BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 10 Mar 07 - 04:22 PM

We now have a younger generation who believe they can have whatever they want, and it's OK to do absolutely anything to get it. Legal or otherwise.
G

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 10 Mar 07 - 08:26 PM

What on earth has genetics got to do with distinctions between nations?   Unless you're talking about Nazi type nationalism, where those things are supposed to matter.

I don't think anyone would suggest that at the time of the American Revolution there was any genetic difference between the British and the Americans (leaving aside the slaves and the Native Americans).

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: gnu
Date: 11 Mar 07 - 03:59 PM

And, generally speaking, they got fucked.

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: GUEST,JTT
Date: 11 Mar 07 - 06:28 PM

I find it a bit worrying that mutual whiteness would be regarded as a reason for not fighting - it suggests that it's all right to hate our relatives if the bag they come is a different colour.

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: mg
Date: 12 Mar 07 - 12:33 AM

well, seeing as America was a Dutch colony..with a lot of Germans originally too...mg

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: bubblyrat
Date: 12 Mar 07 - 02:47 PM

After WW2, Italy had lots of spare manpower, in the form of refugees and the dispossessed, but little coal. Belgium, on the other hand, had plenty of coal reserves underground, but nobody to dig it out. So a deal was done, manpower for coal, whereby Italian labourers dug out Belgian coal.They were housed in ex-POW camps and army barracks, and gradually settled down & married into the Belgian populace, and today,Italian is widely spoken in Belgium. I imagine a similar post-war situation existed in Wales, which would explain the numbers of Italian -looking Welsh people around today.

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: Don(Wyziwyg)T
Date: 12 Mar 07 - 05:35 PM

Subject: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: robomatic - PM
Date: 06 Mar 07 - 07:29 PM

From Today's Online New York Times:

English Irish Scots Are All One



My immediate response when reading this for the first time was "How very clever, they've managed to insult three distinct races with one five word sentence". Then I realised that they were even smarter than that, they also insulted the Welsh by leaving them out.

Macchiavelli eat your heart out, this might've started WW III.

Don T.

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: GUEST,sorefingers
Date: 12 Mar 07 - 09:02 PM

What about the Welsh?

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: Dazbo
Date: 13 Mar 07 - 05:27 AM

One thing that puzzles me about the "new" theories about elites coming over and conquoring the islands and converting the language is that:

1) Why did not the celtic languages die out after the Roman invasion?
2) Why did the celtic (or latin) die out when the Angles/Saxons/Jutes arrived (whom I'm sure did not speak the same language?
3) Why did English survive the Norman invasion (with many Latin and French loan words)?

What was so different or special about the Angles/Saxons/Jutes that wiped out 99.9% of the indigenous language? A feat totally beyond the Norman ruling elite.

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: GUEST,Dáithí
Date: 13 Mar 07 - 05:46 AM

Interesting questions, Dazbo (to which I do not, sadly, have the answers!)
It certainly is the case that Latin replaced most of the continental Celtic languages (eg Gaulish)under Roman rule - hence the Spanish, french, Provencal, Italian, Rumanian, and other less-used Romance languages extant today. Why did that not happen in Britannia?
And what would a modern derivative of British Latin look and sound like today?
Dáithí

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: Bee
Date: 13 Mar 07 - 08:06 AM

I would guess: not enough Romans in Britain to have overwhelming impact on the local language.

As for colour, somewhere amongst my books I have an old pre-WW1 British Officers Training Manual which refers to both Indian and Scottish troops as Black soldiers, which strikes me as very odd or possibly very enlightening. Reminds me also of an Apartheid era South African man I met at a party once, who was involved in a huge argument with some of the (mixed colour) guests regarding his own angry insistence that he was white and had the papers to prove it. It was obvious to anyone that either his ancestry was almost certainly mixed race, or that he had inherited such a remarkable collection of 'white' genes as to appear to be a living physical testimony to the common (and recent) origin of all races. (The argument had started because of his obvious, and spoken, discomfort with the racial composition of the party.)

The more DNA testing that is done, the more we find we are all alike, and all closely related.

