Wee Giftie Fur Auntblabby

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'tis a Scots tae Sassenach translator, Laddie. Hae fin! Haes an app, tae

(Didnae wantae hijack th' ither threadie)

Burr-in-a-Box

Ah dinnae think he kens aboot yer gift.

He likelie hasn't seen this thread yit.

Och, 'twill keep. Glad ye fun it, och aye .

Seriously, can you imagine the entire board being posted in Lowland Scots? Bit o' a headache?

Aye. Twood be a headache. ( I winged that without going to the translater).

Some folks who post here are from non English speaking countries. Their posts range from better English than the native born WPers to folks who post in rather broken English. But even the later do better than I could do in any Foreign language. So now you know how they all feel.

I saw there's a section of the board for posting in other languages, never looked in on it. Alex (board founder) grew up outside the US too, didn't he.

Could be. He now lives in Jefferson's hometown of Charottesville Va., but he might be a DC area military brat, or a D.C. area State Dept/foreign service brat, or even both (like many folks I grew up with here in the DC area).

I visit the foreign language area on WP once in a while. Am thinking of trying to post about autism in my highschool Spanish. See if I can do it as well as the foreigners post in English here. Am right now involved in a "movie quotes in Spanish" game with a couple folks in that subforum.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 01 Dec 2017, 10:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Cool. I enrolled in first semester Spanish at the local CC for the Fall term... but... had to drop the class. Wasn't online at home yet (except for a smartphone), catalog said they used their online teaching database starting in the second term, but when I visited the campus a day before classes began, the instructor had changed his mind and everything was in the database for this class as well.

Which I couldn't access from home. So I dropped the course. Got my cable wi-fi 2 weeks later. Had my ProBook, just couldn't use it.

Will try enrolling again in the Spring. Hopefully the textbook/CDs won't change, since I kept it/them.

Faodaidh Google Translate eadar-theangachadh gu Gàidhlig na h-Alba, ach chan eil mi a 'faicinn rud sam bith airson talamh ìosal na h-Alba.

By the way, when Anders Breivik killed all those people in Norway on July 11, 2011, I posted in another place that the maximum sentence was 21 years in Norway. I was already familiar with that from regularly reading the English language portion of a Norwegian news website.

There was many objections to that by those who thought he would either get life or the death penalty. One or two asked for citations which I could not provide. One of them helpfully posted a link to the Norwegian penal code which was, of course, in Norwegian.

So I went through and found the portions of the penal code that applied. In my response, I included a link to those sections of the code, still in Norwegian, and my explanation in English of what was in those sections and why they applied.

The response from the guy who posted the link was something like, "That didn't go as I expected."

What he didn't realize was that I was using Google Translate in order to read the statutes. He had to have thought that I could read Norwegian after that.

By the way, he got 21 years. However, if he is thought to still be a threat close to the end of those 21 years, the prosecutors may appear in court and recommend that his sentence be extended 5 years and they can keep doing so as long as necessary.

Don't know what you're saying but its probably in the actual Scottish language which is a Celtic language closely related to Irish. And is only spoken in the islands, and in the highlands of Scotland.

The (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) translator that she is linking to in the OP is actaully for "Scots" which is a centuries old dialect of Anglo Saxon English- that spoken in the lowland mainland "civilized" parts of Scotland including the capital of Edinburgh. Actually its probably not even that. Its for the Scottish dialect of English which is derived from Scots, and has nothing to do with actual Celtic Scottish.

The kings of Middle Ages Scotland were more concerned with the Nation, then with national-ism (the way that heads of state tend to be obsessed with today), and happily allowed the native Celtic language of Scotland to die out in the civilized parts of Scotland by encouraging merchants and folks with skills to migrate in from Anglo Saxon England to populate Scotland and to build it up. The result was that in the lowlands of Scotland the population developed a parallel kind of Germanic Anglosaxon English to that of England, and lost all hint of the Gaelic language of their Celtic ancestors. But nonetheless the Scotland version of Anglosaxon English is quite distinct.

That is "Scots" (and not actual "Scottish").

The stereotype Hollywood "Scottish accent" one thinks of that comics do is how Scots speakers sound when trying to speak standard English . In contrast when folks from the highlands and the Islands of Scotland whose native tongue is the actual even more ancient Gaelic/Celtic language of Scotland (actual "Scottish") try to speak English they have a gentle melodic brogue that's very similar to an Irish brogue, and very different from whats thought of as "a Scottish accent".

Sorry. The British Isles are complicated! Lol!

^^^^ Oooooh, 'tis Gaelic!

Kokopelli, you reminded me of one of my favorite novels - The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey - the protagonist ends up in the Highlands and the Hebrides and there's a bit about how Gaelic is an ancient tongue and hasn't incorporated technical English, so conversations end up like "blah blah bicycle blah blah blah gearshift blah blah blah S-bend blah blah blah guardrail blah blah ambulance blah blah blah hospital blah blah fractured vertebra blah blah body cast blah blah traction."

I have the paperback still, but couldn't find the passage, so this is as close a rendering as I can provide from memory.

Thank you, you brought back some excellent memories - it's because of that novel that I visited the Hebrides a few years later and they were beautiful! (If you like glacial landscapes and watching weather from hundreds of miles away and single-track roads and way more sheep than people.)

Have you every seen a tv show called Hamish MacBeth? How would you characterize his accent?

I've wanted to visit Scotland but never have. The Hebrides would be a good destination. I've read a bit about Colonsay in the past and so that would probably be my first choice if nobody with better knowledge helped me find a better place to start. Just go to Oban and take the ferry to Colonsay.

I've also, on occasion, used Google Maps street view to look at the sights of Oban. I don't remember if Google Maps street view had anything on Colonsay.

The reason I looked at Colonsay was after watching a musical that supposedly had ties to Colonsay even though it was filmed on a different island in the Hebrides.

I did Harris and Lewis, from Stornoway. Highlight being the standing stones of Callanish, and hailbows. Hail squalls would sweep in off the North Atlantic and at the right time of day they created huge, diffuse rainbows. And the full Scottish breakfast, which is just sinful.

Hope you manage to make the trip you'd like

here are the standing stones, and if I'm not mistaken, that's a hailbow even. (edit in: well, it was. Been censored for some reason. Let's try again.)

have heard of the "Stonehenge of the North" on a Scottish island. That must be the place.

Sounds like the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico and Northern Arizona!