Nationalism: Scottish + other "oppressed" ones

What happened to culture?

Languages and cultures deserve to survive or at least to be recorded because they are beautiful.

If English does take over does that mean we'll say fuck MArx etc as they didn't write in English?

I hate those pseudorevivalists as much as anyone but the idea of a grassroots effort to preserve a language although it probably will fail is still a good idea.

If people were more romantic about these things then once the revolution has come we could occupy ourselves with exploring languages and cultures.

Indeed. I was making precisely that point. In Israel no lingua franca existed amongst divergent immigrant communities, apart from the 2000 year dead ecclesiastical language. It won out. In Ireland almost everyone spoke English and so imposing Gaelic as a standard when few people actually spoke it had next to fuckall chance of achieving anything, just as Gaelic in Scotland has next to fuckall chance of being brought back to even 1900 levels (200,000+ speakers and spoken in Perth for fuck sake. So very sad.) by massive investment from the state. I don't actually think it'll die tho, maybe come much closer to the already close final end, but I don't think it will actually die.

As regards the dialects and inflexions, while that may be sad it has happened with English and it is still possible to speak and right trully artfully. Equally new dialects will emerge within the fullness of time.

The West Coast is a grim place really on so many levels. There's a totally totally non-contiguous accent and dialect, a peculiar lack of any historicity of how we might have arrived at now and shitload of sectarian prolefeed which people mistake for culture. I spend a great deal of my mawkish moments pining for the North East where life is properly Calvinist, the people have the classic drumbeat timbre in their speech and its not uncommon to hear someone actually speaking a bit of Scots unselfconsciously.

As it happens I think it is better to base the revival of a langauge on an already existing dialect (so with Scots it would seem obvious that any future bairns brocht up spikkin the leid would hiv tae caa the craic wi aa their fitlikes and that, ken. Nae a bad thing mind.).

i totally agree, and so they have survived & been recorded for thousands of years, nationalism (and it's bastard child the nation) as a a political principle has been around for a couple of hundred years at the most, so i fail to see how you have to connect the survive of language & culture to nationalism and paint it as the only way of achieving this, how did it manage for the thousands of years before nationalism was even a twinkle in the eyes of the elites?

that would be one useful by-product i suppose

and therein lies the rub, how on earth is any sort of "revolution" going to come whilst everyone is occupying (and subordinating) themselves in cross class allliances and are busy building nations which will invariably lead to working class kids going to war against other working class kids in the name of the nation

While I agree with you wrt language. it is quite mistaken to see nationalism as a new thing. You're confusing nationalism with the nation state. The nation state has been said (and I vehemently disagree) to be a relatively historically recent concept. nationalism has been around for millenia. There are nationalistic statements in documents from the bible and Hebrew scriptures to ancient Greek legends.

what is the primary aim of nationalism?

to obtain a state to wrap around the nation

ergo the concept of the nation and the concrete reality of a state, both of which have only been around for a couple of hundred years, therefore how can nationalism precede what it is trying to achieve

i don't doubt the existence of proto-national groupings, or pre-national cultural collective communities, but they weren't nationalist as the nation didn't exist then, or certainly not in a form that can be compared with modern nations today (mass communication, common language, customs, common rigths & duties for all, clearly demarcated territory etc etc). in those days culture was used to differentiate people in an area, between the high classes who spoke latin & greek and what have you, and the yokels who spoke all manner of different local dialects, it's only been in the last 200 years that culture has started to be used as a "unifying" thing rather than a divisive thing, and the reason for that was for the elite to deliver an educated, compliant workforce, who could all understand each other and cope with things like division of labour, to early capitalism

so some french nationalist for example who thinks they are holding true to some idea of the french nation from 1600 years ago when clovis became a christain king, is deluded, france didn't exist outside paris until two hundred years ago at the most

to project a common link between these two things is pointless, there are some similarities in terms of the dominant ethnic groupings at the time, but there's a dam sight more differences

