Do you remember my last post about Irish? Let me continue this topic but in a bit different way. I want to tell you something about Scottish language.

Scottish, like Irish, belongs to the Celtic languages group. I can bet that most of you saw a movie or a few where brave men were fighting to death in their kilts for the land they loved. I did. And it really makes me sad that their language is extincting.

Recently I've come upon tv series called „Outlander”. It's about a lady living in the 1940s who in magical way, by touching big stones in Scotland, travelled 200 years in the past to the 1740s. There she was saved from a British solder (who looked exactly like her husband, the one from 1940) who was not really a good man. Rescued by a Scottish man and taken to his village, Claire, because that's her name, is helping villagers due to her nurse skills. The thing I like the most about this series is the way they speak. This is not a fake accent as it has always been in other movies or series that I'm familiar with. Producers took care of details like putting Scottish phrases into English speech. Even Claire is called Sassenach - an outlander or a foreigner, more specifically an English person, usage generally derogatory (as the producers, more specifically Àdhamh Ó Broin, explain). The thing that I love about it is the fact that fans, addicted to the series, will start to learn Scottish. Searching something more about Scottish parts in dialogues, I bumped into videos on youtube connected with series which can teach you how to pronounce some phrases or words in Scottish. Here you have one of those videos in which one of the main characters pronounces: Tha gaol agam ort (I love you) in Scottish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbB0IbXWC3I&list=PLus0YZufzZ8BhbKnZ-yJhtoS8E9KuuWlJ&index=12

I hope you' ll get some interest in this fascinating language. Below I put the wedding vow from this series, which is really lovely, so you could see what this language looks like:

Is tu fuil 'o mo chuislean, is tu cnaimh de mo chnaimh.

Is leatsa mo bhodhaig, chum gum bi sinn 'n ar n-aon.

Is leatsa m 'anam gus an criochnaich ar saoghal.

(Literal Translation

You are blood of my veins, you are bone of my bone.
Yours is my body, that we may be one.
Yours is my soul until our worlds end.)

sourse: http://www.lallybroch.com/LOL/blood-vow.html