Scots, English, and the linguistic uncanny valley

English’s fascination with its closest cousin

View of Tantallon Castle and the Bass Rock (ca. 1816), Alexander Nasmyth

On January 25, people the world over will celebrate Burns Night. They will gather for Burns Suppers and honour the memory of Robert Burns — Rabbie Burns to his friends — the national poet of Scotland. The celebration will likely include a multi-course meal, the recitation of poems, and the elaborate presentation of the haggis.

If you’re not familiar with haggis, it’s a polarizing Scottish dish made of sheep’s offal (heart, liver, and lungs) cooked in the sheep’s stomach. At least, that’s the traditional version. You can get vegetarian versions these days; I had one myself while on the Isle of Skye which used mushroom and walnut in place of the offal. It was delicious.

On Burns Night, however, haggis is the centrepiece of the evening. The guests stand while the haggis is brought in. In fact, the haggis is not simply brought in, but piped in, that is, accompanied by a tune on the bagpipes. Then, a poem of Burns is recited: appropriately, Address to a Haggis.

Toasts are made, songs are sung, speeches are given. It’s good fun. If you can get yourself to a Burns Night, I highly recommend it, not least because you’ll get to hear a lot of Scots.

The Scots language is a close cousin of English. Both languages are descended from Old English, and, living side by side, the two languages have had a close and often complicated relationship over the years.

Scots is one of the three official languages of Scotland (as of last year), the other two being English and Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig).

Here’s an example of what Scots looks like:

Some hae meat an canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit.

‘Some have food and cannot eat,
And some would like to eat, but don’t have it (food);
But we have food, and we can eat,
And so the Lord be thanked.’

This is the Selkirk Grace, traditionally said at Burns Suppers.

If you’ve never encountered Scots before, it can appear like English distorted in a funhouse mirror: hae instead of have, wad instead of would, sae instead of so.

It hovers just on the edge of comprehensibility. Of course, a monolingual Scots speaker encountering English would have a similar experience, although I’m not sure there are any monolingual Scots speakers left.

This close relationship between the two languages has meant that Scots has, over the years, contributed many words to the English language. These loanwords were especially common during the 18th and 19th centuries, as a wave of interest in Scotland brought the works of Scottish writers to an English audience ready to gobble up tales of this exotic and Romantic world on their doorstep.

But because the languages are so closely related, these loanwords can be hard to spot. To the untrained eye, they seem like they may well have been part of the English language since time immemorial.

Let's look at a few of these stealth Scots words in English. As we'll see, the words that made the crossing tend to cluster around certain themes: the wild, the dangerous, and the supernatural. Their stories reveal something of the history of Scotland, but they reveal far more about what Scotland represented to the 18th- and 19th-century English mind: a seductive mix of violence, superstition, and authenticity.

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Great Scott

Let’s begin with violence.

Our first word describes a phenomenon familiar to anyone who lived on either side of the border between England and Scotland for much of its history: the raid. The Scottish Borders were a violent part of the world for many years, and the institution of raiding was a tradition of long standing. So it’s appropriate that the word raid comes into English from Scots.

As is true of most words in Scots, raid descends from an Old English word. The Old English word in question is rād, which could mean a variety of things, all to do with riding: rād is the noun form of the verb rīdan ‘to ride.’

Rād could be the activity of riding, an expedition out on horseback (especially with hostile intent!), or the place where you could ride on a horse. Beowulf aficionados will recognize rād from the famous kenning at the start of the poem: hronrād, which refers to the sea, and which Tolkien, in the notes to his translation, insists we must translate as “where the whale (hron) rides.”¹ We could also, just as easily, translate it as “where the whale raids.”

But that’s not the usual translation of hronrād. More usually, hronrād is rendered as “whale-road,” as it is in Heaney. Tolkien condemns whale-road as suggesting “a sort of semi-submarine steam-engine running along submerged metal rails over the Atlantic.”

