Join two wayward radio hosts on A Way With Words, the call-in radio show about writing, speaking, slang, old sayings, and more.

Login   •   Register  

Monday, November 12, 2007

Quality scholarship: From Ulster to America: The Scotch-Irish Heritage of American English

If you want to see what proper research into the roots of American English looks like, I highly recommend Michael Montgomery’s From Ulster to America: The Scotch-Irish Heritage of American English. Michael is also co-editor of the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English and the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 5: Language. You can get a taste of his scholarship at his web site about Southern Appalachian English.
“SCOTCH” is a drink, liquor, a kind of whiskey which is as distinct & different as the Irish, Canadian, US distills.  If you are refering to language origin, please be polite enough to spell it correctly.
Though “Scots” is these days the preferred form, “Scotch” is still widely accepted and that’s also what Montgomery chose to use in the title of his book, so I have included it here as-is. I suspect he uses it because he is talking about a time when “Scotch” was still the preferred term.
Not if he’s Scot’s!  But thanx -was just having abit of a view & a lark.

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

This is the personal weblog of Grant Barrett, editor of the Double-Tongued Dictionary, a collection of words from the fringes of English. More about this site...

Recent Catchwords