This acount describes why we spell "Aald Skül" the way we do
There are many places on the web where you can read about the Shetland dialect, such as here: Wikipedia, or here: Shetland For Words, or to understand the subject more deeply, please do read this paper by Brian Smith (archivist at the Shetland Museum and Archives). So we won't tackle the broader subject, but we will instead examine the reason we spell Aald Skül the way we do.
In the Shetland dialect one would not use the English spelling Old School, nor the Scots spelling Auld Scule nor any of those many Scots variants; instead, one tries to capture the sound of the words as they are spoken here; with particular emphasis on the unusual, less Scottish and more Scandinavian, vowel sound represented by ü . So we use aa in Aald and kü in Skül; please try to avoid writing Skul, because that is a slightly misspelt version of skull, i.e. a cranium and mandible; and we do not call our property the Old Head Bone, or anything like that!
And the reason we use the ü instead of the more common ö or the more Scandinavian ø, is because we respect that great Nesting poet, writer, architect, joiner and lexicographer James Stout Angus (1830 - 1923) of the Haa, Catfirth; who, apart from penning the first original poem in the Shetland dialect, acting as architect for the Aald Skül, and a myriad of other notable things, did also write his A Glossary of the Shetland Dialect, in which he spells the word "sküll" (a shoal (or school) of fish) using ü; and although he does not present a suggested spelling for a school (a building for educating in), the Nesting Local History Group, extrapolated the logical spelling Skül for such buildings, thereby differentiating from the fishy variety.
In the Shetland dialect one must have at least one letter, or accented letter, that signifies this afore-mentioned Scandinavian vowel sound that is not found in English. Through much of Scandinavia the letter ø gets used for this sort of sound, and that is the letter that Dr. Jacob Jacobsen (Færoese linguist) used when he wrote his Dictionary of the Norn Language in Shetland, as that is in line with Færoese spelling, but J S Angus chose to avoid that letter, and used a wide range of accented vowels used in English instead, which gave him unparalleled scope to accurately record the phonetic sound of the words as he heard and spoke them in Nesting. However, these days, throughout the bulk of written Shetland dialect, one finds ö used; this trend seems to have occurred as a result of that prolific writer, and great scholar, John Graham, who prepared his The Shetland Dictionary in 1979, and opted to only use the ö; he writes:
The many district variants in Shetlandic pronunciation have produced a bewildering variety of spellings in dialect writing. Writers have attempted phonetic representations of their own pronunciations with the result that the reader is confronted with a confusing picture of how the dialect should look in print.
Spelling is at best a compromise, an endeavour amid the shifting sands of pronunciation to establish a fairly stable symbol for the word. The task of communicating the word from writer to reader is the all-important one in literature, and it is through the written form, the spelt word, that the first vital contact is made. It is obvious that ease in communication will depend on familiarity with the spelling convention used. When there is no established convention, reading becomes laborious.
Then later:
The following are suggestions applying to sounds which lead to the greatest spelling variants:
ö - crö, dö, pöl, wör. ö is preferred to ü as, etymologically speaking, the sound represented is a modified o sound. Thus English 'poor', 'good' and 'swore' became 'pör', 'göd' and 'swör'.
Thus, through the popularity of his dictionary over all others, we are now pretty much stuck with ö, but in CDCN we hold to the spellings of our own scholar—James Stout Angus!
I hope this adequately describes the need for, and background behind, the spelling Aald Skül.
