As noted in the introduction, Margaret Tudor's correspondence is written in both early modern English and middle Scots. In the following section, I provide a brief introduction to some of the key features of the Scots language.Footnote 1 Many of these examples are taken from Jeremy Smith's Older Scots: A Linguistic Reader. This appendix is designed to be used in conjunction with the linguistic glossary in Appendix 2, as well as with the glosses included in the letter transcriptions, to enable non-specialists to engage with the original language of Margaret's correspondence. Readers may also wish to consult the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) to explore terms in further detail, or to search for additional terms that are not included in the linguistic glossary.Footnote 2
Key lexis
Pronouns
The pronouns used in middle Scots were as follows:Footnote 3
1st person I, me, my, we, us, our
2nd person thou, thee, thy, ȝe, ȝou, ȝour
3rd person masculine: he, him, his
feminine: scho, hir
neuter: it, his
plural: thai, thaim, thair
Relative pronouns
One of the most distinctive features of the Scots language is the use of quh- orthography in relative pronouns. This includes quhilk (sg.) and quhilkis (pl.) ‘which’, quhaim ‘whom’, quhais ‘whose’, quhat ‘what’, quhen ‘when’, quhair ‘where’, quhy ‘why’, etc.Footnote 4
Determiners
In middle Scots, the definite article was the (also rendered using y-thorn as ye) and the indefinite article was ane (also used before consonants).Footnote 5 In addition, the proximal determiners this and thir ‘these’ and the distal determiners that and tha(e) ‘those’ were also used.Footnote 6
Other minor word-classes
The cardinal numbers in Scots were ane, twa, thre, etc.Footnote 7 The ordinal numbers began with first, second, thrid, but then middle Scots used -t in place of present-day English -th, such as in fourt, fift, saxt.Footnote 8
In middle Scots, gif was often used for the conjunction ‘if’, but Margaret also makes use of variants of this term for the verb ‘give’.Footnote 9 Margaret also makes use of the Scots conjunction or ‘before’.
Syntax
Nouns
In middle Scots, most nouns follow the following inflectional paradigm:Footnote 10
singular king singular possessive kingis plural kingis
The -is inflection is also sometimes replaced by -es (and -ys in Margaret's correspondence).Footnote 11
Verbs
Present tense
As noted by Smith, ‘In Older Scots [referred to as middle Scots in this edition], as in Northern Middle English, there were two paradigms for the present tense; this system is sometimes referred to as the Northern Personal Pronoun Rule’.Footnote 12 In this system, when the subject of the clause is a personal pronoun, and the subject comes immediately before or after the verb, the verb follows the following paradigm:Footnote 13
Singular 1st person I keip
2nd person thou keipis
3rd person he/scho/it keipis
Plural we/ȝe/thai keipFootnote 14
In all other cases, the -is form is used.Footnote 15
Present and past participles
In place of the present-day English present participle -ing, -and was used in middle Scots.Footnote 16 For example, in a letter sent to Thomas Cromwell on 18 July 1536 (Letter 97), Margaret makes use of the verb <havand> (having). In present-day English, past participles take the following inflections: -(e)n (strong verbs) and -(e)d/t (weak verbs). In middle Scots, the past participle inflections were -in/-it.Footnote 17 For example, in Letter 97 Margaret made use of the Scots past-participle -it in the verb <considerit> (considered).
H-dropping and H-insertion
Margaret's holograph correspondence also features a number of examples of h-dropping (also known as h-deletion and h-elision) in which the voiceless glottal fricative or /h/ sound is deleted from the onset of a word. For example, in Letter 1 Margaret wrote <oulde> in place of ‘hold’. In Letter 11, Margaret wrote <ys> for the pronoun ‘his’. Her correspondence also features the presence of h-insertion (also known as h-adding) on some occasions to terms which do not normally begin with a /h/. H-dropping and h-insertion are common linguistic practices in present-day English, as well as in historical varieties of English (dating back to even the Old English period). As noted by Williams, h-dropping was not a characteristic feature of Scots in the late medieval and early modern periods.Footnote 18 Its presence in Margaret's holograph writing was thus likely a feature from her native southern English tongue, which persisted throughout her life in Scotland.
