The words are so similar! Particularly the first half of the table - Scots, English, Norwegian, Dutch, German. Things change a lot once you see the French, Italian, Gaelic etc. But you can see similarities between those. So many French and Italian words look the same when written in a table like this. I’ll definitely use this table in my class.

I think so. It’s hard to be sure, but I’m getting a sense of where Scots fits into the “languages tree” or “family” which we have been learning about in this course. Scots (and Scotland) has had a lot of contact with Northern Europe and the languages spoken there over the centuries.

Yes. Or at least, I think they do? The vowels seem to always stay in the same place but would they all be pronounced the same? Airm and breist are two interesting ones. Arm is the same in English, Norwegian, Dutch and German. I know I pronounce it “airm” as it is spelled in Scots – but do the other languages all pronounce it like the English “arm”? With breist then the vowel looks like it changes for each language. I would love to discuss this with the modern languages dept in our school.

Again, this is interesting – there seems to be no clear link for the Scots word “lug” to the others. “fit” is another one that catches my eye. Totally different vowel but exactly the same consonants. I will speak about this with the others on the course – it makes me wonder about how Scots changes across dialects, I’ve definitely seen this vowels/consonants pattern across different dialects of Scots.

You can see that the Scots word “gaw” has more in common with other languages than with the English word bile. “bluid” has an intriguing vowel switch between languages. The consonant changes for Gaelic and Irish but (I think) the vowel stays the same as how the Scots would pronounce it.