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The Secreits of Late Middle Scots On:2007-04-16 10:47:44

Now listen up you lot! I’ve been mollycoddling you and grading you on a curve for far too long, and now it’s time to get down to some serious and scholarly work; so for the next period we are going to look at some Middle Scots Poetry, but don’t worry too much because it will be late Middle Scots Poetry, and very late Middle Scots Poetry at that. The text for today’s lesson is William Dunbar’s touching and notorious poem of courtly love ‘In Secreit Place This Hyndir Nycht’ written around the year 1500.

It begins conventionally enough:
In secreit place this hyndir nycht,
I hard ane beyrne say till ane bricht,
"My huny, my hart, my hoip, my heill,
I have bene lang your luifar leill,
And can of yow get confort nane;
How lang will ye with danger deill?
Ye brek my hart, my bony ane!"
[VO]
Well, while I’m sure you have a fluent grasp of this stuff, there are probably some few people in my audience (not you of course---other people) who might need some help, so for them (not you of course, just those others) I’ll gloss as I go1.
His bony beird was kemmit and croppit,
his attractive beard was quite well-kempt
Bot all with cale it was bedroppit,
apart from certain evidence of a recent meal in which cabbage was somehow involved
And he wes townysche, peirt, and gukit;
and he was quite sophisticated, if somewhat forward and foolish
He clappit fast, he kist and chukkit,
As with the glaikis he wer ouirgane;
He paid court to his young lady in a quite enthusiastic even unrestrained way
Yit he his feirris he wald have fukkit;
and indeed gave every appearance of finding her rather attractive
Ye brek my hart, my bony ane!
You break my heart, my bonny one!
Quod he, "My hairt, sweit as the hunye,
Sen that I borne wes of my mynnye,
I nevir wowit weycht bot yow;
My wambe is of your lufe sa fow,...
Nyeah! That’s QUITE enough of that! It’s getting to be too much even for me!

But, in its near complete incomprehensibility, it does illustrate just how interestingly different the varieties of English are---though of course many Scots (my mother included) would dispute that, however late or Mediæval it may get,  Scots is now or has ever been anything but a language, separate and distinct from English; and quite possibly wanting to give it (as her mother would have said) ‘a bunch a'wee heedies’2 too---the question remains: in spite of (or perhaps because of) whatever your resolution of that dispute is: whether English is going to pull a Latin on us and, like its own ancestor PIE , get cut into slices and become several different languages, or if it is going to suffer the opposite fate of coalescing into some sort of horridish Bollywoodish-Midwestern-Esturine- ’Strineish English koine.

As evidence of these disparate fates let me present the fact that my mother has already given up calling her phone and computer company help lines, in spite of desperate need, because the thoroughly globalised postulant providers of that help all to a man speak the English of India, which to her already is a foreign language; at the same time oddly enough, the threat of koine-ising is because of the fact that we all watch the same films, TV and YouTube, and increasingly work for the same company; which after all are only slightly different actions by the very same forces that allow the help-line man to speak so incomprehensibly (though not Late-Middle-Scotishly) to my Mum from such a faraway place.

Cheerio for now
from
Richard Howland-Bolton

 





Notes:

For those of you gullible enough to think that I was really going to do some serious and scholarly work; the poem, complete with glosses, can (as a sort of minimalist sop to you) be found here.

1 "gloss as I go": probably a popular Disney song not unlike “Whistle While You Work”*

2 "a bunch a' wee heedies": a collection of rather small heads—i.e. the fist, a punch.

____________________________
* Now how do the words go?

“Oh whistle while you whistle
“When you're standing out in a drizzle,
“Or even if you're taking tea with the Queen
“And she's handed you a plate full of gristle!”

or something like that.

 






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