I think you're wrong on your generalisation Oisleep. You're wrong on the tolling gang thread on the same subject and you're wrong here. This idea smacks of nineteenth century wanky sociology. According to a Marxist pal of mines the idea of socialism could only exist when the mass press arrived, because before that no-one could theorize the totality of society, and understand that the enemy wasn't so much the local lord bu the whole system. He thinks the peasants revolt in england so disparate groups of peasants rebeling against what they parceived parochial as their own local tyrannies. Now to me this is so much bullshit. That because the construct 'the nation', the 'vox populi' etc. haven't been reified as a social construct then ergo they do not exist... That is so much nonsense. I've told him it's nonsense, and I'll tell you its nonsense. Your position differs little from his, and to take a perfect example of why you're both wrong how was ancient Rome not what you would term 'a modern nation-state'? To my mind it was exactly a nation state. It was technologically similar to any kingdom in Europe in the 16th/17th century (with the exception of musketry), and socially similar to any empire in the 19th.

What I object to is that this idea that the nation state is something new really smacks of Engels. It's Engels to the max.

Primitives -> Theocratic Despotisms -> Feudal Kingdoms -> Huzzah! The Nation State.

It's sounds so much like fucking historical materialism dressed up in crude disguise, with its view of a linear development in history. A view that is isn't backed up by even a cursory glance back in time. Next you'll be telling me that the bourgeoisie are the modern descendents of the 'middle classes' who overthrew the aristocracy.

i'll tell you, i have no idea what u just said

you've a place for one, and i've a place for other

For a start, I should say that I despise nationalism and any romantic idea of national culture altogether. I'm also fairly fundamentally opposed to the Irish language in its political sense and really think that attempts to revive it are both doomed and inherently ridiculous - language being a tool for communication after all

However, I feel that the debate here is, as usual, somewhat simplistic and sloganeering.

For example, national oppression and imperialism exist and they're not nice. If the goverment in Westminster decided tomorrow that all education was going to be through Chinese and only those who spoke Chinese would be eligible for public sector jobs, with the best jobs reserved for those with Chinese 'blood lines' - however that was to be defined - I'm sure you'd all oppose it rather forcefully. Add in a ban on pubs, the transformation of all football pitches into grounds for some bizzare feudal chinese recreation of the upper classes and so on and you'd probably be moved to take up arms. Indeed if you weren't you'd be more worm than homo-sapien. On the other hand if this happened on the other side of the world in a place that you knew little about, I'm sure that many of ye would denounce those people who opposed it as 'nationalist' fuckwits or something similar.

This example isn't as ludicrious as it sounds, since this type of thing was a reality until very recently in most of Africa for example (and still is within every modern African nation state that I can think of bar Somalia). It still goes on in many other corners of the world where typically artificial nations of recent vintage impose themselves in just such a manner.

This, to me, is what is meant by national oppression and is why national liberation movements have such paradoxical strength in countries where there really was no existing concept of a nation. Not that this is any reason to support the political goals of national liberation movements, but when it comes down to somebody forcing me to speak a certain language and excluding me from employment on the basis of the language I speak or the games that I play or any other such thing, I know which side I'm on.

There is also a slightly subtler argument regarding imperialism and the extraction of resources by a ruling class which is not resident in an area and hence has no interest whatsoever in maintaining its infrastructure beyond that which is required to extract the resources. In this sense it really does make a difference if the ruling class is local or based in a foreign imperialist country. If anybody doubts this, they should take a trip to the central african rainforest region where the only infrastructure of note is a few mines and the light aircraft strips and mercenary armies that service them.

In summary, it is necessary to look beyond the slogans about nationalism in order to understand the dynamics of many movements of national liberation. If you don't you end up taking a position against somebody who might quibble with the imposition of chinese nationalism on England, for example.

Oh - it was different in so many ways from the modern concept of a nation state that it's hard to know where to begin. For a start, there was really no concept of the nation - Rome assimilated enormous areas with disparate peoples with utterly different traditions and so on. Once you were a citizen, there was no concept of blood lines or national traditions and so on. For example, historians find it very difficult to work out the race, skin colour, ethnic origin or mother tongue of many emporers. Why? Because these weren't the sort of things that Romans generally thought worthy of mention - it just didn't matter to them. It's like a future society trying desperately to work out the length of our prime ministers' toe nails to fit them into some funny taxonomy that was crucial to them but is meaningless to us.

Nation states are generally very modern inventions which still haven't won any type of legitimacy in much of the world. Ask a fulani!