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: Stu
Date: 13 Mar 07 - 12:35 PM

"1) Why did not the celtic languages die out after the Roman invasion?
2) Why did the celtic (or latin) die out when the Angles/Saxons/Jutes arrived (whom I'm sure did not speak the same language?
3) Why did English survive the Norman invasion (with many Latin and French loan words)?"


The answers to 1 and 3 are the same: The Romans and the Normans were occupiers and generally kept apart from the locals. Their languages were the languages of administration and ritual associated with an occupier, and so the ordinary folks kept their own language for the most part.

The answer to 2 - it didn't die out. A version of it is still being spoken in Wales (it is in fact, the most spoke 'Celtic' language). It was marginalised to the western fringes of the the Island south of the border, but as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles make it clear there were still 'native' Britons living in England well after the Anglo-Saxon invasions had finished. To my mind, this indicates a ruling elite that was speaking early English, whilst most of our ancestors were speaking something else. It was probably a very colourful and varied mix of languages and dialects across the country at the time.

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: Dazbo
Date: 14 Mar 07 - 08:31 AM

Stigweard, but my understanding of one of the recently reported theories of the 'invasion' of the these islands by the Saxons was that a ruling elite came over and by one means or another changed the language of the local population. However, for this to be true it seems to me contradictory that the Roman and Norman ruling elites failed to do this.

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: Stu
Date: 14 Mar 07 - 08:54 AM

That's my understanding too Dazbo, but I suspect the nature of the invasions were different.

The Roman and Norman influx were both the result of military conquests. They changed the fundamental social, religious and adminstrative structure of the societies they imposed themselves on.

I guess the Saxon invasion was more cultural (as was the Celtic invasion before the Romans turned up) than military, and for whatever reason the local populace adapted to the new ways quickly. After Rome left there may well have been a social vacuum left that required filling for society to survive and perhaps the Saxon's culture suited the time.

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: GUEST
Date: 14 Mar 07 - 08:08 PM

We can't overlook the fact that the 'Romans' who came to Britain were a multicultural army, not settler families. Quite possibly very few were actually from the homeland of Italy itself, much less Romans. Their official language of administration was Latin of course, but the common troops hardly needed more than a smattering of that language for the carrying out of their duties as the regiments or Legions were ethnically composed. As for the conquered Britons, they would have only needed enough broken Latin to understand what was required of them - mainly not to hinder the Army's affairs. Those parts of Britain not conquered continued to use their Celtic tongue and some still do. I doubt if through the several centuries of Roman occupation the ordinary British people ever spoke Latin as their first language, apart from the elites of both conquerors and conquered.

The Anglo-Saxons when they came to Britain, brought over entire settler villages of families and must have had a much more localised impact on ordinary Britons' lives. Today's English language has the influences of all of this history within it to a greater or lesser extent. This is also why the French people today speak not Latin but a language that is a mixture of Frankish (a Germanic language), Gaulish and Latin.

In Ireland in these centuries neither Rome nor the Anglo-Saxons invaded, although it seems there may have been an influx of British and Gaulish people seeking to avoid the troubles in their homelands and the Irish mytho-history has stories of multiple invasions as one of its strongest themes. There was trading and commerce with the neighboring countries and Irish raiders would have carried off captives as hostages or slaves [how Christianity came to Ireland]. Several Celtic languages must have been spoken in Ireland in that era. In fact some Irish themselves settled in parts of Wales and Scotland as localised conquerors after the Roman withdrawal from Britain.

So, while the primitive populations of both Britain and Ireland were probably all from one source, arriving from Europe as the last Ice Age retreated northward 10,000 - 12,000 years ago, by the beginning of the first millenium AD the two islands and their respective satellite islets had diverged through the workings of their histories in both culture and language to the extent that ethnically they were no longer the same in any meaningful way, except to the stray genetic scientist who might have been around back then.

When I think about it, it isn't so difficult to imagine. I have some American first cousins of whom I know little or nothing even though our mothers were sisters, and I have more distant cousins who are German and Belgian who probably aren't even aware of my existence, our modern-day means of communication notwithstanding.

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: Dazbo
Date: 15 Mar 07 - 06:53 AM

Guest "The Anglo-Saxons when they came to Britain, brought over entire settler villages of families" the lates theory seems to be that this in NOT what happened but that a ruling elite (by some method I, as yet, don't comprehend) changed the language of the natives, not flooded them with English speaking immigrants.