But Heaney, and others who translate hronrād as whale-road are on to something. The word road is in fact the direct descendant of Old English rād, at least as it has come down into Standard English.²

The meaning has, of course, narrowed to mean a path that was wide enough for a horse or vehicle to travel on. But the older meanings hung around for a surprisingly long time: you could still use road to mean a hostile expedition until the early 19th century.³ The use of rād/road to mean an attack is the source of the word inroad, as in the phrase to make inroads into something: an inroad was originally a military incursion.

But in Scotland and Northern England, that ā vowel had a different fate: it turned into the sound we have in day, which is often spelt ai. So raid is the direct descendant of rād in Scots. But, in Scots, the meaning of the word rād narrowed in a different way than it did down south. In England, a road was a path on which you could ride. But, in Scotland, a raid came to mean a hostile incursion.

The word raid in the sense of a military expedition was borrowed back into English from Scots in the early 19th century due largely to the influence of one man, the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832).

Scott (who wrote in English) is best known today for his historical novels, such as Ivanhoe (1819), Rob Roy (1817), and Waverley (1814). Many of Scott’s novels — Ivanhoe is a notable exception — were set in Scotland during the 17th and 18th centuries.

In fact, by the time Scott was writing in the early 19th century, the word raid was largely obsolete in Scots. Scott revived the word from old Scottish ballads, many of which were concerned with raids to and fro across the English border, to lend colour to his novels and poetry.

From Scott’s works, the word passed into the English language in general, and has been so thoroughly adopted that few people today are even aware that it has its origins in a Scots word which was once of exclusively antiquarian interest.

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You’re a Grammarian, Harry

The word glamour is the Scottish cousin of a family of words which, at first glance, seem to have little to do with each other. Grammar and grimoire are two other, well-known members of this family. There are also the obscure cousins gramarye, an archaic word that means ‘occult learning,’ and glomery, the title of a post at the University of Cambridge, with somewhat unclear responsibilities.

All these words come into English as loanwords from French, or variations on French loanwords. They all derive ultimately from a single Old French word gramaire, which had two basic meanings in Old and Middle French: ‘the science of the rules of language,’ and ‘sorcery, or a book of sorcery.’⁴

Which of the two was the original meaning? And how do the two meanings relate?

The French word gramaire came from the Latin grammatica, which was a clipping of the phrase ars grammatica ‘the art of letters.’

Ultimately, like so much of the Romans’ high culture, it derives from the Greek: ars grammatica is a calque, or a word-for-word translation, of γραμματική τέχνη grammatikḗ tékhnē.

From this, we can tell that the original meaning was in fact the more prosaic one, the one having to do with the rules of language. This is the meaning that is preserved in the English word grammar, and, for that matter, the Modern French word grammaire.

The other side of the Old French word gramaire, the one having to do with the occult arts, split off into another word, grimoire. The word was altered under the influence of a Germanic root grīma ‘mask,’ which does not survive as a separate word in French. It did exist in Old English in exactly that form: grīma ‘mask,’⁵ and it survives into Modern English as grime, which, if you get enough of it on you, can act as a mask.

As for grimoire, it still exists, both in French and English, although it now refers specifically to a book which purports to teach sorcery.

The connection between the two meanings isn’t immediately obvious, but it makes more sense when we understand the broader meaning of grammar in the Middle Ages.

It was the science of the rules of language, but it meant, more specifically, the science of the rules of the Latin language, since that was the only language anyone saw fit to study in a systematic fashion at the time. In fact, until the 16th century, the English word grammar was solely used to refer to the grammar of the Latin language.⁶

Because only educated people knew Latin, grammar (and Old French gramaire) came to refer to the learning of educated people in general. And who knew what they were getting up to in those ivory towers of theirs: it could be (and sometimes was) things like magic and astrology. This is how words meaning grammar came to refer to magic: and this meaning is preserved in the archaic English word gramarye.

