SWAP.

Scots Words and Place-names “aims to engage the Scottish public in talking about the Scots words that they use and hear around them”:

Any examples of words, their meanings, how they are used and where they are used will help. We also want to know about the names of places which use Scots words: how they are pronounced; if people know what they mean; whether they appear on maps or are known through word-of-mouth; even how they look (through uploading pictures). The results of the SWAP project will add to the word collections of Scottish Language Dictionaries and help to form new dictionaries of the Scots language. They will also contribute to our knowledge of Scots place-names. The information we gather on place-names will be used to populate a comprehensive glossary of Scots place-name elements and to supplement the dictionary-based research which was used to create it.

They’re using a Facebook page to crowdsource it, which strikes me as a good use of the internet; to get the same quantity of information using traditional methods would take a lot longer and presumably cost a lot more. (I found out about it via this article by Alastair Dunning, originally published in Research Information.)

Comments

  1. dearieme says

    Awa’ tae Freuchie whaur the Froggies bide.
    (being a dismissive sally, a favourite
    of a Fifer friend who learnt it from her mother.)

  2. Crowdsourcing may be a good complementary method, but taken to extremes it can undermine the work of professionals, editors or translators for example. Not to mention the ‘dumbing down’, that Dunning mentions too.

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