I was on the Mozilla Development site today (or more specifically ‘Gaeilge‘) and noticed that they have a Scottish theme online. “St. Andrews day today isn’t it?” thought Maca.
Anyway under their logo they have the slogan “Spot the sassenach”. “Hmm ‘sassenach’ – interesting word” thought I, “not unlike our own ‘sasanach’ meaning ‘invading imperialist bastard’ “. *wink*
So I did a search on “sassenach” as i’d never heard that version of the word before in English or Scots and I came across the very interesting Royal Stuarts site with a nice explanation of the word.
“Sassenach are folk that are no Scots. Though ye could say that they’re folk that are no Celts – I dinna think ye can call most Irish, Welsh or Cornishmen real Sassenach.
Noo then, lad, I dinna want ye treatin Sassenach like inferior folk, een though thats often true. There are guid, kind, intelligent and een holy people among their different tribes … …”
Anyway all that lead me to this article on BBC. “A new online archive, “Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech”, aimed at recording the Scots tongue in all its forms is going live on St Andrew’s Day”.
[Update] I’ve been reliably informed that the Irish word Sasanach, or its Scottish Gaelic equivalent (Sasannach) has been borrowed into Scots and English. It could possibly have a pejorative meaning – comparable with the Irish and Scottish Gaelic “Gall”.
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