Perhaps it’s the great distance between the two meanings of the original Old French word gramaire that lead to this profusion of variants: in English, grammar was retained as a linguistic term, and grimoire specialized in magic.

And here too is the Scottish connection: in Scotland, a form glamer (spelled variously) arose, meaning ‘magic.’ The word is first attested in Scots in 1715, as far as I can tell,⁷ and was formed from the word grammar by a process called dissimilation, where two instances of the same sound become different.

This is especially common when you have sequences of r…r and l…l in words, which seems to be hard to pronounce, so one of the two will flip: an l to and r or an r to and l. The pronunciation — but not the spelling — of the word colonel is an example of this process.

Like raid, the Scots word glamer only came to prominence in English, albeit under the anglicized spelling glamour, through the good offices of Sir Walter Scott. He used it his poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805):

A moment then the volume spread,
And one short spell therein he read.
It had much of glamour might,
Could make a ladye seem a knight; (Last Minstrel, 3.9.9–12)

He also, helpfully, included a footnote defining glamour for the English-speaking reader:

Glamour, in the legends of Scottish superstition, means the magic power of imposing on the eve-sight of the spectators, so that the appearance of an object shall be totally different from the reality. (ibid., footnote to line 3.9.11)

Before long, it took on its present-day meaning of, as the OED puts it, “An attractive or exciting quality that makes a person or thing seem particularly appealing or desirable.”

This usage emerged as early as 1840, only a few short decades after Scott’s introduction of the word into English in the first place. The older, magical meaning, on the other hand, is a mystery to most. It persists barely into the present day by virtue of its use in certain works of fantasy fiction.

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The Uncanny Valley

Many of the Scots loanwords into English have something in common with glamour: they deal with the gruesome, the eerie, or the uncanny. In fact, each of these three words is itself a loanword from Scots.⁸

The reason that Scots loanwords into English tend to relate to the supernatural is a function of the context through which Scots words came into English. We’ve already seen two words that made the jump from Scots to English through literature, in particular, through the historical novels and poetry of Sir Walter Scott.

But Sir Walter Scott was not an isolated phenomenon. He was rather part of a wave of literature coming out of Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries, literature which embodied — and sometimes invented — the distinctively Scottish.

Scott built upon the work of authors such as James Macpherson (1736–1796), the author of the Ossian poems,⁹ and, the man of the hour, Robert Burns (1759–1796).¹⁰ Together, these three authors (and others) presented a romantic vision of Scotland as a land of mystery, ancient tradition, and brooding wildness.

Scotland became a convenient “other” for the English mind, a mind caught in the throes of Enlightenment rationalism. Here was a land on their doorstep which had never been a part of the Roman Empire, where perhaps some link to a deep, dark, and authentic past might still linger.

The work of Scottish Romantic writers like Macpherson, Burns, and Scott helped to solidify this image with their tales of ghosts wandering on windswept moors, witches’ sabbaths in ruined churches, and goblins with the power to bewitch the mind.

This Romantic version of Scotland was a compelling package, and it was delivered to the world in special language. In some cases, this was genuine Scots; but, more often, it was English with just enough of a Scottish flavour to make it feel authentic. But these Scottish Romantic poems and novels were a pathway for Scots vocabulary about the magical, strange, and bizarre to enter the English language.

Uncanny is one of these words. Today, uncanny is used most often to mean ‘uncomfortably strange,’ as in the famous uncanny valley effect, where something that looks almost human, but not quite, is found more repulsive than something that doesn’t look particularly human at all.

Etymologically, uncanny is the negative form of an adjective canny, which was present both in Scots and northern dialects of English, and which originally meant ‘knowing, wise.’ The adjective canny is related to the modal verb can, which now means ‘be able to,’ but which originally meant ‘be acquainted with’ or ‘know how to.’ So someone who is canny is someone who can — that is, knows — many things.

