When antiquarians looked at the thistle – Late Modern views of Scotland's linguistic heritage

The lively Ossian debate certainly influenced the controversy on the Celtic or Germanic roots of Scots; however, Scottish Teutonism was not exempt from political overtones: Sweet (2004: 189) quotes the words with which, in 1722, Edmund Gibson dedicated the revised edition of his translation of William Camden's Britannia to George I:

Not only our Histories, but our Language, our Laws, our Customs, our Names of Persons and names of Places, do all abundantly testify, that the greatest part of your Majesty's Subjects here, are of SAXON Original. And if we enquire from where our Saxon Ancestors came, we shall find, that it was from your Majesty's Dominions in Germany.

A few years after the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, a link was established between the mutual Saxon origins of Britain's language, law, customs, names and place names – and the House of Hanover.

In addition, the negative influence of French was stressed whenever the Saxon roots of English were highlighted. Alexander Geddes did not believe that "that the language of the Picts was a Gothic dialect," but a Celtic one; as for the "Saxon dialect" of Scotland, this had been imported from England (1792: 410), but its spelling was closer to the original one, because it had not "adopted a very erroneous orthography" from modern French (1792: 428). Geddes concluded recommending the adoption of a "Scoto-Saxon Lexicon" in English literature; to obtain this, however, it would be necessary to collect "the old terms as soon as possible, and from the mouths of the oldest inhabitants. […] no word should be omitted, however barbarous it might appear; no phrase rejected, howsoever vulgar."⁶ James Adams' views, though based on Geddes' Dissertation, were (as we saw) even more radical; as for Chalmers, who described Sir David Lyndsay's language as "better Saxon but worse English, than the language of England" (1806: I/147), he dubbed French "that intruding tongue" (1806: III/227).

The search for 'pure Saxon' persisted throughout the nineteenth century (see Dury 1992). James Paterson, whose Origin of the Scots and the Scottish Language argued in favour of Pictish as the original "Scottish dialect" (1855: 109), linked "Dano-Saxon", i.e. "the northern Saxon of England", to Icelandic, "which is the elder branch of the Teutonic, and, of course, the senior of the Anglo-Saxon" (1855: 119). Paterson, who also referred to Geddes' Dissertation, thus acknowledged the Scandinavian influence on Scots, but he also claimed that Scots was not "wholly indebted to the Gothic […] the great body of the people, ancient Picts and Britons, being Celtic" (1855: 135).

As late as 1888, when Charles Mackay published A Dictionary of Lowland Scotch with an introductory chapter on the poetry, humour, and literary history of the Scottish language and an appendix of Scottish Proverbs, emphasis was still placed on the closer connection of Scots with the older 'Anglo-Teutonic' vocabulary described as obsolete in English, but still fully comprehensible in Scotland (1888: xii).

Unfortunately, the letter to which Stevenson responded in 1894 is untraced, but his response shows that the debate was still of interest as the new century approached. Although Scots was stigmatized in 'polite' usage, its literary value and its antiquity gave it a significant aura of respectability – maybe a somewhat contradictory attitude, but certainly one that could and did survive into our own times.

Marina Dossena
Professor of English Language
University of Bergamo
marina.dossena @ unibg.it

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⁶ This is clearly a very modern approach to dialectology, recommending as it does unbiased field work.

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