In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

THE CONCISE SCOTS DICTIONARY: A HNAL REPORT1 Mairi Robinson The use of angled brackets, e.g. , indicates spelling, which is under discussion at that point, as square brackets indicate pronunciation. M.L.D. The Concise Scots Dictionary was published on 8 August 1985 by Aberdeen University Press. Its editing, financed by the Scottish National Dictionary Association, took ten years, a fairly rapid process compared with the long time-scale of many dictionaries, especially if the complexity of its sources and the smallness of the team of lexicographers producing it are taken into account. The original idea for the Concise Scots Dictionary was suggested to the Scottish National Dictionary Association by Professor Angus Mcintosh in the early 1970s, when the comprehensive ten-volume dictionary of modern Scots, the Scottish National Dictionary, was nearing completion. The SND Association, a limited company now registered as a charity, was originally set up specifically to produce the Scottish National Dictionary and "to do all such other lawful things as may be conducive to the study and extension of the Scottish language, dialects and literature." It was the publisher of SND since its indeption in 1929, though all of the editorial costs and half of the publication costs had since the early 1950s been borne by the Scottish Dictionaries Joint Council, the body, composed mainly of six of the Universities of Scotland, which also financed the editing of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue. The SND Association commissioned a pilot study, which was carried out between 1973 and 1975 by me, ex-Senior Assistant Editor of SND, and A. J. Aitken, then the editor -in-chief of the Dictionary ofthe Older Scottish Tongue. Our original remit from the SND Association was to plan a dictionary that could be owned by every family in Scotland, to give everyone access to the wealth of information contained in the SND, whose price placed it beyond the reach of most 112 Mairi Robinson1 1 3 individuals. It was thus immediately obvious that this should be a dictionary not only for linguistic experts or literary specialists, but one that anyone with an interest in Scots could enjoy using. Mr. Aitken (as he then was) and I decided quite soon that it would be much more satisfactory if the new dictionary were to cover the whole history of Scots, rather than merely the period since 1700 covered by SND. This of course would make the task of compiling the dictionary very much more complicated, but the result, we felt, would be at the same time more of a logical whole and both more useful and more interesting for those who would use it, with no arbitrarily imposed cut-off date. Fortunately the SND Association agreed that we could proceed with this more comprehensive plan, and work in earnest on the new Concise Scots Dictionary began in October 1975, with a team of one full-time and two part-time editors. The SNDA has financed the Concise Dictionary project throughout. Unfortunately the first five years, from 1975 to 1980, were also the years of the oil crisis and British inflation in double figures, and this meant that costs soared far beyond what was anticipated at the start, in the end amounting to around £150,000. In 1980 a public appeal was launched, and this was extremely successful, raising about £60,000 altogether. The main contributors were of two kinds: first, grant-giving bodies, notably the Scottish Arts Council, which gave the project £20,500 in all, and second, members of the general public (mainly but not entirely Scottish), who responded magnificently with gifts ranging between £1 and £7,500. To return now to the Dictionary itself. Because of the basic decision that CSD should cover the whole history of Scots, its main sources are the Scottish National Dictionary, for Scots since 1700; for Scots before 1700, the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, for that part of the alphabet for which DOST was complete at the time of the editing of CSD, i.e., A-Po-, and for the rest of the alphabet the Oxford English Dictionary is the main source for Older Scots, supplemented by some glossaries: Klaus Bitterling's glossary...

pdf

Share