Cover not available
Part of
Unlocking the History of English: Pragmatics, prescriptivism and text types
Edited by Luisella Caon, Moragh S. Gordon and Thijs Porck
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 364] 2024
► pp. 225–249

“Quhen I am begun to write I really knou not what to say”

Inter- and intra-writer variation in the use of <quh‑> in Early Modern Scots

 | University of Edinburgh
It is currently unclear to what extent Older Scots features continued in correspondence during the early eighteenth century (Millar 2020: 100). To explore this, the digitised letters of politically-involved Scottish writers active during this time were compiled into a purpose-built corpus, and searched for the Scots feature <quh‑>. The focus was on three authors in particular who were selected for close-up analysis. Their correspondence was quantitatively analysed to determine the frequency of <quh‑> across author and word-type, which was then compared to the general dataset. Inter- and intra-writer variation was evaluated in relation to possible macrosocial influences. Results suggest that, contrary to earlier findings (Macqueen 1957; van Eyndhoven & Clark 2019), <quh‑> had not completely disappeared, but its persistence was largely conditioned by its use in abbreviations for highly frequent function words. The professional background of the author, however, is also shown to influence usage.
Keywords: eighteenth-century Scots, orthography, <quh‑>, abbreviation, identity-politics, lexical bundles
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Divergence and convergence in the history of Scots
    • 2.1Defining ‘Older’ Scots?
    • 2.2The variable <quh‑>
  • 3.Research questions
  • 4.Data and methods
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Use of <quh‑> across author
    • 5.2Professional background
    • 5.3Use of <quh‑> across lexical item
    • 5.4The role of abbreviation
    • 5.5The influence of topic
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 4 April 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.364.10van
References (72)
References
Aitken, A. J. 1979. Scottish speech: A historical view with special reference to the standard English of Scotland. In A. J. Aitken & T. McArthur (eds.), Languages of Scotland (The Association for Scottish Literary Studies Occasional Paper 4), 85–118. W & R Chambers.Google Scholar
1984. Scots and English in Scotland. In P. Trudgill (ed.), Language in the British Isles, 517–532. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
1985. A history of Scots. In M. Robinson (ed.), The Concise Scots Dictionary, ix–xvi. Aberdeen University Press.Google Scholar
1997. The pioneers of anglicised speech in Scotland: A second look. Scottish Language 16. 1–36.Google Scholar
Auer, A. 2015. Stylistic variation. In A. Auer, D. Schreier & R. J. Watts (eds.), Letter writing and language change, 133–155. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beal, J. 1997. Syntax and morphology. In C. Jones (ed.), The Edinburgh history of the Scots language, 335–377. Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Binongo, J. N. G. 2003. Who wrote the 15th book of Oz? An application of multivariate analysis to authorship attribution. CHANCE 16(2). 9–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bugaj, J. 2004. Middle Scots as an emerging standard and why it did not make it. Scottish Language 23. 19–34.Google Scholar
2003. Mechanisms of change in grammaticization: The role of frequency. In B. D. Joseph & R. D. Janda (eds.), The handbook of historical linguistics, 602–623. Blackwell Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J. & S. Thompson. 1997. Three frequency effects in syntax. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General session and parasession on pragmatics and grammatical structure, 378–388. Berkley Linguistics Society. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chung, C. & J. W. Pennebaker. 2007. The psychological functions of function words. Social Communication 1. 343–359.Google Scholar
Clarke, T. 2004. Monro, Alexander (d. 1698), Episcopalian clergyman. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. [URL]
Conde-Silvestre, J. C. & J. M. Hernández-Campoy. 2004. A sociolinguistic approach to the diffusion of chancery written practices in late fifteenth century private correspondence. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 105(2). 133–152.Google Scholar
Corbett, J., J. D. McClure & J. Stuart-Smith. 2003. The Edinburgh companion to Scots. Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Cruickshank, J. 2012. The emergence of Scottish Standard English and the role of the Second Earl of Fife. Scottish Language 31. 111–127.Google Scholar
