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11/30/2004: "Spot the sassenach"

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".