As I prepare to train for a new full-time career, I am going to start occasionally reprinting some genealogy articles that I have written over the years, which I hope may be of some help! They will not follow the layout of the original publications, which are copyright, but the text is my copyright. The first is my article on 'Language Skills for Family Historians', first published in Family Tree magazine's Family History Handbook in 2004 - a couple of web links have been updated since its first publication:
Language Skills for Family Historians
Every day we witness shifts in how the language is used. 'Received Pronunciation' or 'RP', for example, also known as 'BBC English', was adopted widely prior to the Second World War in radio broadcasts, and after the war in television. Whilst conveying an air of middle class authority and education, its 19th century origins were from the East Midlands of England, with it soon adopted as a very middle class accent, particularly in London and the south-east. Yet despite being once considered worldwide as the definitive 'British' accent, in recent years there has been a widespread rejection of RP in the broadcast media, which now favours accents portraying regional diversity. With technological advances the way that we use the language online or in our phones is equally changing, as witnessed through the abbreviated forms used for texting and social media.
There are many English dialects in the UK and worldwide, detailed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_English. One of the oldest still in use today in Britain is the Geordie dialect of the north-east, aka Tyneside English, which contains traces of the old Anglo-Saxon language, Old English, which lasted until the middle of the 12th century, before the post-conquest intrusions of both Latin and Norman French transformed it into the Middle English tongue. Whilst England moved on from Anglo-Saxon, many of its features were preserved for centuries in older dialects, some of which were carried beyond the country. A fascinating article by Damian Shiels at https://tinyurl.com/Yoladialect describes the medieval English dialects of Yola and Fingalian taken to Ireland in the aftermath of the Anglo-Norman invasion of the 12th century. Yola was the dialect taken to Wexford, and used there until the 19th century (a song sung in Yola can be heard at https://youtu.be/RFl9ptuxd8s), whilst Fingalian was a similar dialect in use near Dublin. Both are now sadly long extinct.
Amongst the lost tongues of England is the Cumbric language, a close Celtic cousin of the Welsh language in Cumbria. Although extinct by the 12th century, aspects of the language were preserved in use, such as the Yan-Tan-Tethera counting system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera), employed in various parts of England, particularly the north, for counting sheep and stitches. Further north, a separate language that once existed in Scotland, but which has been functionally extinct since the 19th century, was Norn. A North Germanic language spoken in Orkney, Shetland, and parts of Caithness, the language was related to Norse, with the areas in question part of Norway until the 15th century, when they were ceded to Scotland.
I live in Scotland, which has had a plethora of other languages in use over the years. The Scots language, for example, is often crudely parodied as some kind of English dialect with an accent. It is in fact a separate West Germanic cousin language of modern English, which evolved from the Northumbrian version of Old English, but which had undergone a very different evolution by the 15th century. Referred to as both 'Inglis' and 'Scottis', it continued as the language of court in Scotland until the Union of the Crowns in 1603. However, by this time it was already battling against the English language, thanks to the introduction of the Geneva Bible to the country, written in English and published in 1560, the year of Scotland's Reformation. In the early 17th century Plantations of Ulster, thousands of Scots colonists took the language with them to the north of Ireland, where it became known as Ulster Scots or 'Ullans' ('Ulster Lallans' – the Lowlands Scots of Ulster). The Ulster word 'crack', which at its simplest means 'conversation', came from 'crak' in Scots, and was adopted into Irish as 'craic'.
Many Scots and Ulster Scots happily continue to use words and pronunciations today that their ancestors would have understood, for example, as a child in County Antrim, I was often referred to as a 'cheeky wee hallion', with 'hallion' meaning a clown or rascal! Even today I occasionally use Scots words when writing articles and books, such as 'outwith', meaning 'beyond', which are often excised at the proof stage by English speaking editors (outwith this article I rarely get away with it, but I am optimistic this time!). If you travel back three centuries in the written record, you will soon realise how separate the undiluted Scots language really was, and thank your lucky stars for resources such as the online Dictionaries of the Scots Languages (https://dsl.ac.uk), whilst in Ulster, The Hamely Tongue by James Fenton is also an invaluable dictionary.
The Celtic languages that are still extant in the UK – Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh and Cornish – have similarly evolved over the years. Here in Scotland I have recently achieved a Higher in Gaelic (Gàidhlig), and am currently studying for the Advanced Higher. I first started to learn the language thirty years ago, and a huge difference between then and now is the shift from a 'vigesimal' counting system to a new decimal system, which our ancestors would simply not have recognised. In the past, the vigesimal system – counting in twenties – meant that when describing a number such as 'sixty three', Gaels would instead say 'three twenties and three' (trì fichead 's a trì, in the language). In today's decimal system, you now say 'sixty three' (seasgad 's a trì), and although many older speakers will frown when you do so, it will become the norm for future generations. This vigesimal style of counting also occurred in the English language – when Abraham Lincoln opened the Gettysburg Address with “Four score years and seven”, he was using a similar form of counting as employed by the early 17th century King James Bible.
