Blackhouses of Scotland | Hacker News Reader

Blackhouses of Scotland

amusingplanet.com

107 pointsrzk44 comments

Scotland and Ireland are intimately linked by a common language (Gaelic). As an Irish person who speaks English (for obvious historical reasons), visiting Scotland blew my mind because of the common language.

Here’s an example of a simple stone house from the south west of Ireland:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloch%C3%A1n

Note that these are some houses from Skellig Michael, used as a film location for one of the Star Wars movies Edit: typo

What became Scotland pretty much originated with the kingdom of Dál Riata that stretched between Ireland and Britain and there are a lot of legends and myths that tell of strong connections between the two e.g. Deirdre of the Sorrows

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1l_Riata

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deirdre

"Pretty much" is doing a lot of work there. The kingdom of Dál Riata was predominantly the islands and the west coast of modern Scotland. Picts held the north, east and central parts of modern Scotland, the Britons of Strathclyde ruled the south-west and the Anglo-Saxons of Bernicia (later joining with Deira to form Northumbria) the south-east.

There were many other tribes, this is a gross simplification.

Ultimately the Picts and Celts/Scots of Dál Riata "merged" (if that's the right word? it's not clear who took over who) in the 700s-800s, for certain by the time of Kenneth MacAlpin who was both King of Dál Riata and King of the Picts, and by the 900s this was the Kingdom of Alba, later the Kingdom of Scotland. This Kingdom still did not include what's in modern south-west Scotland, that was won later.

FWIW, the British History Podcast does a pretty good job of covering Scotland and the migration of people through this period. I actually don’t know how good it is, but I do at least remember all of the names and places you mentioned. :)

The podcast is quite England heavy, but does also cover Scotland and Wales, as well as the relevant parts of France, Ireland, and Denmark (as appropriate).

> Scotland and Ireland are intimately linked by a common language (Gaelic)

Just on parts of the west coast of Scotland - much of mainland Scotland spoke the Scots language, with the (now dead) Norn language spoken in the northern areas (with Norse heritage), and other languages in the border areas. The promotion of Scottish Gaelic as a "national language" is very much modern-day myth-building.

It depends how far back you go. Gaelic was spoken across the country, not just on the west coast. Nowadays it's been more or less eradicated, except from the Western Isles (where it's not that widely spoken - English is the main spoken language). And it's increasingly become a political football so you see untrue statements made about its history.

Do you have a source for Gaelic being spoken in places like Berwickshire?

My understanding from School of was that it went straight from the Brythonic to the Germanic.

Scots is an English dialect, descended from Northumbrian English.

The dialect is arguably alive in some locales, including some places northern Ireland.

To me, the dividing line is code switch. There are rural pubs and such where people will noticeably switch to standard English when speaking to non-locals.

Ulster Scots, it is sometimes called.

Hard to draw distinct lines, especially since the "standard" English near Scots speaking locales is not very standard. Glasgow, Newry and whatnot have pretty quirky "standard" English.

That said, an average person from Newry won't code switch. If you can't understand the accent, they'll just speak loader, slower and more directly at your forehead.

To me that makes it "not a dialect."

I'm originally from a small fishing village in north-east Scotland and used to speak a very broad dialect called Doric (loons, quines etc.) I'm pretty sure this is fairly different from the "Ulster Scots" you mention.

What was interesting is that people from a farming background had a very different accent to folks from the coastal fringe - even though they might only be living a couple of kms away!

That's a very interesting point.

We tend to think genealogically about these things. I said "Scots is descended from northumbrian" and that Ulster Scots is spoken in NI. But irl... dialects are porous. They don't really "descend."

In any case, I believe that most of the language influence is from the borderlands and the glasgow area. That said, 400 years is a long time... especially considering how young English is.

An interesting example is "weans" vs "bairns" for children... first time I heard the former I had no idea what people were talking about. "Weans" seems to be a shortened form of "wee ains" and "bairns" is from Old English:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bairn

She's turned the weans against you mate aye?

