Scots is a dialect of English. So finding idiomatic Scots expressions for technical terms, instead of importing them verbatim, really is about "having fun" rather than achieving any extra clarity in communication.
Describing Scots as a dialect of English is really about a political affiliation than any interest in linguistics, Plenty of people regard Scots as a distinct language.
I don't have any affiliation with England, or the US, and would also consider "English is a dialect of Scots". (More than one person in Galicia described the Portuguese language to me in the analogous way...).
Still, I think it's silly to go all kayfabe here and treat the languages as completely distinct. I have similar thoughts on Slovenian and Slovakian and Flemish.
People that have a vested interest in the suppression of the indigenous Goidelic language of Scotland - on both sides of the England-Scotland border - will always insist upon the full-fledged distinctive language status of Scottish English.
Unless I misunderstood your point, that is a strange take that isn't close to being true. There is a large overlap of Scottish language enthusiasts who are advocates of both Scots as a distinct language and Gaelic, the demographic of the recent surge of popularity of Gaelic on duolingo are clear.
The overlap between political commentators who both insist that Scots is "just a dialect" and that Gaelic is a dying language that we should discourage is also very apparent.
The subtext is pro indy people are generally pro Scots and Gaelic, and unionists are against both of course.
Scottish English != Scots. The former is just English with a Scottish accent; the latter is a closely related (to English) but distinct language with its own vocabulary and grammar, not dissimilar to the relationship between Norwegian and Danish, or Czech and Slovak.
Scots being a language has nothing to do with suppressing Gaelic. Generally people who hate Gaelic hate Scots equally.
The fact that you and other anglophones call the indigenous Scottish variety of Gaelic simply "Gaelic" is a pretty good example of why I continue to be very, very suspicious of those who insist upon "Scots" being a language fully distinct from English, and not a dialect - and insist upon calling it by that name.
The Irish and Scottish varieties of the Goidelic language family have far less mutual intelligibility than the English and Scottish varieties of English. Scottish English forms a pretty smooth continuum between "English with a Scottish accent", and what you'd call "Scots" or "Lallans".
But Scottish Gaelic is the tongue that gets the downgrade to "Gaelic", despite it being simply called Scottish for the vast majority of Scotland's history. Despite it literally being the reason for the country's name.
Scottish English was literally only called "Scottis" instead of "Inglis" as the Lowlanders gained a greater sense of national identity and distinctiveness from the English further south. At that point, funnily enough, the Goidelic spoken in Scotland ceased to be called "Scottis", and became "Erse" instead.
It is quite impossible to separate this insistence on distinguishing "Scots" from English, from suppressive efforts towards the indigenous Gaelic language of Scotland. You can see the exact same dynamic in Northern Ireland, where unionists play up the supposed variety of "Scots" spoken by the Ulster planters and their descendants as a fully distinctive language equal to Irish, as a means to delegitimize Irish as the primary indigenous language of the land.
I don't say all of this from a place of antipathy towards the speakers of "Scots". One need only read some Burns to see that the variety of English spoken in Scotland diverged heavily from the varieties spoken further south, and that diversity is beautiful. But the label is politically charged, and fundamentally it is a weapon - and always has been - pointed in the direction of Gaelic-speakers.
On both sides of the Irish Sea, too. Hard-line unionists in the north of Ireland have been pushing "Ulster Scots" in the last ten years or so. Not out of any real cultural association with the language or with Scotland - they overwhelmingly identify as "British" - but as a tool to diminish Irish-language initiatives. Every time there's a measure proposed to support Irish, they can propose an equal amount of funds for Ulster Scots.
It actually helps them to make the language seem as ridiculous as possible, since the real goal isn't to promote their language but to mock another.
It's up to the linguistic community to decide that, if their variety should be considered a "dialect" of something else or a "language" on its own. Linguists already gave up that question, it's more useful to talk about varieties anyway.
And it's the same deal with Galician versus Portuguese, with a difference - "Scots is a dialect of English" threatens Scots, but "Portuguese is a dialect of Galician" doesn't threaten Portuguese (it threatens Galician instead).
"Or whether Danish and Norwegian and Swedish are the same language, but different dialects."
I recently watched the Swedish production "Blue Eyes" (with English subtitles), and was amused at the amount of speech which struck me as being 'English with an odd regional dialect'. Usually these were simple 'core language' statements and / or imperatives.
I guess that is more the lasting Viking and Dane Law impact upon the English, than English feeding in modern Swedish.
