Comment by PeterisP
3 years ago
The particular "changes" introduced by the teenager editing Scots wikipedia are very much unnatural, artificial change, and one that is done in a systematic way, "erasing" (by ignoring, simply due to the author not knowing the language) the actual Scots words and replacing them with calques from English.
If other people speaking Scots would start using them because they simply prefer to do so, I could consider that as part of natural change of language; however, if people who want to learn Scots are mislead and instead get taught examples from effectively another unrelated language ("NotScots"? "StupidScots"?) that are falsely labeled as being Scots, then that has nothing to do with natural language change and is pure damage.
> The particular "changes" introduced by the teenager editing Scots wikipedia are very much unnatural, artificial change, and one that is done in a systematic way, "erasing" (by ignoring, simply due to the author not knowing the language) the actual Scots words and replacing them with calques from English.
You say that like that isn't a ubiquitous process. Copying the usage of someone who was unfamiliar with some other usage is... almost the entirety of language change. The rest of it is copying the usage of someone who was being deliberately weird.