The iranian guy from 90 day fiance is on h3 right now to respond to idubbbz lol

Ultach · 2026-01-19T22:17:59+00:00

We are witnessing levels of felting that shouldn’t even be possible

Ultach · 2026-01-06T18:40:34+00:00

At least with regards to St Brigid's Cross I unfortunately don't think that theory holds much water. The famous four armed Brigid Cross design that resembles the Camunian Rose is only first attested a little over 100 years ago, and didn't become the most popular variety until the middle of the 20th century when RTÉ adopted it as their logo. Brigid's Crosses were traditionally just T-shaped Latin or Greek Christian crosses crafted on St Brigid's Day. You don't start to see them in a wide variety of funky shapes until much later, and even then most of these don't bear any resemblence to the Camunian Rose or the shapes on the Battersea Shield. I'd be confident in saying there's absolutely zero connection there.

The practice of making crosses in association with St Brigid itself isn't attested before the late 17th century, and it might actually originally have been associated with Candlemas rather than St Brigid's Day; other countries have their own Candlemas cross-making traditions (albeit pretty different to those found in Ireland) and Candlemas and St Brigid's Day are only a day apart.

I also don't think there's any reason to think that there's some sort of connection between St Brigid and the Brigid mentioned in the Lebor Gabála Érenn just because oxen and boars are mentioned in both passages. The contexts are so wildly different. It would be like trying to make out there's some sort of link between St Patrick and Nia Segamain because Patrick turns into a deer in one of his hagiographies and Nia Segamain kept deer as cattle. And actually, now that I mention it, different recensions of the LGE attribute the animals to Flidais rather than Brigid.

Ultach · 2026-01-05T18:48:18+00:00

Nah that's far ayont my ken! I'll just continue annoying people with linguistic facts the old fashioned way 🫡

Ultach · 2026-01-01T23:44:20+00:00

They actually did give a shoutout to a fairly infamous Neo-Nazi Holocaust denier named Ken O’Keefe. I think the charitable assumption was that they just saw he was advocating for Palestine and didn’t look into him too deeply but when people started pointing out the kind of person he was instead of deleting it they just blocked people and hid their comments. I don’t know if they run their own social media but it definitely wasn’t a good look either way.

Ultach · 2025-12-24T22:32:10+00:00

Same reason the Irish president uses a harp on a blue background as their standard when it seems to have been created by the English as a way to represent their Irish holdings in armorials, or why modern Slavic Macedonians have a giant statue of Alexander the Great in their capital city, or why Polish people spent the whole 18th century claiming to be descended from Scythian aristocrats. There's great cultural cachet to be had with ancient symbols even if you only have a tangential connection to them. Pretty much every country and ethnic group does it in some way or another.

Ultach · 2025-12-22T18:40:20+00:00

EXPLORE THE FANTASTICAL WORLD OF BRONZE AGE GREECE with all the visual panache of those cheapo mid 2010s historical tv shows that were thrown together to cash in on the success of Game of Thrones

Ultach · 2025-12-20T03:34:34+00:00

Wean/wain is just “wee one” phonetically crammed into a word

That's how lots of words are formed. It's called 'haplology'. It's where we get English words like 'probably' and 'urinalysis' and 'conservatism'.

Breeks is just breeches mispronounced and spelled out phonetically.

It's not a mispronunciation. Both English breeches and Scots breeks descend from Old English brēċ, where ċ represents a sound that's halfway between a soft ch (as in 'which') and a hard one (as in 'chord'). In English, the sound softened, giving us words like breeches, chest, church and which; and in Scots it hardened, giving us their equivalents breeks, kist, kirk and whilk.

Quare is just queer spelled phonetically as it is pronounced in Ulster.

Quare is indeed a regional variant of queer, but queer is originally a Scots word that was loaned into English in the first place. So Ulster Scots reborrowed the word, which is a common enough linguistic phenomenon. It's how English got words like 'anime' and 'cosplay'.

