Ever since Jeff lent me his Battlefield Band CD and seeded my interest in them, one of the songs in particular, Birnie Bouzle (MP3), has always really amused me. It's a charming song where a guy tries to convince a girl to marry him, telling her how happy they'll be together. It's sort of like Layla's 200-year-old grandfather. What I find really interesting is the language. It's clear from the language used that this is an old song (as far as I can tell it was written sometime around 1800), and it seems to indicate that people in Scotland at the time spoke a dialect that melded Gaelic and English. But when I looked up the meanings of all the strange words, I found that many of them are surprisingly similar to the modern-day word, which suggests that those modern words are derived from the older forms spoken in Scotland at the end of the 18th century.

Birnie Bouzle

Gin ye'll marry me, lassie,
At the kirk o' Birnie Bouzle,
Till the day ye dee, lassie,
Ye shall ne'er repent it.

Ye shall wear when ye are wed
A kirtle and a hieland plaid,
Sleep upon a heather bed
Sae couthie and sae canty.

Ye shall gan sae braw, lassie,
Tae the kirk o' Birnie Bouzle,
Little brogues and a', lassie,
Vow! but ye'll be canty.

Yer wee bit tocher is but sma',
But hodden gray will wear for a',
I'll save my siller tae mak' ye braw,
Ye shall ne'er repent it.

We'll ha' bonnie bairns and a',
Some lassies fair and laddies braw,
Like their mother ane and a',
And yer father he's consented.

I'll hunt the otter and the brock,
The hart, the hare, the heather cock,
I'll pull ye limpets frae the rock
Tae mak' ye dishes dainty.

That's an aspect of language and etymology that I only realized once I started working on the Online Etymology Dictionary and reading Language Log — we use pretty-sounding words like "derived" to describe the evolution of language, but really all it is is an endless sequence of bastardizations and corruptions. If only a few people spell a word or phrase a certain way, then it is considered a misspelling. But if enough people start doing it, it is considered an "emergent variant," and, with time, gets added to the OED and becomes an accepted part of the language. So all these seemingly strictly defined language rules are actually just observations of the currently predominating standards, and not really as fixed and unyielding as the laws of physics or chemistry, as they tend to be presented to you in school.

And in fact, I read a few weeks ago (but would like to see confirmation of it before I believe it for sure) that just two or three hundred years ago, there was no standardized spelling of words in English. You simply spelled it how it sounded to you, and other people had to try and figure out the word you were trying to convey. That seems somewhat farfetched, but not entirely unbelievable. What a different scenario an English class would be at the time. Though much fewer people were educated at the time, of course. In fact, I wonder if that's precisely why there was no standardization. How could it be enforced, when most people weren't even literate?