I don't think I did suggest that nationalism was the way to preserve languages. Bourgeoisie nationalism usually attacks local dialects and languages, France and Scotland are prime examples of this. It wasn't until the fourth republic that French diversity of languages was wiped out, so its barely out of living memory.

The primary aim of nationalism is to support a state by creating an 'outside' that is threatening/inferior and must be resisted etc. Nationalism is a method of persuading people to die for the state

re your example: France has been a nation for a fairly long time, I've read c12th texts that try to create a sense of french nationhood to support the french king's eforts to expand out of northern France which he eventually did. As Nick pointed out nationalism exists in a lot of texts going back pretty much as far as you want.

Rome had hereditary membership of classes, and it did have nationalism, despite its generally good record of assimilating conquered territory.

Yeah, but even in Scotland nationalism falls down Nick, clans in Highland Scotland were loyal to their individual chiefs as they saw them as kings, and only fought for Scotland when persuaded to by those chiefs. The notion of a Scottish Nation only existed in the eyes of the Scottish kings and other nobles, people were loyal to their locality rather than a notion of Scottishness. Especially since Scotland is divided between Gaelic and Scots. Nations are created by states and are entirely artificial and don't arise through popular sentiment

What languages did the Scots speak before English, apart forn Gaelic. Is it the same Gaelic spoken in Ireland?

They spoke Welsh in the south, and Pictish everywhere else, which was related to Welsh. Gaelic settlers came from Ireland originally and settled in Argyll, and present day Gaelic is still related to Irish, most closely to Donegal Irish, as you go further south in Ireland the differences increase.

Some people say that Scots is a language distinct from English too, just sharing the same roots.

definitely not. It's got it's own vocabulary and grammar. Like the way Norwegian and swedish are similar.

That was troll Knightrose. John isn't thick. You took the bait.

[altho in a lot of senses I'm glad you did coz I would have felt pidgeonholed into writing a long rant making references to verb concords, syntactical differences, a vastly different lexicon (including different pronouns and so on) and half a dozen modal verbs or so with absolutely no cognate in English.]

why?

Also important to bear in mind that the Anglian tongue imported to Scotland in the 12th century developed separately from the language that was spoken in the South of England (largely Saxon) from the start. There was a great deal of crossover, of course, but the development from that point in the two poles sometimes took different routes. For example a good deal of the Scots borrowings from French took place at a rather later date than the French borrowings into English, and indeed there are many French origin words in both languages which were not borrowed in the other language, or which had become anachronistic by the time they were borrowed into the other language. Equally Scots borrowed from Dutch and other languages which English largely didn't.

The result is that dependent on what you are trying to say sometimes sentences can appear entirely the same as what you'd expect in English (with some phonetic differences) or they can be much more divergent.

For example:-

I had better leave. [Eng.}

A'll better awa [Scots]

I must go [Eng.]

A hae/hiv tae gae/ging [Scots]

I absolutely must leave [Eng]

A maun awa [Scots]

i think the king james bible sealed the fate of the scottish language, the decision not to have a bible translated into scottish but to have the common king james one for both kingdoms, meant english was given a fixity that scottish never got

I figured he was joshing, as they say. But I wanted to make the point. Doesn't Scots have as much right to survive as gaelic? Or is it less romantic?

Yes. This is particularly important given given that throughout history Scotland often teetored on the brink of becoming a Calvinist theocracy.

It must really have had a profound effect, and caused immense psychological damage to see the founding text of the religious institutions of the kingdom (those institutions the people valued most and had fought for so hard) be written solely in English.

The pyschological subtext (bearing in mind that this is at the point when the English and Scots languages were probably at their most historically divergent) is very clear:

'God speaks English.'

Nonetheless the language continued as the everday demotic of the people of the whole of the lowlands (irrespective of class) until the 19th century, and of the whole of the working class of the lowlands until long into the twentieth century.

The really crucial time of change for the language (outside of Glasgow where it was probably dead by the end of the 20s) was when my gran was my age (she's now in her early 80s). She recalls getting on trams in Dundee and almost everyone speaking Scots (as in full-on echt Scots, not 'urban Scots'). Of course she tried not to at the time coz she was a secretary (doncherknow) and not some proley jute-mill worker. In other words throughout the 30s and 40s the middle classes and labour aristocracy in the towns and cities were ditching Scots in favour of kind of creole (if you like) of Scots and English (of the sort 'it's right bonnie theday(today)', as opposed to 'it's richt bonnie theday').