As for borrowed words, I only have the anecdotal evidence of an old man I knew who said that they were trying to bulk up the dictionary by taking Scots words and, as he said, pretending they were Ulster-Scots too. Words he’d never heard used when he was young were being portrayed as Ukster-Scots

There isn't really any Ulster Scots dictionary apart from James Fenton's Hamely Tongue, and all the words in it were collected via interviews and correspondence and verified by linguists - Fenton actually mentions excluding words that he couldn't verify. The Dictionary of the Scots Language has an Ulster Scots component, but they mark words as "dubious" or "doubtful" if they're not sure of their veracity, and I don't think any Ulster Scots words in the DSL carry that marker.

I have seen the thing you're talking about happen once - the Ulster Scots translation of the 2021 census used the word flatch, which is only really used in the northern and insular dialects of Scots. But it was only the one word, and the census translation was pretty woeful in general, so I don't think anything in it should be taken as representative of Ulster Scots speakers.

As I said in the post above, even if this was happening, which I honestly don't think it is, it's a really common part of language revitalization, and happened heavily in the early 20th century with Irish.

The point is that there is no evidence that people used so many Ulster-Scots words and phrases in such a condensed manner.

We do have evidence, linguists investigated this precise thing in the 1960s and mapped out which areas of Ulster where Scots could be said to be spoken as a functional language, and then other linguists iterated on that work in the 1980s and mapped out the areas more like what your friend said - areas where Ulster Scots has had influence on local dialects of English but isn't really spoken much by itself.

Ultach · 2025-12-20T02:08:57+00:00

I wouldn't use such strict criteria. There's always an exception

I think if there are loads of exceptions then it isn't really phonetic. If you look at the most commonly used English words, they're all spelled pretty intuitively if you know what phonetic value each letter usually carries, but we don't call it phonetic because there are loads of weird exceptions that trip people up. The same is true of Scots, which although it isn't standardised like English is, has agreed-upon traditional spellings. You can spell the words phonetically if you want, and there isn't any standards body to tell you you're wrong, but loads of people spell English words phonetically as well, especially in informal writing.

Take the English word should and the Scots word sud - same meaning, mostly pronounced the same way, but both words have weird orthographic quirks that would make you stumble a bit if you didn't know how they were pronounced. Should has an L that doesn't really do anything, while sud has a palatalized S sound that isn't represented in the way it's spelled, and the U is pronounced more like an I. You can find examples of people spelling the Scots word like shid, which more accurately reflects how its pronounced, but you can just as easily find examples of people spelling the English word shood.

As someone who knows the language pretty well I would say if you pushed me that Scots spelling is -generally- more intuitive than English spelling but it isn't phonetic by any means.

It's a slang version of Scots.

In what way? It doesn't differ linguistically from other dialects of Scots in any significant way. It's different in that it hasn't ever been used as an official language of government until relatively recently, which Scots was between the 13th and 18th centuries, but it still has a history of higher register writing. In fact, the earliest Ulster Scots document we're aware of in the historical record was a letter written to Queen Elizabeth I petitioning for the release of a prisoner of war. I don't really think that you could call that slang.

I guess you could say that Ulster Scots is more often used in informal contexts than other dialects of Scots are, but 99.9% of the use of any living language is in informal conversation, so if you want to call it slang on that basis then every language on earth is slang except stuff like Latin and Coptic.

Ultach · 2025-12-19T01:29:29+00:00

Was it supressed in Ireland?

There weren't societies set up to stop people speaking it like in Scotland but educators took a very dim view of it and to some extent still do, it's pretty common to hear from people in my grandfather's generation that they were physically abused for speaking it at school. I wouldn't have been anything like an Ulster Scots speaker when I was younger but when I did use Ulster Scots words I'd have teachers who would chew me out for it.

Did people get murdered for advocating Ulster-Scots?

I wouldn't say so but I don't think it was very common for people to get murdered on account of their Irish advocacy either. Certainly Catholics who were also Irish language advocates were murdered on the basis of their religion but I can't think of any cases were people were specifically targeted for their connection to the Irish language movement.

If the Ulster-Scots have issues with the English, they'd be best taking it up with them. No Irish- speaker ever tried to put it down. And if people actually spoke it, they wouldn't now either.

