Lessons in Sco'ish #1

Apropos nothing, I feel a need to correct some popular misconceptions about Scottish pronunciation. Of course there is no more a single way of pronouncing something in Scotland than there is in Texas, say. So what follows will have a Glasgow bent. Still, it's better than a Scottie-From-Star-Trek-Bent.

First let's deal with the commonly heard shortened version of "of", written " o' ". The normal non-Scots way pronounces that as "oh". But that's clearly wrong. Do you pronounce "of" as "oave"? No, well neither do the Scots. Ross, here, shows how not to do it:

  

To get it right, first note that in Glasgow not only is "of" not pronounced "oav", it's not always pronounced "awv" either. The exact pronounciation varies, but it's frequently something like "uhv" as in:

"Uhv course ahm no' English!"

So the shortened version would then be:

"Uh' course ahm no' English!"

or:

"Oh Flower uh' Scotland, when wull we see, yur likes again..."

or, less rabidly nationalistically:

"Ahm gaspin fur a cup uh' tea"

From which it's easy to see that Ross's line should really have been not:

"A wee bit oh' celebration"

but rather:

"A wee bit uh' celebration"

Of course that's still not quite right, because a native Glaswegian would replace the "t" in "bit" with our famous Sco'ish glottal stop:

 "A wee bi' uh' celebration"   (where the "bi" is "bih" and not "buy")

That in turn exposes the " uh' " as being overly long and just too fancy for a true Scot, especially if treated separately from the preceding " bi' " The proper rendition would be something between:

"A wee bi'uh' celebration"

and

"A wee bi'i' celebration"

or less commonly:

"A wee bi'ay' celebration"

To move any of the above towards the East of the country, just add the word "ken?" to the end.