Tryin tae get a decent photie o ma third Scots dictionary, this ane's a Doric frequency dictionary - the 3,200 maist common wirds an aw their spellin variants.

Soutien à Pierre Samson dont la page Facebook a été supprimée.

I'm quite interesting in the use of the word "raring". In Modern English is its exclusively used in the phrase "raring to go". But in other language varieties it is still used in other contexts, "the man was raring in the street".

There was a chap talking about this on the Yimby Podcast the other week. Whilst on the one hand it would lead to higher and lower prices in respective regions, it would also give clearer price signals to suppliers. Each region would develop an appropriate mix of generator tech.

I only just found out that the word "strewn" (as in "his clothes were strewn across the floor") is just the past tense of the verbal form of "straw" - the bits of wheat that get blown away when you harvest wheat.

Israël, qui confirme que le soldat photographié frappant une statue de Jésus est Israélien, présente des excuses

To create the first written Scots work in a specific genre.

It could be that I'm getting old, but I'm buying into the "dead internet theory" That most of the stuff on the internet is just bots and spam, and not real people. Twenty years ago, there were messageboards, real people posting, friends, acquaintances, strangers who you might meet in the pub.

The BBC undercover investigation into false immigration claims is deeply irresponsible journalism. It does not highlight that exploitation by unregulated advisors occurs because legal aid was cut and the system is insane to navigate.

I've got a linguists theory, or maybe a paradigm, an I'm going to try to articulate it in a thread here. Whilst Scots is seen as a sister language to English. It might be more useful to be more specific, Modern Scots is a sister language to Modern English. 1/

It would be interesting to see if the various whale sounds a-codas and i-codas follow Zipf's Law. Is there something that could be described as a vocabulary, or lexical units, that follow the sort of frequency distributions seen in human languages?

It's a fundamental thing that "social media" took away from us, being social with girls we are afraid of.

The best way to win a fight with a wild bear is to ensure it is a properly organised boxing match. The bear will be disqualified in seconds and you would be awarded the win by default.

Serious question: Is Game of Thrones going to become illegal due to the amendments on the Crime and Policing Bill about fictional depictions of incest?

Ukrainian robots capture enemy position without troops in historic first, Zelenskyy says

WHY ARE PEOPLE SO FUCKING ALLERGIC TO ALT TEXT. Anyway, this post contains two screenshots showing that the woman who delivered Trump his McD's today was a woman who testified about how great Trump's stupid OBBB was. So the whole "paid actors" thing they accuse the left of, well.

Nine days on

I've written a SubStack article about using Zipf's Law to identify words that might be the 20,000th most common in the Scots language. Its got some fancy graphs that might be interesting if you're a linguist. #linguistics chrisgilmour.substack.com/p/adventures...

On a related note, I once emailed the ranger of the island of St Kilda, apparently there are absolutely no trees on the entire island. Its all just grass, stone and ground-hugging shrubs.

Its an interesting story, but I gotta point out that whilst £20 million sounds like a lot of money, the public libraries of Scotland spend only £3,000 on Scots language books each year for the 30% of people of people who speak Scots. This is English linguistic imperialism.

Cooper boasts about the role Britain played in drawing up maritime laws to establish freedom of navigation & says we need that restored in the strait of Hormuz. Where was your outrage when Israel was kidnapping British citizens & seizing boats in intl waters?

After Trump's latest shocking threats, Keir Starmer faces a choice. Withdraw US access now to UK air bases, or risk letting British soil be used to commit war crimes.

I really resent endlessly seeing this in the BBC website. They're not flogging ads so don't need our data in the same way other websites might. Could quite believe it's a infiltration plot by rival websites to make the BBC website experience equally crap.

CW: Scots Muckle thanks tae the fowks at SEXTET for includin ma poyum "The Yerl of Buckingham Wauks on the Saubath" in issue 3! (This ane is espeicially for ma Anglican freends 😉⚓) An gin ye're in Glesga, ye can hear me readin it in the installation at Six Foot Gallery till the 21st. (Verra sexy😘)

This is interesting. LLMs serm to perform well in Celtic languages, despite not "officially" supporting them. It's an emergent effect, they just happen to contain enough Gaelic text to function.

