Uiser:Illandancient/Lemma word comparisons

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As Scots doesn't have a standardised spelling orthography, various spellings of words are used on the Scots wikipedia. Some of these spellings are common to many dialects, some are relatively rare and used in only a few dialects, some are archaic spellings and some were clearly made up for the wiki where no Scots spelling existed before.

As a non-native speaker, it is difficult to pop out into a Scottish street or pub and chat to the fellows there to establish which category the spellings fall into. Instead it is necessary to research each spelling, checking different online sources, this can be repetitive and time consuming.

Spelling classification[eedit | eedit soorce]

I would like to propose three classes of spelling

  • Standard spelling - likely to be the English spelling, but may lead to a range of different pronunciations in Scots (Type A)
  • Dialect spelling - a standard-ish spelling that more accurately covers the regional pronunciation and is used in published works, for example "toon" and "toun" (Type B)
  • Synthetic spelling - a non-standard spelling, created to answer the question, how would the word be pronounced in Scots, but never or rarely used in published works (pheesicist). Often "mock-scots" spellings used in newspapers" (Type C)

List[eedit | eedit soorce]

This is a list of lemmas (in English) with Scots spelling variants, their word frequency on the scowiki corpus, the Scottish Corpus (Scots language) and other corpi as available.

Lemma Spelling Scowiki occurrences (2020-09-01) Scottish Corpus occurrences Scots Pairlament Corpus occurrences Notes
addition addeetion 292 0 0 Type C
addition addition 387 10 3 Type A
addition addeetional 101 0 0 Type C
addition additional 126 3 1 Type A
addition addeitional 1 0 0 Type C
administrative admeenistrative 4204 0 0 Type C
administrative administrative 177 1 2 Type A
area aurie 10281 0 0
area area 390 500 3
british breetish 2326 1 1 [a]
british british 417 150 4
city ceety 17840 0 0
city ceetie 43 0 0
city city 844 150 4
city ceity 80 5 0
city ceities 21 3 0
city citie 0 5 0
civil ceevil 835 16 0
civil civil 128 100 0
discover diskivert 44 0 0
discover discovered 315 2 0
discover discovert 7 4 0
discover fund 267 600 0 [b]
independent unthirldom 933 0 0
independent independent 726 50 1
independent unthirlt 165 0 0
independent thirled 0 15 3
independent sequestrate 4 0 0
independent sequestratit 0 1 0
independent unthirled 0 0 0
system seestem 1970 8 0
system system 292 800 26
symbol seembol 586 0 0
symbol symbol 23 6 1
Notes
  1. Its been suggested that this is a satirical use
  2. Not from the same lemma but perhaps an acceptable alternative to consider

Let me know if there are other words, spellings and corpi to consider.

The English spelling is used as the lemma here because I'm English and one of the main points of the exercise is to establish which Scots spelling should represent the lemma, and which are secondary.