fit like chiels an' quines?

[McKenzie]

(how are you doing boys and girls...pron for the nouns - cheels kwines)

I was brought up to speak broad Scots which is a language in its own right, but business convention forces me to use "BBC Scots". There are several regional dialects (mine is "Doric") and people from one part of Scotland cannot always understand one another when they use their native dialects. For example, if I said to a Sassenach, or Lowlander, "ah'm jist scunnered wi' yon glaiket gowk Blair, jist a weel-riggit nyaff fa's haverin' awa'", they'd think I was speaking Swahili. I'll let you all have some fun trying to translate that. I could post some Gaelic, to add to the fun, but that cannot be translated by Babelfish, or any of the other online translation services, nor can broad Scots dialect.

As an aside, the Scots for "dust" is "stoor" and a "sooker" is a "sucker". Scandinavians call a vacuum cleaner a "stoorsooker"

[ZombieNixon]

1. Let's give it a shot.

"I'm just (past participle of verb, probably indicating disgust or bafflement) with that (epithets) Blair, just a ??? ??? ??? jabbering on."

I can speak Irish Gaelic, not Scots Gaelic, but I could probably translate it with some success, since they're quite closely related.

On the other hand, if you comapre Welsh to Gaelic, it's very difficult to understand how they could possibly be related, since they look and sound so dramatically different. It has been said that Gaelic is essentially Welsh cunningly disguised as gibberish to fool the English.

[McKenzie]

2. trans...

"I'm just fed up with that idiotic jerk Blair. He is just a well dressed twerp who is foaming at the mouth."

You are right about the relationship between Irish and Scots Gaelic; they have a commonality of root words. Difference is Irish Gaelic is pronounced "Gaylic" whereas Scots Gaelic is pronounced "Gallic".

Ciamar a tha sibh? Slainthe!

[LynzM]

3. Slainthe at least I have seen before!

I'd love to hear what this actually sounds like, it's neat. I don't have any real-life experience with it, though, just the dumbed-down fiction stuff I've read before.

It's interesting to me that the German word for vaccuum cleaner is Staubsauger (stauben=to raise dust, saugen=to draw, to suck), literally, a dust-raising sucker! But it's similar enough, I wonder what other similarities exist?

[ZombieNixon]

4. Sounds more or less like

"Kimmar aha sheev? Slanch!" Thing is, in Gaelic, you have to palatalize all your consonants before "e" or "i," so t/d often assimilate into ch/j (at least in Irish), also, putting H after consonants drastically alters the pronuniciation in unconventional ways (mh = w/v, fh is silent).

[McKenzie]

5. damned good pronunciation there

it means "how are you? cheers!"

Scots Gaelic is a really difficult language to learn and there are regional variations. I speak some but not a great deal.

[ZombieNixon]

7. Yeah, I knew

"tha" and "sibh" and of course "slainthe," so I would have guessed at that. I wasn't familiar with "ciamar," more with the Irish "conas."

[McKenzie]

6. I speak German although I missed that one.

Other Germanic crossovers in Scots that come to mind immediately are schwester and bruder. There are probably many, many more.

There is definitely a commonality of root words between German and Scots (not Gaelic though). Danish and Norwegian influences are clear in Orkney and Shetland. There is a strong French influence in Scots too, which is hardly surprising, given that the first King, of what is now Scotland, was brought up in the French court; David I (1124-53). Latin also influences Scots. For example, our early towns were called, and still are called, "burghs", after the Latin "burgus". The latter means "fortified enclosure" although very few Scottish towns were walled for defensive reasons. They were enclosed but only as a customs/taxation device.

regards

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. Is Scots Gaelic still spoken anywhere?

Is there any kind of a revival movement?

I remember reading years ago about how it was all the rage among Dublin yuppies to send their children to Irish-language schools. Sure enough, a few weeks later, I was having dinner at an Irish emigre pub/restaurant in St. Paul, Minnesota, and in walked a family speaking a foreign language. I'm pretty good at identifying languages, but this was one I'd never heard.

When the waiter came to take their order, they switched to English, revealing strong Irish accents. When he left, they switched back to their utterly opaque Gaelic conversation.

[ZombieNixon]

9. Scots Gaelic...

Scottish Gaelic is spoken by about 60,000 people in Scotland (Alba), mainly in the Highlands (a' Ghaidhealtachd) and in the Western Isles (Na h-Eileanan an Iar), but also in Glasgow (Glaschu), Edinburgh (Dùn Eideann) and Inverness (Inbhir Nis). There are also small Gaelic-speaking communities in Canada, particularly in Nova Scotia (Alba Nuadh) and on Cape Breton Island (Eilean Cheap Breatainn). Other speakers can be found in Australia (Astràilia), New Zealand and the USA (Na Stàitean Aonaichte).

(from http://www.omniglot.com/writing/gaelic.htm)

Dunno much about revivial movements, tho'. Irish Gaelic has some significant work done on revival. That's about all I know.

[marions ghost]

10. this might be too historical a question, but

am interested in the dialect spoken around Perthshire in the 14-15th centuries...any clues?