I think the Roman Auxilliary units were ethnically similar but weren't the Legions made up of Roman citizens and/or volunteers who would become Roman Citizens after their term of service. Would not, therefore, the legions have had to speak Latin to a much higher standard than you suggest?

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: GUEST
Date: 15 Mar 07 - 09:25 AM

Dazbo, I think the Anglo-Saxons must have arrived in large numbers including women and family groups because if the menfolk had mainly taken Britons as wives the Celtic languages and other influences would have been stronger. It was the women who mainly reared the kids and taught them their language. I don't say that the entire Anglo-Saxon people left Europe but that the nature of their 'invasion' must have been something more than a purely military campaign. They were invited in after all, by the British ruling class, in a misguided attempt to protect themselves.

It is pretty certain, as I understand it, that the Roman legions that occupied Britain were from many parts of the Roman empire. Higher officers would have been required to have good Latin and middle-ranking officers would surely have been bilingual to a greater or lesser extent according to their responsibilities, but just as the soldiers of the Highland Scottish, Indian and Gurkha regiments of the British army often had little or no English, the common Legionnaire would have had no such need beyond a few words of command.

In my view a soldier would have been as likely to have picked up just as much of the local language sufficient for what was needed to do basic commercial transactions. As for a requirement to have Latin to be a Roman citizen, given the administrative task of checking it I doubt that more than basic communication could have been expected. Even today in immigrant societies such requirements are kept to basics and standards are often dependent upon the zeal of the examiner. Given the demand for a loyal population I daresay a retired legionnaire out on the frontier of empire, who applied for his citizenship and gave it as his intention to settle in a newly conquered territory with his local wife and kids, would have been given a wide margin for error in his Latin test.

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 15 Mar 07 - 01:56 PM

hic haec hoc

okay, you got the job.....

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: Dazbo
Date: 16 Mar 07 - 04:22 AM

Guest "Dazbo, I think the Anglo-Saxons must have arrived in large numbers including women and family groups because if the menfolk had mainly taken Britons as wives the Celtic languages and other influences would have been stronger. It was the women who mainly reared the kids and taught them their language. I don't say that the entire Anglo-Saxon people left Europe but that the nature of their 'invasion' must have been something more than a purely military campaign. They were invited in after all, by the British ruling class, in a misguided attempt to protect themselves."

I'm not disagreeing with you as this seems to be the simplest explanation and, to my mind, is not explained satisfactorily by the 'elite only' version hence my question.

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: Stu
Date: 16 Mar 07 - 04:40 AM

Well, according to Occam's Razor, all things being equal the simplest explanation is usually the right one.

But I'm not so sure. Obviously it was not just a purely miliartary invasion by the Saxons, but also in my opinion it didn't displace the numbers of Britons we have been led to believe - and this new genetic evidence supports this theory.

There are elements of Celtic and Saxon (and even Pictish) art in in many dark ages works, from the burial at Sutton Hoo to the Lindisfarne Gospels. This style, which is unique to early medieval Britain (which we would consider smack-bang in the middle of the Saxon's greatest strength) points to a continuous tradition incorporating many elements of the various cultures that have arrived over the centuries.

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: Dazbo
Date: 16 Mar 07 - 08:44 AM

Stigweard,

I'm leaning towards (based on some arguments that I've read and I like the idea) that there was a sizable "Saxon" population in eastern England before the Romans left and quite possibly a lot earlier.

Could it be that the tales of saxon invasion actually refer to an elite taking over a linguistically similar country? Or could it be that these were tales of an existing English invading the "celtic" west of these islands?

Subject: RE: BS: English Irish Scots Are All One Sez NYT
From: GUEST,Bardan
Date: 16 Mar 07 - 09:42 AM

Might also be down to allies and who was in the elites. The romans were friendly with quite a few tribes and allowed them to stay in charge etc. They were romanised, but maybe linguistically they held on to celtic as well so the elite was mixed. Ditto normans with some saxon nobility and clergy. (Although probably less.) I don't remember reading about saxons doing something comparable, but then I don't really know much about the saxons. Just an idea I thought I'd throw in