There's still a lot of it kicking about tho, and it's on a linguistic continuum with English (as opposed to a totally different language like Gaelic) so I think your sounding the deathknell for Scots in the 17th century is a bit precocious.

Anyone who is interested in finding out more about Scots should look at:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language#Language_Change

http://www.scots-online.org/

uk.geocities.com/rfairnie@btinternet.com/ [This one carries news about Scots in monthly newletters, altho they're in Scots.]

Fairplay. I don't really get why people feel the need to play sudoku or crosswords, and I'm totally baffled by introverts.

The problem that's being cited is that in the past people really have stopped others speaking Gaelic and eating pies, and that culture reflects sociological phenomenon which are unjust. If by some pure happenstance a culture voluntarily 'dwined' away then I probably wouldn't have a problem with that, except for mawkishness. It's also not really on to compare folk who are interested in Gaelic and Scots with the BNP. Nobody here has posted anything remotely ethnocentric or racialistic, have they? I would have thought that's precisely why the BNP are interested in defending England, not because they particularly give a fuck about the existence of the Stoke dialect or something.

Did I say Scots didn't have a right to survive? No, I didn't. And languages and cultures are eroded by the state and capitalism, so by opposing that you're opposing the work of fascism within us. To be sure, there are a lot of aspects of Scottish culture that aren't humane, like protestantism for example, but as far as language and culture go, they're pretty harmless, and saving them is humane, in the strongest possible sense of that word. Why the automatic assumption of unanimity? Other languages and cultures have contributed to the world apart from English and by abandoning them you abandon much that has historical worth. If we all spoke English, god it'd be horrible, insane even, like saying there's no point believing anything apart from Stalinism, because Stalinism has been scientifically proven to be true, even if it was, it'd still be pish. Learning a minority language is like learning any other foreign language, it shows an interest in humanity, and the various forms humanity has taken, also, diversity is good evolutionally. It's like having an interest in philosophy/religion, without necessarily believing any of it, it shows a willingness to learn about human beings rather than just condemn everyone who isn't from stainsted and a fully qualified Marxist-Hegelian to the slag-heap of history.

paragraphs dude, paragraphs

BNP are trying to use a model/interpretation of 'english' culture for nationalistic ends.

I think what was being discussed was the preservation of languages/culture for their own sake rather than the political imposition of them.

Sorry John, but you wouldn't be able to comprehend a person speaking genuine Scots (*waits for the joke that you can't with Scottish people anyway*), which in itself almost debunks the view that it's 'bad English' -nicely patronising btw. You'll still find 'Scots' is really quite widespread but it's undoubtedly a diluted form of a more vibrant, distinct language. There's still a few people, Shetlanders and Doric speakers particularly, who I just can't get personally. Both dialects within Scots and it shows the variation you can still find.

Frankly I don't know why it's so controversial for people that we view the importance of valuing our cultures, and I don't see why we have to justify ourselves. We've grown up in a different part of the world and have a different perpsective. I disagree with fetishising culture but it's just an abstract term for the ways people communicate, linked to their oral traditions, knowledge and background. It doesn't follow that we should (or could) nationalise it, or split ourselves off from other working class people or human beings. But really if we were actually building a popular movement for change in Scotland or the Highlands for example, couldn't we likewise support our own languages and cultures which would increase the confidence and independence of people? It's not an either-or, we can do both.

Nick, I disagree with the examples you cited for state intervention. In nearly every case of language restoration; Faroe Islands, Israel etc. there's been massive popular support and the work's been done pretty much from the bottom, though the state didn't hinder it. Irish language restoration never happened for instance because it was turned in a nationalist fetish, it worked against the people's own struggles and was part of a strategy that never challenged colonialism in a deeper sense. The state intervention has actually worsened the situation in some respects. In Scotland we shouldn't be merely appealling to the Parliament to give us some reforms, it could never affect significant change and the benefits you mention are debateable (though I've limitedly supported them). Without a more radical popular support our cultures are as good as dead.