GaelEval: Benchmarking LLM Performance for Scottish Gaelic

Over breakfast, my son showed me a "cute animal video". I thought it was obviously AI, and my boy was adamant that it was real. At that point I realised, I simply don't care. If something looks like it might be AI, even if its real, then I have no interest.

BREAKING: Israel's Knesset has passed a law to execute Palestinian detainees. Death by hanging. Mandatory sentencing. No pardon. 90 days to carry out. It applies through military courts with a 96% conviction rate. It does not apply to Israelis.

Trump hops out of bed and immediately posts about war crimes he's planning to commit if he doesn't get what he wants.

I've heard this as an explanation of why Scots speakers report more poor health than non-Scots speakers in the census. Its like "IF YOU DON'T LEARN TO SPEAK ENGLISH THEN ITS YOUR OWN FAULT THAT YOU'RE NOT WELL", despite Scots-speakers paying just as much for their healthcare as non-Scots speakers.

‘A fire that’s burning again’: Welsh language resurges thanks to adult learners The number of people on Dysgu Cymraeg courses has risen by 61% since 2017, as people in Wales rediscover the ‘poetry’ of the language

That Scots is a language. And that “not a language” is an indefensible entirely unscholarly category.

I want to write a thread about slop. Not AI slop but similarly low effort, poor quality produce. Kids magazines with cheap plastic tat on the cover, found in supermarkets. 1/

And yet, they have handed the entire nation's healthcare data and personal information - and the entirety of the FCA's financial regulation data - to the literal self-described neofascist eugenicist tech-Nazis at Palantir with barely a second thought.

I want to write a thread about slop. Not AI slop but similarly low effort, poor quality produce. Kids magazines with cheap plastic tat on the cover, found in supermarkets. 1/

Episode 5 of The Carrying Stream, ‘Gaelic Revival: From Czechia to the Gaìdhealtachd’, recently came out, featuring @poncarova.bsky.social Follow the link to access the full episode: pod.link/1865430519

I've done a Substack article about standardisation of the Scots language, where there's a distinction between "a standard" and the process of "standardisation". chrisgilmour.substack.com/p/new-though...

#DailyOink #Issue2 #StreetHogs #MarkRodgers artwork #MalcolmDouglas as #JTDogg

Yep. In fact, the real failing of students was when we stopped requiring them to regularly search a library catalogue for their reading and instead produced lists with hyperlinks that students simply had to click. As soon as they have to go off list, they’re lost.

This is one of those stories where people will go "yay! D&D!" And fail to take a moment to internalize "12 year olds in jail"

I need to save this to refer to later, as there is an important issue here related to the niche topic of spelling variation in Scots vernacular writing.

To celebrate Dennis The Menace's 75th birthday, here's my article about how there have actually been *THREE* Dennises! #dennis75 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Question for linguists. Is there such a thing as French vernacular writing? Where instead of following the standard orthography taught in schools, its more like the spoken form? Do people write books like that with a non-standard French orthography? @lingthusiasm.com

They’ll have to call it something else, this will just cause needless confusion www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow...

Is it just me, but whilst the "cost of living" is a genuine worry, isn't there a moral aspect here? Thousand of foreign folk are getting slaughtered by bombs dropped by our allies, for no good reason. Its just pointless murder.

Weird thing. Me and the missus are watching that Small Prophets, and she asks me where its set, and "can't I just tell from the accents." Now, to me, none of the actors had an accent, they were all just normal, neutral English voices, nothing regional about them at all.

Watching this live now on RSE's YT channel. Delightful. www.youtube.com/live/pDB87Qj...

✋ Former USG war crimes lawyer here. Apropos of SecDef's remarks this morning: Denial of quarter—even the declaration of no quarter—is a war crime. And recognized as such by the US Government. From DoD's Manual for Military Commissions.

Not even the Nazis expressly announced they were committing war crimes. Indeed, at Nuremberg war crimes were denied. But here, openly, the US Secretary for Defense is explicitly admitting to committing war crimes.

Its about time that another episode of class Dr Who was discovered, and time to roll out The Hector Collectors classic song "Quest for Web of Fear 5" www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtkB...