The Modern Scots era was a period of enterprise and radical tumult, both for Scotland and her languages, encompassing the Treaty of Union, the Jacobite Rebellion, and the advent and diffusion of Scottish Standard English (the not-at-all embarrassing Scottish equivalent of RP). Whilst the Union of Parliaments in 1707 is often regarded as hastening the demise of the Scots language, the ensuing protests (read: shit-storm) produced a resurgence in Scots literature: ballads and oral tales and songs were revisited, revitalised and committed to paper, many for the first time. Despite this literary response, though, the political and social centre of gravity had inveterately shifted south and the century would confirm the Scots leid’s demotion to a non-standard language, a shift attended by the issues of stigmatism, stagnation and obsolescence anticipated by such reordering. The so-called Scots continuum – polarised by Broad Scots and Scottish Standard English – emerged to become the defining apparatus for approaching the language, linguistically and aesthetically; a framework that would increasingly force most readers to discriminate Scots texts via dimensions of class and education.

The influence of an English-speaking readership would be critical in the development of the Scots language’s fortunes in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries: the advent of literacy^[1], wherein Scots would be taught English linguistics norms, would result in the use of Anglicised <oo> spelling to represent /u/ in words such as hoose, moose and aboot, and the exponential erosion of Scots lexis: the departure south of Scotland’s premier political institutions limited the capacity of Scots to innovate lexically, particularly for scientific or specialist terms – there being, for instance, no specifically Scots term for evolution. Or felching. (Editor's note for the unwary: please don't google 'felching'.)

Most iconic, perhaps, of the official downfall of Scots was the introduction of the apologetic apostrophe: the item of punctuation signifying ‘missing’ letters in Scots words such as no’ (not) and fu’ (full). First used by the notable antiquarian, Allan Ramsay (1686-1758), the apologetic apostrophe was a marketing strategy by the Scottish literati, designed to make the language accessible to a swelling, middle-class English-speaking readership whilst retaining, ostensibly, the perception of authenticity. For example, observe below the opening lines of two versions of the story of Thomas the Rhymer, the first by Anna Gordon (1747-1810) and the second by Walter Scott (1771-1832):

True Thomas lay oer yon’d grassy bank

And he beheld a Ladie gay

A Ladie that was brisk and bold

Come riding o’er the fernie brae

Her skirt was of the grass green silk

Her mantle of the velvet fine

At ilka tett of her horses mane

Hung fifty silver bells and nine

Gordon, 2011: lines 1-8

True Thomas lay on Huntlie bank;

A ferlie he spied wi’ his e’e:

And there he saw a ladye bright,

Come riding down by the Eildon Tree.

 

Her shirt was o’ the grass-green silk,

Her mantle o’ the velvet fine;

At ilka tett of her horse’s mane,

Hang fifty siller bells and nine.

Scott, 1812: lines 1-8

Aside from obvious differences in orthography, structure and punctuation (to be revisited in a later article), note the absence of apologetic apostrophes in Gordon’s version and their introduction in Scott’s in line 2 (the latter’s version being inspired by the former’s). Unlike Scott, Gordon wrote down her version of the ballad purely for the benefit of various antiquarian scholars and writers. Scott, however, produced his version in his ballad collection, The Minstrelsy, whose ensuing popularity with English-speaking audiences would make him very rich indeed. This strategy to improve the marketability of Scottish prose and poetry would, according to Corbett, Mclure et al, have “the unfortunate effect of suggesting that Broad Scots was not a separate language system, but rather a divergent and inferior form of English” (2003: 13). Of course, as the Mongongo nut is salvaged from even the most impenetrable pile of steaming elephant shit, so too was there a redeeming factor to this affair. As a result of the uptake of textual transmissions of Scots works by the antiquarians and other interested parties, “from the eighteenth century onwards there is an exponential growth in the variety of literary forms in which Scots is used” (Bann & Corbett, 2015: 67). So that’s nice.

It’s important to differentiate between an apologetic apostrophe and a simple contraction – something this linguistics podcast fails to do. They argue that contracting over to o’er is an apologetic apostrophe – which is incorrect. Crack out the pitchforks and dismiss their lies! Possibly burn their holdings. Leer at their cat and thus make him uncomfortable… Contracting over to o’er is a common method, evident throughout the history of English, for shoehorning bi- (and sometimes tri-) syllabic words into monosyllabic varieties for the purposes of metrical rhythm e.g. if you’re writing to a meter of iambic tetrameter (four feet of dee-dum) but have nine syllables, that just won’t do. What they’re referencing is an eliding apostrophe – NOT an apologetic one. Be vigilant and stay safe, kids.

Someone really ought to write a history of the apologetic apostrophe – indeed, a detailed history of the apostrophe itself would be fascinating (fuck you, it would be). I say this only because, in the course of the last three hundred years, the apologetic apostrophe went through a period of radical evolution, transforming from a linguistic unit of accessibility and into a literary device, and the details of this mutation are unclear. By what manner (and media) did the apologetic apostrophe diffuse? At what pace? Was there more than a single country of diffusive origin, or is this a singular Scottish innovation? Or, one wonders aghast, is the literary device an independent invention, originating independently from its linguistic cousin? If you don’t find out, I’ll have to do the donkey work and I tire so very easily.

The influence of an English-speaking readership would be critical in the development of the Scots language’s fortunes in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

Despite the fug of terra incognita, the apologetic apostrophe made the transition from linguistic feature to literary device and, as with all things literary, the function of the apologetic apostrophe in fiction seems less concerned with accessibility than it is expressing a characteristic of its respective speaker. Question: recall, if you can, instances of the apologetic apostrophe in novels, poems, video games etc. What was the nature of the speaker? An august elf? A sagacious wizard? A young hero, emerging into adulthood and struggling to not masturbate for 500 pages? You’re fuckin’ right it wisnae. The apologetic apostrophe in literature has (almost) become universally applied as part of a wider characterising apparatus wherein supporting characters of certain personalities, such as the brutish minion, the sweet-but-simple friend, are given non-standard dialects – indicated by apologetic apostrophes – to indicate their natures. Observe the two following examples:

“An’ here’s Harry!” exclaims Hagrid, when he meets the novel’s protagonist in chapter four, continuing, “Las’ time I saw you, you was only a baby” (Rowling, 1997: 39). Note the apologetic apostrophes in the opening words of each sentence and then consider Hagrid’s nature: a good-natured groundskeeper, loyal but naïve, rustic, comedic (crucially unintentionally), and magically-impotent. This echoes historical examples – for instance in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, the character of John Barnet is a reverend’s manservant: perceptive but disposable. Hinting at his suspicions of the protagonist’s dark heart, he says: “They find ma bits o’ gibes come hame to their hearts wi’ a kind o’ yerk, an’ that gars them wince” (Hogg, 2010: 80). Of course, whatever perceptive abilities he possesses are rendered ineffectual by his non-standard dialect – his efforts to thwart evil are ignored.

As with Hogg’s prose in the early 19^th Century, Rowling’s use of the apologetic apostrophe is part of a wider nexus of sociolinguistic and phonaesthetic tropes: pioneered in Scots literature (for the same reasons as the apologetic apostrophe), it became, and continues to be, a popular device by authors to write narrative in standard English and contain non-standard dialectal speech within dialogue.

It’s still less common for a speaker in fiction (and particularly the fantasy genre) of a non-standard dialect to be written as the protagonist of any literary venture, but one such instance is Lyra Belacqua: the fearsome, bidialectal protagonist of Pullman’s (utterly magnificent) The Northern Lights (also known, unnecessarily, as The Golden Compass). Unlike Hagrid, then, where Rowling’s use of the apologetic apostrophe is arguably solely literary to convince us of the stereotypical qualities that attend its use (see also the driver of the Knight Bus, Stan – Choo lookin’ at? – Shunpike), Pullman deploys the apologetic apostrophe in order to reflect the communities of practice that Lyra moves in, a phenomenon explained by Milroy as “the closer an individual’s network ties are with his local community, the closer his language approximates to localised vernacular norms” (1980: 175). In essence, Lyra uses standard English variants whenever speaking to an authoritative audience, such as her father, Lord Asriel, and non-standard variants when speaking to peers.

Observe this passage from chapter 2 between Lyra and Lord Asriel:

“Did they vote to give you money?” she said, sleepily.

“Yes.”

“What’s Dust?” she said, struggling to stand up after having been cramped for so long.

“Nothing to do with you.”

“It is to do with me,” she said, “If you wanted me to be a spy in the wardrobe you ought to tell me what I’m spying about. Can I see the man’s head?”

Pullman, 1995: 28-29

Now consider this passage between Lyra and the other children of Oxford:

“The Gobblers,” she said. “En’t you heard of the Gobblers?”

…

“Gobblers,” said Lyra’s acquaintance, whose name was Dick. “It’s stupid. These stupid Gyptians, they pick up all kinds of stupid ideas.”

“They said there was Gobblers in Banbury a couple of weeks ago. They probably come to Oxford now to get kids from us. It must’ve been them what got Jessie.”

“…They en’t real, Gobblers. Just a story.”

“They are!” Lyra said, “The Gyptians seen ‘em!”

Pullman, 1995: 60

The Lyra engaging with the other children of Oxford would never use ought; likewise, the Lyra attendant to her father carefully avoids non-standard expressions requiring the authorial illumination of an apologetic apostrophe such as “en’t” or “’em.” Whilst Pullman’s use of the apologetic apostrophe is arguably somewhat more sophisticated than Rowling’s, functioning as an indicator of the complex linguistic landscapes we all navigate, and Lyra is certainly less of a caricature than Hagrid, the use of the apologetic apostrophe in both texts remains bound to its original mission: decorating non-standard speech for the benefit of standard speakers (or at least speakers with an understanding of standard English as the default). It ought to be said there’s nothing inherently wrong with this – all languages have prestige forms – but it is important we’re aware of its function and impact. For science.

There are many souls the world over for whom language is a political battleground, often attended by issues of language revival. Such a scrimmage is (and has been for some time) being waged in Scotland. Not being in the business of language revival myself, suffice to say the situation concerns attempts to rejuvenate a stagnant Scots language, presumably with ultimate goal being to establish it once again as a prestige form within Scottish society. The role of apologetic apostrophe has been integral within this movement and its exorcism from textual varieties of Scots has become a socio-political act. Minutes from the meeting of the Makar’s Club in 1947 simples reads: “Apostrophe’s to be discouraged.” The website of the British Ordnance Survey, a repository of maps and guide to outdoor Britain, writes: “In earlier writing an apostrophe will be found in such words, for example, ha’, to indicate the loss of ll, but this is no longer acceptable.” The banishment of the apologetic apostrophe was a key tenet of Lallans Scots, the synthetic variety of the language created in the early 20^th Century by poets such as Hugh MacDiarmid to supply Scotland with a unified national language. Whilst one might describe the idea of Lallans as an ongoing project, it has produced some rather beautiful lexis e.g. watergaw: “an imperfect or fragmentary rainbow” (Macleod, 1999: 59).

It’s still less common for a speaker in fiction (and particularly the fantasy genre) of a non-standard dialect to be written as the protagonist…

The elision of the apologetic apostrophe can also be interpreted as an important political statement, particular concerning notions of identity, in other varieties of English.

A notable example is in the poetry of the much-celebrated (and rightly so) writer and artist, Louise Bennett (pictured above). Her poem, Yuh Nephew Sue, is written in unfettered Jamaican English, as shown in its opening lines:

Aunt Tama, dear, me sad fi hear

How storm wreck Jackass Tung;

But wus of all, yuh one deggeh

Coaknut tree tumble dung!

Las week dem had a meetin fi all De coaknut growers what

Lose coaknut tree eena de storm, So me was eena dat.

Bennet, 2016: lines 1-6

In a world where social issues inevitably intersect with one another, reifying one’s identity through language is an understandable act, and thus the elision of the apologetic apostrophe an understandable protest – and in the 21^st Century, it can be profoundly post-colonial. Socio-politics aside, the deconstruction of the apologetic apostrophe is perhaps an inevitable outcome of language evolution: change and deviation, as it does, becoming subsumed by systemic regulation.

Given its current trajectory, it’s likely the apologetic apostrophe will vanish genre-by-genre, beginning with, one imagines, non-fiction and its dissolution eventually migrating throughout the entirety of fiction. The apologetic apostrophe, however, is a fascinating example of how a single unit of punctuation can reach across linguistics, literature, history and politics, and in that regard we ought to admire the pluck of the little fellow.

If your whistle has been moistened by this article, you might consider ‘It’s glo/t/al stop, not glo/ʔ/al stop!’ Or don’t – I’m not paid to do this so my attitude to your education is, at best, apathetic. As a parting gift, however, do enjoy this screenshot of a cockney cockatrice.

References

• Bennett, L. (2016), Yuh Nephew Sue, Retrieved from: http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/art-leisure/20160911/poems-0

• Corbett, J., McClure, J. & Stuart-Smith, J. (2003), A Brief History of Scots, The Edinburgh Companion to Scots, ed. Corbett, McClure & Stuart-Smith, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).

• Hogg, J. (2010), The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

• Macleod, I. (1999), Scots Thesaurus, (Edinburgh: Polygon).

• Milroy, L. (1980), Language and Social Networks, (Baltimore: University of Park Press).

• Rowling, J. (1997), Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, (London: Bloomsbury).

• Pullman, P. (1998), The Northern Lights, (London: Scholastic).

I felt a sense of pain when I beheld

The silent trees, and saw the intruding sky.

Then, dearest Maiden, move along these shades

In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand

Touch – for there is a spirit in the woods.

William Wordsworth, Nutting (1800)

With not a little reservation, I’ll admit: previously, I’ve never liked platform games. The rigid, linear trajectory always struck me as tyrannical; an autocratic device that purposefully dispensed with meaningful story and character development in favour of a tightly-controlled ‘bonus’ economy, the player conditioned from the game’s inception to be satisfied, even sedated, by the promise of scores-without-ceilings, base power-ups dosing ephemeral advantages, and a trope-drenched plot dotted with Manichean characters, each of whom are about as charismatic as a recycled tampon. Further, and I regard this as a foundational gaming principle to which I fervently subscribe, if there’s no opportunity to creep on a broody elf or dashing mage, I’m really not interested.

So when I chanced upon an image of Ori and the Blind Forest, I’m not really sure why I decided to buy it. Likely it’s the result of my prizing aesthetic quality above all else (life is infinitely more negotiable, if a little less rich, when you estimate the merits of a prospective friendship based not on personal compatibility but on how long you’ll be able to tolerate their looking like an animated bin-bag). The bioluminescent landscape, the character design, the obvious depth of Naru and Ori’s connection: it’s disarming, and immediately brought to life by the exquisitely haunting opening soundtrack, all of which inspired the thought, quite unbidden: “This game is going to be baws-to-the-wall awesome.”

The story itself recalls the abiding trope of the endangered forest, destabilised and unbalanced, its peril engineered by an external, often apathetic force. Throughout the game, I was reminded of Princess Mononoke, and in particular the kinship in motive between Kuro, the bereft antagonist, and Lady Eboshi. Both fight against a forest indifferent or opposed to their wellbeing, and both intend to retaliate with fatal finality, regardless of consequence. This is what stayed with me – long after the credits were done and I’d moved on to my n^th replay of Inquisition, I couldn’t forget the injustice. Through no fault of her own, Kuro’s chicks are killed by a reckless ceremony of the Spirit Tree, the heart of the forest of Nibel. In an effort to protect her last egg suffering a similar fate to its brothers and sisters, Kuro strikes at the Spirit Tree and triggers a cataclysmic series of events that threatens to devastate the landscape, an act whose motive is cruelly dismissed by the narrator as the result of “her misguided will.” And the injustice is poetic: the fateful ceremony conducted by the Spirit Tree was itself a desperate attempt to find its lost charge, Ori.

The experience of playing Ori and the Blind Forest is restful, and nourishing, and revitalising – it’s a game that provides the player with a supreme sensory satisfaction. But it’s also frustrating, and heart-breaking: Kuro ultimately sacrifices herself, not for the forest, but to protect her last egg from being destroyed by the destabilised landscape. She has no way of knowing that, after her death, her last egg would be found and nurtured by Naru, Ori’s adoptive mother. There’s no apology, no justice and barely any acknowledgement for what was inflicted on her and her unborn young.

But it’s this poetic injustice where so much of the game’s narrative and emotional impact draws strength. The theme of parental love and altruism is prevalent throughout – we see it in the motives of Naru, Kuro and the Spirit Tree – and the absence of a universal happy ending, a reward for each character’s efforts, is what gives this game the emotional maturity that makes its story so compelling.

“…it’s this poetic injustice where so much of the game’s narrative and emotional impact draws strength.”

Despite the absence of any humankind in the game, there is a distinct anthropocentric imperative present, each character compelled by distinctly human sensations and scenarios: Kuro’s bereavement and righteous rage, her and Naru’s selfless capacity for sacrifice, their desperation to protect what they love; Ori’s heartbreak and resolve; and Gumon’s dispossession and loneliness. This kind of anthropomorphism has often been dismissed by critics as “sentimental appropriation of the non-human for human ends,” and guilty of what John Ruskin called the “pathetic fallacy” – an emotional falseness. Examples can be found throughout art, historical and contemporary, popular and obscure: from Dream of the Rood, a 10th Century Anglo-Saxon poem told from the perspective of the cross on which Christ was crucified, to “Angels of rain and lightning” in Percy Shelley’sOde to the West Wind(1820); from Aesop’s brash hare and slow but steady tortoise (and refereeing fox) to Tolkien’s Ents. A primary issue that ecocritics have with anthropomorphism is that conceiving the non-human world as human-centric compels us to understand nature, the landscape, in human terms and thus inevitably exploit it for human benefit. Tempting thought it may be to dismiss such a construction as the ramblings of a dehydrated hippie, there is a substantial subscription to this argument (see Further Reading) and so, I suppose, we ought to consider it. Certainly, constraining one’s world view to any universal principle is, universally, a bad idea but scholars such as Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle (who offer an admirable explanation of ecocriticism in their book Literature, Criticism and Theory) fail to show why anthropomorphism is a bad thing – ecocritics in general have established themselves as talented archivists of anthropomorphic instances in literature but offer little empirical data on how this translates into pitch-fork-wielding villagers lynching daffodils.

The ‘anthropomorphism = bad’ contention is administered by its proponents largely against literary instances and so, crucially, this ignores the sizeable swathes of media, such as video games and animation, which deploy anthropomorphism either in defence of the landscape (think virtually every Miyazaki film) or as a performative device with which to deepen our relationship to the narrative – and, consequently, the landscape in, under and on which it takes place. Imbuing something with human qualities intensifies, rather than negates or qualifies, our affections: the friendly dog who adores touch, the recalcitrant kitty who resents affection (and this only makes us love him more), the parrot with a sense of humour, roses that shiver with delight when watered. Language, most glorious of human constructs, invites anthropomorphism, and understanding something in human terms is an inevitable, but by no means necessarily disastrous, consequence. Ori and the Blind Forest captures the performative quality of anthropomorphism perfectly: my heart broke for Kuro the owl, and sharing Gumon’s sorrow as you understand he is the last of his kind is inexorable. Even if a White Rhino doesn’t understand its state as the last of its kind, we – humans – do and it compels us to care and defend and nurture.

Ori and the Blind Forest celebrates that human capacity to relate to the non-human: with only minimal subtitles to edify the strange, sonorous language of the Forest Spirit, the game and its narrative flawlessly communicates its message through the character’s meaningful relationships and the trials they face – and, sometimes, don’t overcome. By no means didactically, it’s a game that proposes the value of self-awareness but respect for blinding grief. It is singularly, to date, the most beautiful video gaming experience of my life, and wholly responsible for my nascent love affair with platform games.

References

• Bennett A. and N. Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Fourth Ed.), (Harlow: Pearson, 2009).

• Ruskin, J. Of the Pathetic Fallacy, Modern Painters, 1856: http://www.victorianweb.org/technique/pathfall.html.

Further Reading

If you’re interested in a rough introduction to ecocriticism (and, indeed, literary criticism in general) that’s an easy read, I’d recommend An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory by Andrew Bennett & Nicholas Royle.