster Scots but not spoken by anyone). I'd like to discuss those articles and 're-read' the texts he analyses.

Where Ulster Scots poetry and literature belong to the few registers that have continued to be written throughout the history of the language, official translations of government documents into Ulster-Scots are a prime example of an attempt to forge a new register, or at least to write in a genre that the language has not since long been used for.

Still from a Shutterstock video of a researcher measuring an Eastern Spiny Softshell.

For all of the texts I will consider the following questions:

1(a) Why was this text created?
  (b) What motivations does the author have for his style choices? (Extent of distinctive Scots vocabulary and grammatical aspects; neologisms and other innovative language use; spelling; distinctive form; imagery.)
Analysis of individual texts may not be the most obvious choice for tracking language change; what can you really say about the language as a whole from its usage by some individuals? Indeed the results may not be generalised carelessly. Yet textual analysis does give an opportunity to take a closer look at the micro-dynamics of language use. Ulster Scots lends itself particularly well to this endeavour. As not much has been written or standardised, an author has to make choices about every aspect of a text including aspects that are very common-sense in the more dominant languages. The consideration of how "English" to make your text would be a tad absurd if you are writing in English. Through looking at the historical and political context of a text, its purpose, and what we know about the author, we may gain insight into why they made the choices that they made. This in turn will tell us something about what effect external factors can have upon language use.

Moreover, because not much has been written in Ulster Scots, every text that is written now may have a big impact upon the language and its speaker community. Not everyone who writes in English will have heard of Carol Ann Duffy, but it is likely that everyone who takes enough of an interest in Ulster Scots to be writing in it will know of James Fenton. The findings of textual analysis of Ulster Scots texts may therefore be reasonably fruitful in saying something about the direction of change in the language as a whole.

Still from a Shutterstock video of a woman looking through a microscope.

2 How successful was this text in reaching its audience?
Language innovations contained in the texts (innovative choices made by the authors) can have an impact on wider language use if many people look at them as an inspiring and/or authoritative source. Robert Burns'  work is a good example of a source that reached many people and inspired a good deal of them to try their own hand at writing in the Scots language. However there is a clear sentiment that if the language is "pushed too far" in a source it will alienate its speakers. Faced with a text written in a spelling they cannot read and archaic or uncommon words that they do not recognise, people may figure that they are not competent speakers of the language the text purports to be written in. A consideration of the success of a source is therefore necessary in asking what impact on the language as a whole it may have. To 'measure' the success, good indications of the work reaching a wide audience would be sales statistics, reviews, numbers of references or citations and reprints in collections and such. The reviews should also give a good impression of whether the work was positively or negatively received.

(Conclusion)
3(a) To what extent is the language used in the analysed sources a result of revival policy and efforts as described in c (is there anything you can say about that based on the findings)? 

  (b) What does this tell us about the result of language policy on the language as a whole?

Following the conclusions of chapter 1 and 2, we should see evidence both of language deterioration and influence of the language contact with English, and of language innovation to patch the gaps left by deterioration.