I'm originally from Shetland, but moved to the Scottish Borders when I was young, and do remember people had a very hard time understanding my Shetland dialect (which I had to lose pretty quickly to communicate locally).

And to the original point, neither Shetland nor the Scottish Borders have ever had any Gaelic influence at any point in their history, and recent attempts to claim otherwise tend not to go down too well with the locals.

I had understood that there was some kind of Brythonic language attested in the Scottish Borders.

Cumbric? At least until the victory of Anglo-Saxon languages there three or four centuries after the Roman withdrawal.

So yeah, not quite (modern) Scots Gaelic but part of the same family of languages. And not at all recently, but potentially hundreds and hundreds of years of language contact in domestic and community use in some parts, as early Scots was first forming out of a continuum of Northumbrian English dialects.

The problem is the extremely sparse written record.

It's basically "pre-history" in terms of academic discipline, until the high medieval. There just aren't historical/written sources.

What is known comes from third party accounts and relates more to current political happenings than language, history and whatnot.

A Saxon scribe describing the politics of Scotland with 3 sentences of Latin doesn't tell you much about Scottish peasantry.

Even into the early modern, it's pretty hard to know what's happening with spoken dialects.

We know Romans used "Scot" referring to Gaelic speakers, the language spoken throughout Ireland.

We know that 1000 years later Constantine, the product of Pict-Scot marriage declares a united kingdom of Scotland. We know that proto-english, danish, Gaelic and (presumably) Pictish were spoken. What writing exists is usually in Latin.

That said... who knows. The academic "best guess" is not necessarily a good guess.

So yes... Pictish might be closely related to Welsh. It might have been a totally unrelated language. It might not be a language at all.

Also there's a lot of baggage. Ideas from shaky 18th century sociology might be crucial to modern identity.

The idea of Scotland as a uniform "Gaelic kingdom" is a highly political one today.

"Dialeck? Why, we ain't got no dialeck, but if'n ya go daown th' road 'bout tin mile..."

> Scots is an English dialect, descended from Northumbrian English.

Not being familiar with that term I looked it up [0] and was surprised by how familiar much of the vocabulary sounds to me, and i'm from south west England... I recognize a number of these words from my childhood (although not so much these days), and many others feel more like an natural accent transformation of a standard english word (although I suppose that might not be the etymology). Admittedly a good chunk of them are completely alien to "standard english" and whether you recognize them or not is more to do with exposure.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northumbrian_dialect#Vocabular...

I don't recognise most of them, just a few. Banter is now heard in the south. My mum says mollycoddle (perhaps it's widely known like banter?) Interestingly, when I lived in Suffolk in the early 2000s people said chud for chewing gum. I found that one funny and thought it was just some slang the kids made up.

deeks - "look" as in "Gie’s a deeks / Gimme a look" caught my eye.

In East London my parents' generation sometimes said "gissa dekko" aka "give us a dekko" aka "give us a look" - but the dekko there came from Hindi, "dekho" (देखो) meaning a casual look or a look-see.

When my elderly neighbor came down from Quebec as a young factory worker, her roommate asked her "Wudjagunnadoodamarra?", and it took quite a while to get her to say "What are you going to do tomorrow?" We got "shell out" from belts of wampum, and woodchuck from Algonquin indian 'wuchak'.

Yeah, Ulster Scots is still somewhat common in the most isolated and rural areas of Northern Ireland, almost exclusively spoken by farmers - who aren't, unsurprisingly, frequent users of the internet.

This is how some US teenager, who didn't speak a lick of the dialect, ended up being the lead contributor to the Scots Wikipedia:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-...

According to my father, who's an Ulsterman, back in the 70s and 80s you would still find job advertisements written in Scots, as supposedly it was a legal requirement to write in both English and Scots - similar to Quebec with English and French. Although most of the time these postings would be complete gibberish as no one who lived in Belfast understood Scots at all.