Devitt, A. J. 1989. Standardizing written English: Diffusion in the case of Scotland, 1520–1659. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dossena, M. 1997. Attitudes to Scots in Burns’ correspondence. Linguistica e Filologia 4. 91–103.Google Scholar
2002. A strong Scots accent of the mind: the pragmatic value of code-switching between English and Scots in private correspondence: A historical overview. Linguistica e Filologia 14. 103–127.Google Scholar
2005. Scotticisms in grammar and vocabulary: ‘Like runes upon a standin’ stane’? John Donald.Google Scholar
Drewnowski, A. & A. F. Healy. 1977. Detection errors onthe andand: Evidence for reading units larger than the word. Memory & Cognition 5(6). 636–647. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fitzmaurice, S. 2000. Coalitions and the investigation of social influence in linguistic history. European Journal of English Studies 4(3). 265–276. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fromont, R. & J. Hay. 2008. LaBB-CAT (formerly ONZE Miner). Corpora 3(2). 173–193. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gordon, M. 2020. Bristol 〈th〉, 〈Ϸ〉 and 〈y〉: The North-South divide revisited, 1400–1700. In L. Wright, S. M. Fitzmaurice, B. Kortmann & E. C. Traugott (eds.). The multilingual origins of Standard English (Topics in English Linguistics 107), 191–214. De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Görlach, M. 1996. And is it English? English World-Wide 17(2). 153–174. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hernández-Campoy, J. M. & T. García-Vidal. 2018a. Persona management and identity projection in English medieval society: Evidence from John Paston II. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 4(1). 33–63. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hernández-Campoy, J. M. & T. García-Vidal. 2018b. Style-shifting and accommodative competence in Late Middle English written correspondence: Putting audience design to the test of time. Folia Linguistica Historica 39(2). 383–420. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Honkapohja, A. & A. Liira. 2020. Abbreviations and standardisation in the Polychronicon: Latin to English and manuscript to print. In L. Wright, S. M. Fitzmaurice, B. Kortmann & E. C. Traugott (eds.), The multilingual origins of Standard English (Topics in English Linguistics 107), 269–316. Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Johnston, P. 1997. Older Scots phonology and its regional variation. In C. Jones (ed.), The Edinburgh history of the Scots language, 47–111. Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jones, C. 1995. A language suppressed: The pronunciation of the Scots language in the 18th century. John Donald.Google Scholar
Kestemont, M. 2014. Function words in authorship attribution. From black magic to theory? In Proceedings of the 3rd workshop on computational linguistics for literature, 59–66. Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kniezsa, V. 1997. The origins of Scots orthography. In C. Jones (ed.), The Edinburgh history of Scots, 24–46. Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kopaczyk, J. 2011. A V or not a V? Transcribing abbreviations in seventeen MSS of the ‘Man of Law’s Tale’. In J. Thaisen & H. Rutkowska (eds.), Scribes, printers, and the accidentals of their texts (Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 33), 91–106. Peter Lang.Google Scholar
2012. Communication gaps in seventeenth-century Britain: Explaining legal Scots to English practitioners. In B. Kryk-Kastovsky (ed.), Intercultural miscommunication past and present, 217–243. Peter Lang.Google Scholar
2013a. The legal language of Scottish burghs: Standardization and lexical bundles (1380–1560). Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013b. Rethinking the traditional periodisation of the Scots language. In J. Cruickshank & R. M. Millar (eds.), After the storm: Papers from the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster triennial meeting, Aberdeen 2012, 233–260. Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ireland.Google Scholar
Laing, M. & R. Lass. 2019. Old and Middle English spellings for OE hw-, with special reference to the ‘qu-’ type: In celebration of LAEME, (e)LALME, LAOS and CoNE. In R. Alcorn, J. Kopaczyk & B. Molineaux (eds.), Historical dialectology in the digital age, 91–112. Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Langacker, R. 1987. Foundations of cognitive grammar. Volume 1: Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Lass, R. & M. Laing. 2016. Q is for what, when, where? The ‘q’ spellings for OE hw-. Folia Linguistica Historica 67. 61–110. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Macqueen, L. E. C. 1957. The last stages of the older literary language of Scotland: A study of the surviving Scottish elements in Scottish prose, 1700–1750, especially of the records, national and local [unpublished doctoral dissertation]. University of Edinburgh.
MacQueen, L. E. C. 1983. English was to them a foreign tongue. Scottish Language 2. 49–51.Google Scholar
McClure, J. D. 1994. English in Scotland. In R. Burchfield (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language. Volume 5: English in Britain and overseas: Origins and development, 21–93. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Meurman-Solin, A. 1989. The Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots. In J. D. McClure & M. R. G. Spiller (eds.), Essays on the language and literature of medieval and Renaissance Scotland (Proceedings of the Bryght Lantemis Conference), 451–458. Aberdeen University Press.Google Scholar
Meurman-Solin, A. 1997. Differentiation and standardisation in Early Scots. In C. Jones (ed.), The Edinburgh history of the Scots language, 3–23. Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Millar, R. M. 2020. A sociolinguistic history of Scotland. Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mullan, D. G. 2008. Protestant piety in Early-Modern Scotland: Letters, lives and covenants, 1650–1712 (Fifth Series, vol. 15). Scottish History Society.Google Scholar
Murison, D. 1964. The Scots Tongue – The Folk-Speech. Folklore 75(1). 37–47.Google Scholar
1979. The historical background. In A. Aitken & T. McArthur (eds.), Languages of Scotland (The Association for Scottish Literary Studies Occasional Paper 4), 1–13. W&R Chambers.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, T. 2000. Mobility, social networks and language change in Early Modern England. European Journal of English Studies 4(3). 253–264. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nevalainen, T. & H. Raumolin-Brunberg. 1989. A corpus of Early Modern Standard English in a socio-historical perspective. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 90(1). 67–110.Google Scholar
R Core Team. 2020. R: A language and environment for statistical computing (Version 4.0.2). R Core Team. [URL]
Raffe, A. 2012. The culture of controversy: Religious arguments in Scotland, 1660–1714 (Studies in Modern British Religious History 28). Boydell & Brewer.Google Scholar
Romaine, S. 1982. The history of the relative clause/markers in English with special reference to Middle Scots. In S. Romaine (ed.), Socio-historical linguistics: Its status and methodology, 53–80. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schindler, R. M. 1978. The effect of prose context on visual search for letters. Memory & Cognition 6(2). 124–130. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schmid, H. J. 2015. A blueprint of the entrenchment-and-conventionalization model. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 3(1). 3–26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2020. The dynamics of the linguistic system: Usage, conventionalization and entrenchment. Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scott-Moncrieff, W. G. 1889. Nimmo’s narrative 1654–1700: Written for his own satisfaction to keep in some remembrance the Lord’s way dealing and kindness towards him 1654–1709 (First Series, vol. 6). Scottish History Society.Google Scholar
Sharp, L. W. 1937. Early letters of Robert Wodrow, 1698–1709 (Third Series, vol. 24). Scottish History Society.Google Scholar
Smith, J. J. 1996. Ear-rhyme, eye-rhyme and traditional rhyme: English and Scots in Robert Burns’ Brigs of Ayr. Glasgow Review 4. 74–85.Google Scholar
Smith, J. 2000. Standard language in Early Middle English? In I. Taavitsainen, T. Nevalainen, P. Pahta & M. Rissanen (eds.), Placing Middle English in context, 125–139. Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stamatatos, E. 2009. A survey of modern authorship attribution methods. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60(3). 538–556. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Szechi, D. 1989. Letters of George Lockhart of Carnwath 1698–1732 (Fifth Series, vol. 2). Scottish History Society.Google Scholar
Szechi, D. 2011. Lockhart, George, of Carnwath (1681?–1731), Jacobite politician and memoirist. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. [URL]
Templeton, J. M. 1973. Scots: An outline history. In A. J. Aitken (ed.), Lowland Scots: Papers presented to an Edinburgh Conference (1975), 4–19. Association for Scottish Literary Studies.Google Scholar
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. 2005. Of social networks and linguistic influence: The language of Robert Lowth and his correspondents. In J. C. Conde-Silvestre & J. M. Hernández-Campoy (eds.), Sociolinguistics and the history of English: Perspectives and problems, 135–157. Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de publicaciones.Google Scholar
Van Eyndhoven, S. & L. Clark. 2019. The 〈quh-〉 – 〈wh-〉 switch: An empirical account of the anglicisation of a Scots variant in Scotland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. English Language and Linguistics 24(1). 211–236. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vibeke, J. 2012. The consonantal element (th) in some Late Middle English Yorkshire texts. In J. Tyrkkӧ, M. Kilpiӧ, T. Nevalainen & M. Rissanen (eds.), Outposts of historical corpus linguistics: From the Helsinki Corpus to a proliferation of resources (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 10). Varieng. [URL]
Whatley, C. A. 2006. The Scots and the Union. Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008. The issues facing Scotland in 1707. In S. J. Brown & C. A. Whatley (eds.), The Union of 1707: New dimensions, 1–30. Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wickham, H. 2016. ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis. Springer-Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yeoman, L. A. 2004. Wodrow, Robert (1679–1734), ecclesiastical historian. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. [URL]
Young, J. R. 2004. Hay, John, second marquess of Tweeddale (1645–1713), politician. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. [URL]