From a family history perspective, we can engage with these older languages and dialects for many reasons. For starters, we can do so out of simple curiosity. As someone with a lot of ancestry from Perthshire, for example, I was delighted to find a book published in 1915 entitled 'Lowland Scotch as Spoken in the Lower Strathearn District of Perthshire' (https://archive.org/details/lowlandscotchass00wilsuoft). This detailed the Scots language dialect as spoken in the region where my ancestors lived, providing a 'flavour' of how my forebears were likely to have sounded on their patch. Similar offerings for other areas of interest are sometimes found in local libraries, as well as through online repositories such as Google Books (https://books.google.co.uk) and the Internet Archive (https://archive.org).
Learning our ancestral languages can be important also to help us understand older documentary sources. My understanding of Gaelic, for example, occasionally helps me in my work as a genealogist, not just in reading older Gaelic texts, but also when somebody has tried to write down a phrase or name from the language phonetically in an English document. There is also the hurdle of the Latin language which pops up regularly, used for centuries across Britain and Ireland within the theological, educational, medical and legal worlds. Initially brought here by the Christian church for ecclesiastical use, it not only influenced the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon languages (e.g. the Gaelic word 'eaglais', for 'church', comes from the Latin word 'ecclesia'), but was in turn also influenced in return by those languages (see www.dmlbs.ox.ac.uk/web/latin-in-medieval-britain.html).
Perhaps the most commonly encountered use of Latin will be in church registers, particularly those of the Roman Catholic Church. Useful starting points to help get to grips with Latin words can be found via FamilySearch at www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Latin_Genealogical_Word_List and FindmyPast at www.findmypast.co.uk/blog/help/genealogists-guide-to-latin. No matter which language you are using, tools such as Google Translate (https://translate.google.co.uk) might help, but often miss the idiomatic use of a language which only learning it properly through a course can reveal.
Beyond the actual function of a language, however, another challenge to overcome can be the evolving styles of alphabet used. When you read 'Ye olde shoppe' on a tourist shop display today, for example, the word 'ye' is deceiving, for historically 'ye' was pronounced as 'the'. The initial letter 'y' used here was never a 'y' at all, but an older, non-Latin derived letter called a 'thorn', written as 'Þ' – in other words, 'ye' was in fact 'Þe'. When the print era arrived, European printing presses in use at the time did not carry the letter, so the easiest solution was to substitute a 'y' instead. Similarly, when you see names such as Menzies, the 'z' in the middle replaces another obsolete letter, a 'yogh', written as 'ȝ' (similar to a number 3), commonly found in both Middle English and Scots. The letter actually had a slenderised 'g' sound, so that Menzies was historically pronounced as 'Mingis' – hence the reason why former politician Menzies Campbell was referred to as 'Ming' Campbell. For other long-abandoned alphabet letters, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_alphabet.
Older styles of handwriting can also be challenging. Today, it is not uncommon to find younger folk struggling with the cursive forms of writing that we may have used at school, with children today living in an era where the keyboard and touch screens are rapidly replacing the pen. In the past there are similar challenges that we will need to overcome, no matter which language a document may be written in. In Ireland, the style of alphabet used in older Irish texts bears some resemblance to that in use in English, but requires a bit of 'tuning in' to read it, quite apart from the need to understand the Irish language itself. In older German documents you will see a very Gothic form of script which can be incredibly difficult to read.
But even within English and Scots documents there are issues to be found. A major hurdle for genealogists can be how to read an older form of writing such as 'Secretary Hand'. The written letters often bear little resemblance to their modern forms, even though the handwriting is actually using those letters, and spelling out words in English or Scots. Fortunately there are are courses and groups available to help genealogists learn how to understand such older forms of 'palaeography', as the science of understanding older handwriting forms is known. The National Archives at Kew, for example, offers a series of tutorials at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/palaeography/tutorial/default.htm, with another handy guide on learning Secretary Hand basics available at https://beinecke.library.yale.edu/article/quarantine-reading-learn-read-secretary-hand. The Society of Genealogists (www.sog.org.uk) has a 'palaeography club' for members, whilst the National Records of Scotland offers a free training site called Scottish Handwriting (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/scottish-handwriting), as well as a free-to-access self-help guide at www.nrscotland.gov.uk/publications/scottish-handwriting-1500-1700-a-self-help-pack/. A free course is also available at www.futurelearn.com/courses/ems-palaeography.
Training to read Secretary Hand can help, but issues will still arise with abbreviations and contractions once commonly used. An issue often found in Scottish documents, for example, is what are known as 'jaj dates', where a year as written out used a stylistic abbreviation of the Roman numerals 'i' (for 1) and 'm' (1000), which looked a bit like 'jaj' – e.g. “jajvijC and seventy five years”. In this example, 'jaj' (im) means 1000, 'vij' (vii) is used for 7, and 'C' for 100, with the remainder written in English. This is just one such issue that Artificial Intelligence platforms are having to deal with as they learn to read older forms of writing, through new Handwriting Text Recognition (HTR) technologies such as Transkribus (www.transkribus.org).
In time the machines may crack it completely, but where is the fun in that?! Learning such languages and styles of writing can be immensely fulfilling, and may well be the key to finally unlocking your earlier ancestral stories!
(c) Chris Paton
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