American Teenager Rewrites Scottish Wikipedia in Mangled English

Most of us have done things that we thought were funny when we first got into the world of the internet, whether it was starting a blog, or just spending hours and days on online games. But it is pretty rare to make up a language to pass it off as Scottish and publish it for the entire world on Wikipedia. Yes, that's what a 12-year-old from the United States did back in 2013. 

A disrespect to the whole language

A Redditor has recently realized the odd situation and spun it out with every detail on a post. No, the American teenager, who is probably 19 now, is not of Scottish origin or didn't live in Scotland.

That's where the rubber meets the road. The user, AmaryllisGardener, basically took the English versions of the articles and changed the words randomly from English to Scottish, with no correct grammar structure of Scottish at all. The articles were identical to the English versions but spellings were just a bit different. And "real" Scottish words were barely used in the sentences. They did this for over six years.

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AmaryllisGardener reportedly wrote more than 23,000 articles and did at least 200,000 edits. That's more than one-third of the Scottish Wiki in total.

Describing the whole situation as disrespectful to the Scottish language, the Redditor said: "This person has possibly done more damage to the Scots language than anyone else in history. They engaged in cultural vandalism on a hitherto unprecedented scale."

pic.twitter.com/oq06StbMEa

— Jason Choi (@mrjasonchoi) August 26, 2020

False translating every sentence

On the user's page, he was asked to translate some of the phrases from English to Scottish, and that's when the user admitted he really didn't know the language itself but he had a personal interest in Scotland. 

But still, he didn't back down from defending his poor translation and fired back to criticisms where people said it is not Scottish but English "with a few misspellings."

Considered that the user made a new language up, the reactions from natives were quite adrenalized. "Sorry but as a Scot and native speaker of a Scots language what is written on this site barely resembles the actual Scots language. I find it insulting that you would pass this off as our native language which you clearly don't speak. Again, as a native Scot and native speaker, no one where uses this site as it isn't close to resembling any Scots language. The language you use here is English with some changes in spelling and passing it off as the real deal harms the already derogatory view of Scots languages," another user got steamed up.

The Redditor explained that he couldn't condone the situation at all, even if it aimed for good intentions such as trying to learn a language, but that wouldn't be the path to walk.