The Doric debate continued
Adam Watson is mainly right in what he says about the word Doric. Like him, I had much to do with the late David Murison, who devoted his life to producing the definitive Scottish National Dictionary, and I can confirm that that great Aberdonian thoroughly disapproved of the word.
As Murison pointed out, ‘Doric’ comes from Greece and has connotations of coarseness, lack of culture. There was nothing coarse about his Buchan tongue, he said!
I deal with this whole question in my recent book on Aberdeen, with a chapter called ‘Will Doric Survive?’ Where Adam Watson errs is in pinning its use on “English speakers or what Aberdeen folk term ‘panloaf’ speakers”.
Our own local dialect folk are just as bad. So many of them joke about “lapsing into the Doric”. Do they really regard their local tongue, whatever you may call it, as a lapse? And from my experience of rural Buchan, unlike Adam’s in the burgh of Turriff, the adults of my childhood were using the word Doric.
Adam Watson, incidentally, was still a schoolboy in Turriff when I became a reporter on his local paper more than 60 years ago. So, while we are at it, would he agree on another word I certainly never heard in my schooldays? that was for the Highland chiels we drove out of the North-East at Harlaw. Ceilidh. We held dances, concerts and meal-an’-ales, but never, never a ceilidh. Now it seems to be one of those fashions that mix Highland and Lowland culture, with little caring for their origins.
Jack Webster, Netherlee, Glasgow
Adam Watson (Leopard, May) may have a variety of grounds for his objection to ‘Doric’: of course we never called it Doric (or anything) when we were children; as far as we were concerned, aabody spoke like ‘at. I didn’t hear the word until I got involved with folk song; and then later, in the process of scrambling through a degree in English at Aberdeen University. And, like Adam, I don’t remember the word being used by David Murison in any of his highly-diverting lectures.
Problem is, if we don’t call it Doric – weel; fit are we gaan ti caa’t? Because we have to call it something. I can very easily imagine the teeth-gritted, barely-contained intensity of the debates over alternative name-tags. Other recognised dialects have locality-linked names, like Northumbrian or the rather patronising Zummerzet; but you can bet that absolutely none of the possible candidates to replace Doric as an identifier (Buchanish? Gariochese? Formartinian?) would evoke anything other than 10% (maybe) grudging acceptance and 90% implacable hostility; never mind the ridicule (for which, of course, Doric is such an apt medium).
We certainly couldn’t call it Aberdonian, not only because it’s spoken and recognised far beyond the city but because, as in most cities, both dialect and accent have been subjected to so many competing and diluting influences as to have lost much of their distinctiveness – and I speak as one who, brought up in Torry, only realised much later in life the richness and strength of the original. Anyone inclined to argue this point should go away and read Bennygoak, out loud, two or three times.
Even conducted on a more serious level than this, I can’t see that a debate about what name we use for the indigenous language of the North-East serves any purpose at all. Such a debate would certainly do nothing for the language itself. The energy and passion that would be dissipated in the debate could be much better spent on promoting and preserving its use; on helping to make everyone (incomers or natives) with even the slightest interest in the language of the area (and no; I will not be drawn into defining what the area might be – I’m not that stupid) comfortable with learning it and using it; with being genuinely, fully and happily bilingual. Maybe ‘Doric’ isn’t ideal, bit it’ll dee fine fir noo.
Colin Stuart, colinmg62@ic24.net
I read with interest Adam Watson’s letter (Leopard, May) in which he questions the validity of the term ‘Doric’ to describe our North-East dialect.
To trace the origins of the word Doric we have to go back to Ancient Greece. In those far-off days three principal dialects of the Greek language were spoken – Ionic, Aeolian and Doric. Athens eventually established itself as the principal and most powerful city state in Greece; the dialect spoken by the Athenians was called Attic, a sub-dialect of Ionic.
The inhabitants of the Peleponnese in southern Greece were called the Dorians and the dialect they spoke was called Doric. The cultured but arrogant Atheniens looked down their noses at the Dorians and considered their Doric speech to be crude and rustic, hence the term Doric as applied to speech was originally a derogatory one.
In 18th century England, we find writers using the term Doric to mean just that – rustic dialect.
Norman Allan, Campbell Street, Banff
Mair Swatches o’ Hamespun was printed by The Banffshire Journal and published ‘under the auspices of the Vernacular Circle of the Burns Club of London by the New Byth Horticultural Socety’. Their prime objective was to preserve North-East dialect, and it is a great delight to browse our 1922-1924 copies. There is an honesty in that I feel they wrote as they spoke.
Swatches is a collection of poems, stories and short plays by Buchan writers and never ceases to bring a smile, although sometimes the glossary has to be checked to unearth the meaning of words like ‘fumblat’ or ‘immis’. Despite gaps in my vocabulary, the entire rhythm of each paragraph or sentence is familiar music to North-East folk and no meaning is lost. We may not know all the words, but we understand the tune.
Look at the different uses of the word ‘ken’ (which I still pronounce ‘kain’). Sad news brings a long, low and sympathetic ‘kain’; when a short, higher pitched and irritable ‘kain’ states that ‘you knew all along’. Adam makes his point and I support his notion that the dialect lives in the North-East, among people who would never claim they are speaking Doric. They are simply communicating by means of centuries-old ‘words and music’.
My apologies if I come over as maroonjeous, but there is far too much ganj. See what I mean?
Fred Bull, Logie Coldstone.
Editor: immis, or eemis: adj. uncertain, gloomy, likely to rain.
I offer an apology to Dr Adam Watson if I offended him by over-using the word ‘Doric’ in my last article; but in defence, I was merely following what he must agree is the general practice.
Something which I noticed almost immediately on coming to Aberdeen was that the gentle fowk of the North-East had commandeered the word for their own local speech: growing up in Ayr, I had always heard it used to mean Scots in general. Originally, of course, the word had no Scottish connections but referred to the dialect of classical Greek that was used for pastoral poetry: when Allan Ramsay, Alexander Ross and others restored the mither tongue to respectable literary use in the 18th century, critics referred to it as “Scotland’s Doric”. But the Banffshire-born scholar Alexander Geddes applied the term to the North-East dialect in 1792, giving the usage a respectable precedent; the journalist Cuthbert Graham, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of North-East culture in our time, used The Living Doric as the title of his collection of local poetry; and while researching for my own book on the Doric I never found that any of the fluent speakers I interviewed had any objection to the name.
What are we going to call our Doric Festival, the popular Doric Nichts in pubs, or Douglas Kynoch’s justifiably best-selling Teach Yourself Doric books, if Dr Watson gets his way? Na: the wirdie’s here tae bide, an he’ll jist hae tae thole it!
Derrick McClure, Aberdeen.