But words are slippery things, and meanings change over time. In Scots, canny acquired other meanings like ‘skilful,’ ‘pleasant,’ and ‘safe from harm.’ That covers a lot of ground, but they’re all broadly positive things. Likewise, uncanny tended to be a negative word, with such meanings recorded before 1700 as ‘malicious,’ ‘aggressive,’ and ‘untrustworthy.’¹¹

After 1700, uncanny branches out further in Scots to meanings like ‘awkward, careless,’ ‘hard, violent,’ and ‘dangerous.’ It’s this last meaning which became the key: something uncanny was dangerous, and an uncanny person was not to be trifled with.

Often an uncanny person was dangerous precisely because they were in league with dark forces. In Scott’s novel Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer (1815), the word is used in reference to a woman who, while serving as a guide, keeps muttering strange things. This, quite naturally, frightens her followers, one of whom complains to the other:

‘Captain,’ said Dinmont, in a half whisper, ‘I wish she binna uncanny! her words dinna seem to come in God’s name, or like other folk’s. Od, they threep in our country that there are sic things.’

‘Captain,’ said Dinmont, in a half whisper, ‘I wish she weren’t uncanny! Her words don’t seem to come in God’s name, or like other folk’s. Gosh, they insist in our country that there are such things.’ (Scott, Guy Mannering)

This is roughly the meaning of uncanny that entered English, although the notion of danger isn’t always present. Sometimes that which is uncanny is simply strange. Unlike raid and glamour, there isn’t a single author or work that we can point to as the conduit by which the word came from Scots to English. But it arrived just the same.

It’s appropriate that we should be discussing uncanny, because, to the English speaker, the Scots language itself appears to occupy a linguistic uncanny valley.

As the closest living relative of the English language, Scots hovers just beyond comprehensibility for English speakers, at least in writing.¹² It’s so close… but it’s just not English. But rather than triggering revulsion, Scots gave those 18th- and 19th-century English readers a frisson of excitement at being offered a glimpse at a mysterious alternative path that English might have taken.

Of course, for speakers of Scots, what the English saw as mysterious and romantic was just their language. It had words for daily realities of washing the dishes just as much for the eerie mysteries of ancient lore.

But, as the Scottish Romantics found, it’s the eerie mysteries that sell books. And, through the 18th- and 19th-century literary craze for all things Scottish, the Scots language left its mark on English, not as an accurate portrait, but as a curated collection of the strange and the uncanny.

When English speakers encounter Scots today — something which happens all too rarely outside Burns Suppers — they may find that it retains a hint of the glamour that the readers of the Romantic era found in it: a compelling combination of the strange and familiar. But if you look past the glamour, you’ll find something even more compelling: a living, breathing cousin of the English language.

1. Quotations from Tolkien’s translation are from Tolkien (2014). Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell.

2. The change of the ā vowel to one pronounced oa is the same transformation we saw when hāliġ became holy.

3. Or, at least, that’s the last recorded usage of that meaning of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary.

4. According to the Dictionnaire étymologique de l’ancien français and the Dictionnaire du moyen français.

5. Believe it or not it’s likely a cognate with the root that gives us Christ!

6. This is also the origin of the term grammar school — the kind of school Shakespeare is thought to have attended. It meant, originally at least, a school that taught Latin.

7. According to the Scottish National Dictionary, which covers the years 1700 to the present. It does not appear in the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, which records words as used before 1700.

8. Gruesome comes from the verb grue ‘shudder,’ itself of unclear origin. Eerie comes from a derivative of an Old English word earg ‘cowardly,’ which went from meaning ‘easily frightened’ to ‘causing fear.’ As for uncanny, read on…

9. Macpherson claimed to be no more than the translator of what he said were ancient Gaelic poems, but this was quickly discovered to be a fabrication. Literary forgery though they were, they were no less influential for it.

10. Burns is perhaps the most famous writer to write in the Scots language, although he also often wrote in a Scottish-inflected version of English.

11. See the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue.

12. If you want to see for yourself, pick up the Scots translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stane.