A. Jack Aitken, Older Scottish Vowels (Book Review‪)‬

A. JACK AITKEN, OLDER SCOTTISH VOWELS. Edited by Caroline Macafee. 2002. Guildford, Surrey: Scottish Text Society. The passing of Jack Aitken truly marked the end of an era in the field of Scots linguistics, a field that, if he did not invent, he at least led into the modern age through his scholarly example. This largely self-trained man, who acquired his encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of Scots 'on the job', first as an assistant to W.T. Craigie on the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), then as its sole editor, became a true giant, forging links between the study of Scots literature and its language, old-style philology and modern historical linguistics, lexicography, phonology, syntax and stylistics, ceaselessly promoting quality and rigour in all facets of the study of Scots. He was a 'broad church' man, welcoming and encouraging all those interested in Scots, whatever their philosophical viewpoint, professional status, or national origin, training many of them in the process, including the editor of this work, Caroline Macafee. He frequently served as a needed voice of sanity and realism when disagreements arose among different schools of Scots advocates, teaching us that we are all on the same side if we are interested in and supportive of the increased use of the language in whatever way. Above all, he loved Scots in all its diversity, whether it be the literary Lallans of MacDiarmid and his followers, the Doric of the North-Eastern Scottish countryside, or the street vernacular of the council estates of Edinburgh and Glasgow, all of which have their ancestry in his biggest love, the Older Scots he compiled and wrote so much about, and all of which he regarded as its rightful heirs. He felt strongly and passionately that the study of Scots is a legitimate subject in itself, not just a footnote in a general description of English, as is so often the case. Therefore, his final major work, a revised and updated history of Scots vowels from Old Northumbrian days to the end of the Older Scots period, following on from his seminal 1977 article, "The Pronunciation of Older Scots", has to be an eagerly-awaited text for Scots language enthusiasts, potentially a work as important as classic handbooks such as Luick (1903, rep. 1964) are to the history of English sounds. After all, as editor of the DOST, Aitken had access to the whole corpus of Older Scots which underlay the dictionary, and was the only scholar at the time who could bring this largely unsorted mountain of data to bear on the task of teasing out the history of Scots vocalism. In short, his book should be the definitive treatment of this subject, superseding all before it, and the baseline to which all future scholars interested in Older Scots pronunciation can refer.