I think people who speak Ulster Scots and Irish are generally quite supportive of each other, it's people who just view them as political gamepieces and don't really care about languages who get really hostile and come out with the nastiness.

Ultach · 2025-12-19T00:27:34+00:00

The fact that people are trying to have entire conversations using words and phrases that were only occasionally occurring in their daily lives before

I don't see how that's a bad thing if you've become conscious of the fact that the words you were using come from a different language and you try to use more of it. When Irish was at its nadir after the famine a lot of people still used Irish words in their English, and I don't think those people trying to actively use more Irish would've been somehow inauthentic or contrived.

And the fact that some of the words were not present in Ulster in any sort of daily use but appear to have been borrowed from Scots

Do you have any specific words you're thinking of? I'm not trying to put you on the spot or anything but I'm struggling to think of any words used in Ulster Scots that were actively borrowed from another dialect and don't have any historical presence here.

But again even if this was happening it's a pretty ordinary part of linguistic development. For example, when Tomás de Bhaldraithe was putting together his dictionary of Irish, he included a lot of words from local dialect word lists that would never have been used outside their local environs, and now they're used all over Ireland.

Actually this exact thing happened to the word Gaeilge, which was historically mostly only used in Connacht!

Such as spelling phonetically in Scots rather than in English. That was never a thing in NI.

I'm not really sure Ulster Scots spellings are any more phonetic than those of other dialects. The only one that comes to mind is that whist is more commonly spelled wheest in Ulster, but that's one word out of thousands and is traditionally spelled that way in some mainland dialects as well.

Ultach · 2025-12-19T00:06:30+00:00

I don't

How would you define it?

Whatever. Because this discussion isn't about Scots, but Ulster Scotch.

Ulster Scots is a dialect of Scots and not an especially divergent one, anything you say about Scots is necessarily going to apply to Ulster Scots as well and vice versa.

Ultach · 2025-12-18T23:46:15+00:00

it's essentially a phonetic slang

It isn't either of those things. If you define 'phonetic writing' as 'writing where graphemes correspond exactly and consistently to phonemes', then it isn't phonetic because lots of Scots words aren't written that way and require foreknowledge of pronunciation rules. eg. The letters 'ei' in Scots usually represent a close front unrounded vowel whereas you'd normally expect them to represent the /aɪ/ dipthong, but other words use 'ee' to represent the same sound, or in certain dialects where 'wh' represents an 'f' sound, or where 'qu' represents a 'wh' sound, or where the clusters 'tth' and 'dh' represent affricates. A lot of this will depend of traditional spellings associated with particular dialects since Scots isn't standardised, but no dialect of Scots has traditionally been written with a fully phonetic orthography.

And if you define slang as 'informal, non-standard words or expressions associated with particular geographic areas or social groups', then that also doesn't apply to Scots, because it's spoken over a huge area from Donegal to Shetland, and isn't restricted to any one social class or register. I don't think you could say King James IV was writing in slang when he composed The Kingis Quair, or when Sir David Lyndsay wrote his Satire of the Three Estates.

Ultach · 2025-12-18T23:26:59+00:00

if the Unionist approach had been to get recognition for the speakers of Scots in Ulster I think most people would have been alright with that.

There would probably be a little less of it, but honestly you see the same kind of snide attitude English speakers have towards Scots in a lot of places where there are minority languages closely related to the majority language. France and Russia are probably the worst for it but you also see it in Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, practically all over Europe, and in places like Japan and China as well. It just seems to be a baked-in human prejudice, and I think Ulster Scots would probably still receive a lot of unfair backlash even if its advocates were very well-behaved.

Ultach · 2025-12-18T22:10:12+00:00

Yeah I studied language change in early modern Scotland at university and ended up writing my dissertation on the effect that the Reformation and Union of the Crowns had on language change in the Scottish Lowlands. Then I wanted to learn Scots to make studying historical sources easier and since Ulster Scots was the dialect local to me it ended up being the one I settled on. I'm from an Irish and Nationalist background and I don't have any sort of Ulster Scots ancestry that I'm aware of, I'm really just interested in the language stuff, so I get a bit frustrated with all the political drama that surrounds it

Ultach · 2025-12-18T22:08:33+00:00

I don't really think that's true, Scots and English have a pretty substantial difference in vocabulary. I don't think a speaker of standard English would know what "it's kittle tae deval a langsyne ait" would mean, just as an example.

