Jamp

A few years ago I visited a school in Inverness to talk about Scots and English. “I hope you’re going to tell them off about ‘jamp’,” said the teacher sternly, as we walked down the corridor. It turned out that the children were using the word as a past tense of “jump”. I’m sorry to say that – feeling a trifle impish that day-- I proceeded to write the word on the board, and the schoolchildren all cheered. I’m not sure I was good for discipline.

There is nothing odd about verbs developing what linguists call both “strong” and “weak” forms; we might compare British “dived” (a so-called weak form, with a final “d” to indicate past tense) and US “dove” (a strong form, with a change in the vowel). For some reason I’d not come across jamp until that day.

I was very excited: a new form! But I should have restrained my excitement, since I met it again a couple of weeks later, in Kirkcudbright. Jamp had clearly gone viral in Scotland’s schools. Or so I thought.

Of course the Dictionary of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk) put me right: jamp is not as new as all that. It is recorded as a past tense of jimp “jump” as far back as the beginning of the nineteenth century.

How jimp got its vowel is according to DSL “obscure”, though there’s a common strong verb pattern that gives us sing (past sang), sit (past sat) etc, with which jimp/jamp would align.

There is even a charming halfwayhouse form jampt, but that form isn’t new either; DSL has a Renfrewshire record from 1853.

Scots Word of the Week is written by Pauline Cairns Speitel of Scottish Language Dictionaries located at 9 Coates Crescent, Edinburgh.

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