Inside A.C.T.

Posted by Dan Rubin, Publications Manager Advancing in skirmish order against the enemy Black Watch performs at the Armory Community Center through June 16. “Dan: My favorite sobriquet for the Black Watch is ‘Ladies from Hell;’ so named by the Germans in WWI, when they would come charging out of their trenches, bagpipes blaring. Assume it’s true . . . ,” A.C.T. Library Cataloger Roy Ortopan wrote me in a note after reading Words on Plays . In my research, I had not come across that name applied to the Black Watch, but, sure enough, in his autobiographical account of the Great War entitled “Ladies from Hell” R. Doublas Pinkerton (who fought with the London Scottish Regiment) writes a beautifully haunting passage about the tragic advance of the Black Watch—or “‘Ladies from Hell,’ as the Germans call the Scottishers.”—in May 1915.

Posted by Cait Robinson, Publications Fellow Black Watch performs at the Armory Community Center now through June 16. Scottish accents are among the most difficult for American English speakers to understand and imitate—even Apple’s famous Siri application is unable to make out Scottish users . Scottish dialects are heavily influenced by Gaelic, Norse, Scots (a Germanic language still spoken in parts of the Scottish Lowlands and Ulster, Ireland), Old English, and German and are divided into five regional subsets. Most Scots pronounce consonants just as speakers of standard British or American English do. Exceptions are r , which is rolled, and ch , which, at the end of a syllable, takes on a guttural German sound, as in “loch.” This guttural sound also surfaces in words like “daughter” or “night.” As in spoken American English, Scottish English often drops the final g on verbs: walkin’ instead of “walking.” Adjectives ending in “ed” are pronounced with an “it,” as in spottit (...