Wednesday 2 September 2020

did ye ken...

This is probably old news for most but I was somewhat taken aback to learn that for over six years the Scots language Wikipedia has been moderated and edited by a Wikipedian who isn’t of Scottish heritage nor speaks Scots and has contributed over twenty-thousand articles to the domain that are largely accurate though not written in Scots but rather with the approximation of a Scots accent.
I feel torn because I understand the upset that this revelation causes—though arguably not malicious cultural vandalism—it does have an outsized influence on the minority language and probably represents the largest lexicon of Scots presently—with all the errata that non-native speakers would take as genuine. What do you think? Despite earnest efforts, one probably ought not to assay something this potentially influential given Scots’ status as something once the object of derision and suppressed, but there is also the fact that this was an undertaking that the administrator took on aged twelve and it presumably grew into an obsession and mission, and I think there’s something relatable in that. Again, a people and a language is not fandom but this episode recalls the spurious volume two of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Alonso Fernรกndez de Avellaneda of Tordesillas—which Cervantes denounces and is probably the first occurance of metafiction in literature.