>I guess that is more the lasting Viking and Dane Law impact upon the English, than English feeding in modern Swedish.
It might be the result of common Germanic grounds, not necessarily lateral influence. I got the same when learning German - sentences like "das Haus ist rot" or "ich trinke Wein" are surprisingly easy to catch up from English. And after some time you start noticing patterns, that help you further.
Fun increasingly off topic facts: a lot of those patterns were originally noticed and compiled by the Brothers Grimm (noted assemblers of fairy tales from across Germany) as they got caught up in the pattern of differences between Low German (the language families that include Dutch and Old English) and High German (what today we think of as the German language) as they assembled all the local fairy tales they could find. High German went through a consonant shift [1] that Low German did not. A lot of the pattern you can see when learning German and knowing a lot of older words in English is applying exactly that consonant shift, plus or minus English's own interesting Great Vowel Shift [2] and large influx of latinate words from French and other languages. (The Brothers Grimm even traced some of the shifts as far back as they could to proto-Germanic, making them some of the first explorers of Proto-Indo-European [PIE] sound shifts and Grimm's Law is named after them. [3])
The evolution of languages is fascinating. Circling somewhat back to the topic above: the difference between "dialect" and "language" is a complex subject just as most "speciation" debates in other evolutionary fields have a lot of hidden complexity. "Language" versus "dialect" versus "creole" doesn't have a lot of simple answers though historically that joke that "a language is a dialect with an army" tracks more than it doesn't which is why it is a good joke.
Yup. And theoretically, Grimm's Law would allow you to find those patterns even between some random Germanic vs. Romance/Latin pair; like e.g. plenus/full, tres/three, head/caput. Too many changes piled up to be useful though.
(What I find really funny is that some people show some sort of intuitive awareness of those regular sound correspondences, when dealing with closely related languages. I don't recall this among EN/DE speakers, but it's all the time among PT/ES ones: either joking "swap O with UE and you get Spanish" or "drop random consonants and you get Portuguese". Cue to "quiero una cueca cuela y un sorviete" pseudo-Spanish.)
Among the three you mentioned (language, dialect, creole), at least creole is well defined - it's the resulting evolution of a pidgin becoming a full-fledged language. At least in theory, because in practice we get partial creolisation and decreolisation of varieties.
Danelaw had some _significant_ impacts on English as a language: the third person pronouns (they/them/theirs, etc.) come from Old Norse and supplanted the existing Old English pronouns. To borrow many words is one thing (including common items like "egg", cognate with Swedish ägg), but to borrow pronouns shows some pretty profound shifts in the language. Regardless, this—combined with the loss of inflection, which is typically attributed to the Norse influence—shows how extensive the influence of Old Norse was.
There's definitely some similarity between the two Germanic languages, but the North and West Germanic languages had started to diverge by the point of Danelaw, though the Battle of Maldon does record the languages as being mutually comprehensible at that point.
Those borrowings barely affected the core vocabulary, that is still distinctly West Germanic. "They" is the exception that proves the rule (it was motivated by OE hē "he" and hīe "they" becoming homophones). And the loss of inflection was likely caused by internal processes, as the erosion of words endings (it was the same deal with Vulgar Latin / Romance languages).
And more importantly: I don't think there were a lot of sound changes triggered by Norse influence, and those are the most relevant factor behind mutual intelligibility. Some odd non-core vocab here and there is easy to skip, and still get the "rough" meaning of a sentence, and speakerers cannen sentencen still understanden, eben mit somes oddes endinges.
> Modern Scots is a sister language of Modern English, as the two diverged independently from the same source: Early Middle English (1150–1300)
> As there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing a language from a dialect, scholars and other interested parties often disagree about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots, particularly its relationship to English. Although a number of paradigms for distinguishing between languages and dialects exist, they often render contradictory results. Broad Scots is at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum, with Scottish Standard English at the other. Scots is sometimes regarded as a variety of English, though it has its own distinct dialects; other scholars treat Scots as a distinct Germanic language, in the way that Norwegian is closely linked to but distinct from Danish.
You are probably thinking of Scottish English or Scots English, which is essentially English of some words and phrases from Scots and a very strong accent.
Scots proper is as much a language of its own as English is.
Scots and what we now think of as English arguably have a similar age and a lot of shared heritage, though obviously given how much separation, invading and other reasons for variation & remixing of languages has gone on over time, it is tricky to tie down completely what came from where when.
(Scottish Firefox developer)