Thanku fer yer trade
That’s a sign that I saw in the St Patrick’s Centre in Downpatrick at the weekend as part of their trilingual Irish/English/Ulster Scots signage policy.
The first thought that came to mind on seeing it was “isn’t that ridiculous looking?”. If I were a Welsh speaker on seeing an equivalent sign with Welsh in it I’m sure that their first thought would be more like “at last” but then Welsh is a whole lot more supported within Wales than Ulster Scots currently is in Northern Ireland.
My second thought was: well, yes it does look ridiculous, but you know it shouldn’t. The problem with Ulster Scots is that the vast majority of us only every heard it from our grannies, never learned to spell it and, until quite recently, didn’t even think of it as a separate language. So, whilst it may well look ridiculous to me at the moment that’s because I’ve really never had the chance to see it written and at last that is starting to change.
One big plus point that we have is that there are still native speakers of the language around so it’s “just” the matter of writing it all down that needs to be covered. That’ll not be easy but at least the prononciation will remain authentic rather than needing to be guessed as happens in the case of some languages that need to rebuild a pool of native speakers as would need to be done for Manx (the last native speaker died in 1974) or Cornish or for that matter. Although Cornish is now spoken as a native language by a small number of people they didn’t learn it from their parents as the last of the continuous line of native speakers died out in the 1700s.
Sure, it’ll take a while before we don’t look at a sign like that and think that it looks ridiculous but at least we’ve made a small start down that route. Perhaps yin day ah’ll nay ha a problem wi writin tha blog in it too.
