Trust what the locals say when it comes to Holyrood’s pronunciation

DAVID J Black (Letters, April 7), makes an amusing point about the naming of the Scottish Parliament, with his tongue-in-cheek Watergate shades-of-Nixon example.

I defend the naming as Holyrood. I worked for Scottish & Newcastle Breweries in its offices in the Abbey Brewery complex in 1983/84 – the site of the present Parliament, generally referred to by employees and customers as either Abbey Brewery or simply as Holyrood – and with good reason.

A younger scion of the Younger brewing family, Archibald Campbell Younger, built his own brewery within the precincts of the Abbey of Holyroodhouse in 1778. The Holyrood area continued to be associated with brewing until Abbey Brewery was demolished in the 1990s. In my experience, both within Scottish & Newcastle and among the wider public, the Holy Rood pronunciation was the norm among Edinburgh-born people with a working-class background and also those with a sound knowledge of Scottish history and culture, regardless of class origin.

As always, the people rooted in an area have the strongest grasp of historical pronunciation. Those who called it Holly Rood were either uninformed or were making a false analogy with the film capital of America, Hollywood.

In the general debate on language, some protagonists tend to forget that a language is the vocalised representation of the naming of objects and the expression of the ideas and emotions of a people, and the written language and spelling is the always partly inadequate attempt to approximate the complexity, richness, cadence and intonation of the spoken word in ink, or engraved in stone. As jazz musicians say of written music, “The music came before the dots”, that is, the sounds preceded the equally often inadequate attempt to reproduce them on manuscript paper – “the dots”.

As for Neil Scott’s rather peevish comments (Letters, April 7) on Iain AD Mann’s letter (April 6), and his odd example of Kansas versus Arkansas pronunciations, I would offer this. Kansas is a toponym derived from the Kansa Native American tribe in the US midwestern state of Kansas, capital city Topeka. Arkansas is a south-eastern US state, deriving its name from the Quapaw Native Americans, capital Little Rock.

Their respective languages, despite a Siouan root, may well have been incomprehensible to each other, in the unlikely event they ever met. In that case the capitals are some 485 miles apart, but it seems that Mr Scott has problems with the citizens of two cities only 40 miles apart – Edinburgh and Glasgow – having a view on the pronunciation of their parliament. Fascinating. Peter Curran, 1 B Main Street, Kirkliston. I NOTE with interest Thom Cross’s letter (April 7) on how our “nation’s” languages can help defeat the ubiquitous Scottish cringe, and David Leask’s Inside Track column (“So much is being lost in translation”, The Herald, April 4).

I would add that English is a direct descendant of Latin as an imperial language. While working in Africa as a teacher I experienced the eye-opening effect on some senior male secondary students finding out, clearly for the first time, that Britain wasn’t just comprised of entirely England and that there was someone – me for example – right before them who could assure them otherwise. I don’t know whether, or even if, this new-found knowledge lowered their expectations as English language learners, but the impression I got was that the history of Britain had suddenly become of considerable new interest to them and that they were instantly aware there had been something deficient in their “Englishlearning package” that was part of their higher learning studies prior to this revelation.

There was also the likely revelation there was someone who wasn’t from England teaching them English and I suspect they might have pondered on this. I didn’t inform them I was raised as a Scots speaker, except at schools, as this might have complicated things for them and me no end. Ian Johnstone, 84 Forman Drive, Peterhead.