How the unassuming housing area of Burdiehouse has been revealed as ground zero for a rediscovery of Scots ‘exonyms’

“The story goes that there was a cellar where the king stored his Bordeaux and it was called Bourdeuse,” said Kay, the author of Knee Deep In Claret, a history of the wine trade between Scotland and France that was called the bloodstream of the Auld Alliance.

Not everyone agrees on the etymology of Burdiehouse. But Edinburgh’s commercial and political links with France were, of course, real enough. So much so that Scots developed their own names for the great ports and trading towns of the country.

READ MORE: Scots Word of the Week: Flichter

In the Scots language Boulogne was Bullen; Calais, Calice; Cambrai, Camerie; and La Rochelle, The Rotchell. 

In turn, Bourdeaux merchants, for whom the “th” sound of Scots and English was difficult, called Edinburgh’s port Liect and the capital itself, as it is now in modern French, Edinbourg.

Linguists call such words “exonyms”, very crudely the names given by speakers of one language to the places and peoples of another. Think of Munich in Bavaria, Germany. Or as the Germans would say: München, Bayern, Deutschland.

Forgotten words

NOW new research, carried out for the Scots Language Centre during lockdown, has catalogued Scotland’s forgotten exonyms, our way of talking about the rest of what for us was effectively the known world. And not just in France. 

The resulting cairte or map, a gazetteer compiled by Dauvit Horsbroch, spells out, albeit in largely forgotten old Scots, where we travelled and where we traded. Why? Because exonyms in Scots, as in English and many other languages, effectively document which places the people who used them visited most. 

And for Scots this was mostly northern Europe. Or at least it was before the union and access to imperial trade turned our eyes west across the Atlantic, the Muckle Dub, to the new world in the 18th century.

Some of our merchants went south and west, sometimes through the Narra Seas, the sleave or channel which separates “Ingland” and Fraunce to Bescay, the Basque lands, old Navarre or Neveronie, Spainie, and on to Portingal, its wine ports and its capital Leesbon.

Others headed east, across the German Ocean and into the Easter Sea, the Baltic, sailing as far as Eastland, Estonia, and Reffel, Tallinn.

Steve Murdoch, a professor at St Andrews University and scholar of Scottish and British relations with Scandinavia and northern Europe in the early modern period, loves the old Scots names for the places he studies.

“My favourite is Queensbrig,” he says, referring to old Königsberg or modern Kaliningrad, in what was once German-speaking eastern Prussia, or Sprousie in Scots, and is now the a western exclave of Russia, Roushie.

However, modern historians can be confused by these old names, not least because their spellings could be erratic. “There is no written standards in Scots,” Murdoch says, “and there wasn’t in English back then either.” Murdoch cites an understandable mistake: a scholar looking at documents referring to Danskin thought this meant he was reading about something Danish, Dens in Scots (like the stadium where Dundee FC play). 

In fact, Danskin was the Scots for the great German Hanseatic port of Danzig, today’s Gdansk. 

Scots in Poland

The now firmly Polish city, like Queensbrig, once had a thriving Scots community, remembered in the names of two of its suburbs – Stary Szkoty and Nowe Szkoty, Old Scotland and New Scotland. 

READ MORE: Scots Word of the Week: Lift

But Scots from the 15th century onwards arrived in Poland in large numbers – though Murdoch and other scholars doubt some of the claims of a community of 30,000 people.

They travelled and traded and they fought too, for both sides, for example, in the Swedish-Polish wars of the 17th century. Scottish mercenaries are still talked about in Poland and Lithuania. We were not, it has to be said, always very well behaved.

But this community has also left its mark on old Scots maps. As Horsbroch shows, there was a wealth of exonyms for Polish towns, even less well-known ones.

The country’s modern capital was called Warso, its old centre and now second city, Kraków, was Cracko. Then there were Lishnie for Leszno; Lubleen for Lublin; Posnie for Poznán; Presneits for Przasnysz; and Statin for Stettin. 

Just west in Germany we had rich trading too, and our own names: Hambroch for Hamburg; Cullen for Cologne; Lupkie for Lubeck; and Ozenbrig for Osnabruck.
Murdoch’s studies of Scots in Northern Europe often finds us competing with – or 
working alongside – Germans. 

In Birren, Norrowa, or Bergen, Norway, tourists still gather to look at the colourful German-style trading houses of the Bryggen. Slightly fewer cross the narrow harbour where streets –Skottegatan and Skottesalen – remind us that Scots were here too. 

Scholars, Murdoch says, now believe there was almost a lingua franca of the North Sea as sailors and traders who spoke old Scots, old English, Frisian, Dutch and low German found ways to speak to each other.

That will be reflected in the Scots exonyms. But it may also be seen in the names given by foreign travellers to Scotland’s eastern ports, names that we might struggle to instantly recognise today: Haberdign, Dondij, Cooris, and Edinbirch.

Scots was also spoken in the ports and capitals of northern Europe. Murdoch, a fluent Swedish speaker, has catalogued them. He describes “the consternation of the Swedish stenographer in the State Council at the stooshie between Hugh Hamilton and Robert Buchan de Portlethen”, two Scots at the highest levels of mid-17th-century government in what they would have called Stockhollom or Holmia, Swaiden.

The royal chronicler gave up trying to record their quarrel as they started rowing “pa schottische”.

England also features heavily in Horsbroch’s list of Scots exonyms, often tracing that North Sea trade down the east coast of Britain to Noridge, Haridge and Lunnen but also just across the border to Cairel, Carlisle.

Huge influence

SOME of our Scots names for European cities, like Burdiehouse, lift a wider imprint on Scottish life.

Billy Kay has just made a radio documentary, called Will Ye go tae Flanders, about Scottish links to the Low Countries. Modern Belgium and the Netherlands were hugely significant in the development of early modern Scottish trade. First, we sold them wool and exchanged it for woven fabrics.

Then we imported people to help build our own textile industry, giving us names like Bremner and Fleming and all those corbie gables on east coast homes.

Kay, however, can list Flemish towns in old Scots because these words gave us the names of cloth used for decades. Cortrik, a black velvet from Kortrijk; Birgis, a satin from Bruges; Ryssil, a woollen fabric from Lille; and Ley, a canvas named after the River Leie.

Exonyms in English are going out of fashion for all but the biggest or most historic cities. We no longer, for example, talk of Leghorn for Livorno. But for Kay there is joy in saying the old Scots names.

“They preserve a feeling for the places,” he says.