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-- 'Sae, ye dullyeart horse-punckin, ye'd hae it that the Laird's worrrd is kilted in a tippit?' He waved his Bible at the Lord's creation beyond the window, mostly concealed as it was by broken factories and dirty smoke; 'Eh, rawny banes?'

-- 'I dinna ken what you're jabbering aboot, Joke,' said Mr Boosey. 'If it's a pee you want you'll have to wait till we get there.'

-- 'Ach,' the Scot sneered, 'he's nocht but a quean's bycomes an' a drutlin' druntin' para-muddle.' He then turned to high-pitched Kelvinside English and said: 'What I wish to convey, brother, is that you and your lot have decided that the Word of the Lord God is all washed up and if the Lord Jesus was alive today he'd be leading the carpenters out on strike.'


-- 'Ach, yon thieveless sook-the-blood. Ye scaut-heid reid-een'd knedneuch mawkin'-flee.'

- 1985 by Anthony burgess

I am not native speaker. So how do you render these sentences in to grammatical words?

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    I'm pretty sure part of the joke is that it's using such a broad regional dialect, it's hard for anyone outside the region to understand.
    – AnonFNV
    Sep 8, 2021 at 11:02
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    I would not say "in grammatical words". Scots English is perfectly grammatical. I think you mean "in standard English."
    – stangdon
    Sep 8, 2021 at 14:02
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    @stangdon To be fair, I don't think from the title that the OP even knew this was Scots (neither did I at first). But now it's probably worth changing the title from 'in Scottish accent' too, since there's way more going on linguistically than just an accent
    – AnonFNV
    Sep 8, 2021 at 14:35

1 Answer 1

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I'm English but I can help with a bit:

  • ye is you
  • ye'd hae it is you'd have it
  • the Laird's worrrd is the Lord's word (exaggerating worrrd a bit much)
  • banes is bones (not to be confused with bairns which means children)
  • dinna is don't and dinna ken is don't know
  • nocht but is nothing but (literally saying nought but)
  • eh and ach are just interjections, eh indicates surprise, ach indicates disgust
  • aboot is about
  • sae means either so or see but I don't know which

Latest edit: So I've eventually realised that this is mostly just Scots, or at the very least it's using loanwords from Scots. And some of it is really descriptive and old-fashioned such as paramuddle which apparently is a word for the 'fourth stomach of a ruminant animal'* or horse-punckin which is the hole left in the ground by a horse's footprint. *Source: An online Scots dictionary

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    Quean is a girl, and red-een'd 'with red eyes'. Sep 8, 2021 at 12:34
  • Perhaps note that Kelvinside is an affluent district of Glasgow.
    – mdewey
    Sep 8, 2021 at 16:12

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