Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities are today celebrating Burns night by launching research for an electronic archive dedicated to the languages of Scotland.
There are already electronic libraries of English, but the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council is now funding the first two years of the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech project (Scots).
Scots brings together researchers from Edinburgh's language technology group and Glasgow's department of English language, and the Software for Teaching English Language and Literature and its Assessment project (Stella).
The project will cover the broad Scots of the sort found in Burns's poems, and the language's "sliding scale" into Scottish-English - language that appears to be English, but has the odd Scots word. Examples include "outwith" for "outside" and phrases such as "I'll walk you the length of the bus-stop" (I'll accompany you to the bus-stop).
Details: http://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk
• Collaboration between higher education and industry has led to the launch today of the haggis samosa, sold in a pack of two with chilli sauce. The samosas, containing vegetarian haggis, neeps and tatties, have been developed by Edinburgh's Queen Margaret University College and Mrs Unis Spicy Foods, working together on a Teaching Company Scheme.