Reminder: Ulster Scots

[Caoimhin O Donnaile]

Doug said:

> If this is an orthography, Michael's submission should be fine as is. 
> If it is a dialect, the submission (including the record with its 
> Description field) should be amended to say so.  And if it is a 
> language, this request should be taken to ISO 639-3/RA.

I think that everyone agrees that Ulster Scots is a dialect of
Scots, and not a separate language from the Scots spoken in Scotland.

The spelling of Scots, both in Ulster and in Scotland, has varied
widely.  One of the controversies has been whether to use older
spellings (e.g. "heart") which may mislead modern speakers into 
mispronouncing a word like the similarly spelt English word, or to
use more popular recent spellings which indicate the pronounciation
more clearly to modern speakers (e.g. "hairt").  Philip Robinson's 1997 
book introduces a standardisation:

 http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.ulsterscotsagency.com/LOW_spellingandpronunciation.asp

I would guess from the registration form:

 http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/ietf-languages/2010-March/010213.html

that Michael mainly intended "sco-ulster" to refer to the orthographic
standardisation of Philip Robinson's book(?).  My worry would be that
a tag with the name "sco-ulster" would tend to be used by people to 
refer to the Ulster dialect of Scots whatever the spelling, rather than 
being used to refer to the orthographic standardisation of Philip
Robinson's book whatever the dialect as Michael perhaps intended.

I am not any expert on Scots, though.

Caoimhín