XPost: soc.culture.welsh, soc.culture.cornish, soc.culture.irish   
   XPost: soc.culture.scottish   
   From: innes8@verizon.net   
      
   "Hal Ó Mearadhaigh."  wrote in message   
   news:5id717F3nj1msU1@mid.individual.net...   
   > allan connochie wrote:   
      
   >>> Okay, this language we speak here is Anglo-Celtic, no? John Fowles   
   >>> who had a Cornish mother said so. Yet in this, there is much   
   >>> variety, and a different stress here and there on regional values,   
   >>> which mass media homogenises as if culture were some simile for   
   >>> common language, and which it necessarily in its broad appeal,   
   >>> glosses the difference thereof. I have not found this universal   
   >>> factor of language to be any true indicator of regional or specific   
   >>> value, except as [necessary?] expedient to propose political   
   >>> affiliation. Cordially, Phil Innes   
   >>   
   >> I think you're away on a tangent. The discussion was about the   
   >> English, should probably be pan-Britsh, failure to speak other world   
   >> languages. French, German or Spanish etc.   
      
   Except of course that English language /is/ a conglomerate form of 'other'   
   languages, with more words than French, Spanish and German combined.   
      
   Not only that, but its root~ language contributions are also wide - at least   
   5,000 years of pan-European Celtic forms incorporating Ancient Viking and   
   Pictish q~ forms in the north, and southern p~ forms from Britanny, itself   
   an old Spanish/French language; then comes the 'novel' Anglo Saxon in 500   
   from the northern European plains, with its updated version 600 years later   
   which we call Anglo Norman [which is Saxon via a 500 year sojourn in   
   France].   
      
   So these roots~ already cover all the Scandinavian regions, the northern   
   Euro & Germanic Saxon, French/Spanish from Normandy, which brings us to   
   about 1000 years ago when English then incorporated Old French, &   
   more-than-ecclessiastical Latin apres Bede.   
      
   Its not true that English people don't speak other languages, English /is/   
   other languages. Even the 6 primary forms of Anglo Saxon on the Island were   
   almost unintelligible to each other until abt. 900, esp the 3 main forms,   
   West Sussex [or Wessex], Mercian [North] and the Scandinavian flavor spoken   
   in the Dane-law.   
      
   Saxon King Alfred is called the great because he unified a country of   
   illiterates who couldn't even understand each others' speech, nevermind any   
   written 'English' - an educational effort which continued some 200 years   
   until the boring Normans arrived and screwed things up with a new injection   
   of 3 other languages - which neverthless invigorated 'English.'   
      
   > Of course, fact is that the English (or Scots, Welsh, and even Irish) are   
   > as good or as bad as anyone else at speaking other languages. The reason   
   > they don't normally bother is obvious. Most countries speak English, at   
   > least as a second language. One of the benefits of once having the most   
   > successful Empire ever seen.   
      
   The 100 most used words in 'English' are all, and without exception, Anglo   
   Saxon. :))   
      
   Churchill's 50-word speech which begins "We will fight them on the   
   beaches..." is entirely composed of Anglo Saxon words, except the very last   
   word, "Surrender" which is from Old French.   
      
   Neil Armstrong's address on the Moon, beginning "One small step..." is   
   entirely Anglo Saxon.   
      
   And, as Fowles said, the dominant form of A. Sax is West Sussex, or   
   Anglo-Celtic. To speak English is to express yourself in a language which   
   incorporates other languages - you could [rofl] not have this conversation   
   in a French linguistic newsgroup, which is proud of its isolated purity of   
   form, and only in desperation can those twits admit that people actually   
   want to talk about 'le weekend'. Otherwise they are so stiff that they would   
   rather go without a name for it ;)   
      
   Now - language is a reflection of culture, no mere subjacent feature of it,   
   but an intimate, though surface, partner. Language is the outer expression   
   of the form of culture which, again Fowles, states, did not follow the   
   scarpering Romans, but those who remained were, even after 400 years of   
   occupation, still culturally Celt, thereby the forms and rhythms of new   
   speech in A. Sax were modulated by the 'Welsc', the 'foreigners' who already   
   lived here.   
      
   That is the language which slowly combined in Old Wessex to inform this,   
   now, world language.   
      
   Now, they don't make a big point of that in school, do they? And tell we   
   Celts nothing much about the preceeding culture to the 'modern world',   
   except for the old saws about Boedica, possibly mentioning her tits in   
   battle - as if that justified the mention. But nothing much else, right?   
      
   And it is not really a conscious suppression of culture or the truth of our   
   origins, it is because people do not really understand what I have written   
   above sufficiently to give it credit - instead all students in English   
   schools receive a sort of history of War, beginning with a general   
   /appreciation/ of the Romans, no matter their genocidal activities here on   
   the Island, as if war was a process and not a result of some failure of   
   culture. History continues this way, with more war for about 200 years, and,   
   rara avis! how often is anything mentioned about the lives of the people.   
      
   Should he reader consider that as their own background in British schools,   
   then what preparation is it to understand anything about who we Anglo-Celts   
   are?   
      
   Instead they read about the 'ancient people' as if from those improbable   
   placards you see by megaliths - which suggest that perhaps some group of   
   hunter-gatherers took 2 or 3 generations off, [presumably others were happy   
   to supply them food for 100 years, etc] and just for the hell of it, put   
   this massive stone on top of those other three which they also placed there,   
   after dragging the fucking things 20 miles from the coast, and these in a   
   line with others stretching for a few hundred miles, in an apparently   
   oganised attempt across the whole culture to placate the /you invent it/   
   [the moon?]   
      
   So as the cultural anthropology is rendered to us as if written by a not   
   very imaginative child, or indeed, as if by an idiot, so all that which   
   emerged and survived from that culture is not as much suppressed, since it   
   is literally not even seen... and some impossible people from a   
   psychologically basis be suggested to us with seemingly random fantasy   
   placard sound-bites about the old folks.   
      
   The roots of English language are simply old, and 'modern languages' are   
   just novel forms of what to large extent was already incorporated some 1000   
   years ago. To understand this is the path to the past, though as above, we   
   have hardly travelled it in any cogent manner, nor adequately explained it   
   to ourselves - that is, we Anglo-Celts have not th'n beys danvonas sylwyans   
      
      
   Phil Innes   
      
      
   > --   
   > Hal Ó Mearadhaigh.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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