Language of the People: Scots Prose From the Victorian Revival

Donaldson, William

ISBN 10: 0080377300 / ISBN 13: 9780080377308

Published by Aberdeen University Press, 1989

About this Item

0 241 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. Fine in fine dust jacket. protected in brodart, Seller Inventory # Alibris.0063240

Bibliographic Details

Title: Language of the People: Scots Prose From the...

Publisher: Aberdeen University Press

Publication Date: 1989

Binding: Hardcover

Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis:

If the textbooks were right, this volume would contain nothing but empty pages; because the medium in which its authors' wrote i.e., discursive Scots prose became extinct more than two hundred years before any of them were born. So writes Dr. William Donaldson in his introduction. Historians of Scots language and literature, he says, have claimed that the vernacular prose tradition died out during the early seventeenth century, to be used thereafter for the demotic chatter of lower-class characters in the novels of Scott and Stevenson; that the language was irretrievably damaged by its long and losing battle with the forces of Anglicization; that it became, except perhaps for various experiments with synthetic forms during the present century, intrinsically unfit for serious purposes. The Language of the People presents evident to the contrary. The Scots language had not declined; not, at least, in its spoken forms which continued to be the language