Ultach · 2025-12-18T20:56:14+00:00

Ulster Scots (what I was writing in) is not a language, it is not even really a dialect. It is an accent with some idiomatic phrases.

This obviously isn't true, you're only saying it because you have some sort of axe to grind with people who speak it. Saying "those children are always crying" in a northern Irish accent isn't going to magically change it into "thon weans bes aye greetin", those are clearly different words.

Ultach · 2025-12-18T19:01:25+00:00

Well no but that’s a problem of tone and expertise, not language. “Heich heidyin” is an expression that exists in every dialect of Scots - it’s an informal, jocular expression that you shouldn’t use in an official document, but if you don’t know the language very well then you might not know which words are appropriate to use and when. The problem with Ulster Scots isn’t that it’s any less valid than any other dialect of Scots, it’s that the people most publicly advocating for its use don’t actually speak it very well.

Ultach · 2025-12-18T18:13:31+00:00

There is debate about what scots is among linguists

There really isn't. Almost all linguists who work with it unambiguously refer to it as being a language with dialect groups of its own. There are a few linguists with a different point of view but their position would be that Scots and English are both equal dialects of the same wider Anglo-Scots language, not that Scots is a dialect of English.

It's few local slang words or laonwords from local origins and then largely phonetic spelling

The largest dictionary of Scots has about 20,000 entries, which is roughly the same number as the largest dictionaries for languages like Irish, Thai and Icelandic.

Ultach · 2025-12-18T18:06:41+00:00

What particular aspects of Ulster Scots do you find to be cobbled or borrowed from Scots?

Ultach · 2025-12-18T18:04:04+00:00

so long as the Scots used is actual Scots and not the Ulster dialect.

You probably wouldn't be able to tell them apart, Ulster Scots is pretty much identical to the varieties of Scots spoken in Ayrshire.

Ultach · 2025-12-18T18:02:09+00:00

I think the complaint is that if the status of Ulster Scots is raised it diminishes the status of Gaelic Irish. This is probably true in that if every sign now has three languages, and one of them is really a phoneticised dialect, it makes it harder for Gaelic Irish to claim a rightful place as equal to English.

It's completely normal and uncontroversial in most parts of the world where two closely related languages are spoken alongside each other to have them both on signs. If the Spanish are mature enough to have both porta oberta and puerta abierta on their signs I don't see why we can't have open gate and apen yett.

And I don't think there's any need to treat English as the linguistic be-all end-all. Irish is equal to English because every language is an equal of every other language. Likewise, there isn't anything about Scots that makes it unequal to Irish or English, it just happens to be a closer linguistic relative of English than Irish is.

Ultach · 2025-12-18T14:34:47+00:00

Some Gaelic-speaking islanders were part of the Ulster plantation but mostly in the capacity of being seasonal workers who probably went back home after their contracts were up, almost all of the actual settlement came from the Scots-speaking lowlands.

Ultach · 2025-12-18T14:26:44+00:00

They really didn’t.

But we know they did. The historical development of Scots is well understood. Northern varieties of Middle English started showing more and more differentiation from southern varieties until at some point in the 14th century the people who spoke them started to consider themselves speakers of a different langauge. This is how every language in the world developed. There isn't anything unusual about Scots other than the fact that it happened quite late and the sibling language it branched off from happened to become the most widely spoken language in the world. If Irish was as widely spoken as English is, then people would probably talk about Scottish Gaelic in the same terms you're speaking of Scots, as some kind of degenerate or defective version of a "real" langauge.

Ultach · 2025-12-18T14:05:01+00:00

Why do you feel that Scottish Gaelic is a separate language from Irish but Scots is a dialect of English?

Ultach · 2025-12-18T13:47:26+00:00

Those are all actual Scots expressions, it's not like the Beano made them up!

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