The Language of the People - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0080377319 ISBN 13: 9780080377315

Publisher: Pergamon Pr, 1989

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 of the people, of the great majority of the Lowland nation, requiring simply the appropriate technical means before it blossomed in a rich variety of speech-based prose forms. The Language of the People surveys the period from 1855 to 1914 and the Great War."The mental world of 'the Scottish Democracy' as revealed in these writings," Dr. Donaldson writes, "is very different from anything we have been led to expect. Its leading quality is a sinewy and sardonic intellectualism. It is intensely anti-Imperialists, routinely anti-clerical, thoroughly secular in spirit, fundamentally egalitarian in its hatred of hypocrisy, sham and artificially maintained class privilege".

Edition details

• Publisher: Pergamon Pr
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0080377319
• ISBN 13: 9780080377315
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 241
• Editor: Donaldson William