No, Scottish Gaelic was the main language at the time of Scotland emerging as a nation and for a couple of centuries afterwards.

The demotion of the Scottish Gaelic language is ignorant assertion. Stop listening to it and educate yourself.

This is entirely factually incorrect I'm afraid, Scots is essentially accented English

Far are ye fae?

This is entirely factually incorrect I'm afraid, English is essentially accented Scots.

Dinna ken fit yir spickin aboot

Languages having discrete barriers is a more-or-less modern concept. If you go back in time, basically every town will have a slightly different accent then their neighbor, but if you travel through enough towns eventually you'll find the language completely unintelligible. Like a spatial ship-of-theseus.

Gaelic on signs in the eastern borders and Midlothian are my favourite .

I was going to add that when my father, from Fife on the east coast to Scotland, went to Iceland he was very interested to find out that he could understand many of the place names.

He didn't speak a different language, but had quite a strong accent and also quite a lot of different words. [edit to clarify compared to me born & bred in England]

The main example he used was Kirkjubæjarklaustur which translates as "church farm cloister".

However looking it up this morning adds more depth to the history of the language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkjub%C3%A6jarklaustur#

> Even before the time of the first Norse settlement in Iceland, Irish monks are thought to have lived here. Since 1186, a well known convent of Benedictine nuns, Kirkjubæjar Abbey, was located in Kirkjubæjarklaustur, until the Reformation in 1550.

My family is from Scotland and I was surprised how many slang names for things matched scandinavian languages (Swedish, in my case).

Kirk: Church

Barn (Baen): Children

There was a bunch more, maybe I’ll make a proper list some day.

Yes I think Northern Europe has been quite a mixing pot for a while hence so many common links.

The Vikings first settled in Ireland in about 800 AD so presumably the languages were mixing and evolving.

Your list would be interesting, go for it.

Most of the common links between Nordic languages and English is because English is a Germanic language, but subsequent transfer also certainly happened.

My first name, Lachlan, is a Scottish Gaelic name which was used to describe Scandinavian Vikings

Specifically it means “Lord from the Land of the Loch”, derived from the Scottish name for Norway: Lochlann

I cannot recall others but there a lot of personal and place names of Scottish/Scandinavian mix

——————

PS Lachlan has oddly taken off in Australia and is one of the most popular male names for men my age, along with Murdoch’s kid

Assume the popularity is due to Lachlan Macquarie, a major NSW historical figure?

Correct

I can’t understate the popularity though

I currently work with four Lachlans amongst team of ~20-30

One of these with a rocket mass heater

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mass_heater

would solve the smoke and heating problems in one go. Wouldn't need trees either as you could burn whatever is providing the thatch material - small sticks/brush.

They burned peat, not wood. And I think the smoke was part of the point? The article claims it kept pests out of the roof. Presumably it kept midges away too. Though obviously living with all the smoke wouldn’t be so nice.

Or just a small wind turbine with resistive heating; it's not like Scotland lacks wind. I imagine they didn't use PV because

1) Scotland doesn't get much sun,

2) it'd get nicked by the first viking that came along, and

3) if they put it on the roof then it'd be a nightmare replacing the thatch.

Interesting, in Northern Russia they also had no chimneys up until the beginning of the 20th century (in other places, chimneys were introduced much earlier). They also called it "black heating".

How common was it in Medieval Europe?

Probably depends a lot on the house/roof. If you have a thatched roof you probably didn’t really need a chimney because the roof would be permeable enough.

Why does this remind me of the Four Yorkshiremen comedy sketch - "You were lucky! We lived in hole in the ground."

https://youtu.be/ue7wM0QC5LE?si=exz-ZT2YMmZwmi1G

The smoke killing bugs in the roof is a pretty nice feature.

The Companions barracks

Soil and Soul by Alastair McIntosh talks a lot about these types of dwellings, and the culture of the people who lived in them. It’s a must read if you are interested in learning about the history of that part of the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com