Britain has such a glorious and rich history, full of amazing events and extraordinary people. So to learn today that we are not entirely indigenous to this great Isle was somewhat dissapointing.
Once I got over the initial shock that we are speaking a variant of German and that some of what I thought was our heritage may have been "mythical" and "made up by the Victorians", I took a deep interest in what Chris was saying about the Act Of Union.
I have many links with Ireland, my Dad was born and brought up in Dublin and continues to live in Waterford. I have cousins, aunties and uncles there, and my brother was sent to Northern Ireland with the army to serve for six months. My Dad is very proud of his heritage, I am forever listening to stories about how my family survived the famine as somewhere along the line we were money lenders and other bits and bobs of the Greene family history. But to learn of the hardship the people of Ireland have suffered over the ages made me even more proud to have Irish heritage. Mass genocide, economic destruction and famine are just the start of the problems England has caused in Ireland, so is it any wonder Ireland does not want to become a part of "Great" Britain. What is so great about a country that cannot gain the confidence of another by peaceful means?
I think it is brilliant that Britain was the first country to industrialise, and played a crucial role in developing the world economy and that we have such a brilliant history and ties with many other great countries in the world, but as Chris stated, how can we judge on how best to solve other countries terrorism issues and problems when we cannot even control one in our own country? The whole idea of Britain storming in to help other people to gain face as opposed to solving our own countries issues seems to be a recurring problem.
Let's feed and shelter Africa, when we have a huge poverty problem here, let's go and help America fight the war in Iraq, when our soldiers are being given inadequate food compared to the Americans. It all seems so hypocritical.
I want to leave on a quote from one of my favourite plays "Translations" by Brian Friel. He wrote plays relating to the struggles in Ireland, and along with the Poet Seamus Heaney, had these performed by their theatre company, Field Day. "It is not the literal past, the facts of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language." The marks of the past effect us now in the form of the language we speak, as our language and culture is shaped by our history.
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Good. American (in the uk we speak a variant of American which microsoft calls 'UK English' - Yuklish? Anyway Uklish or whatever you want to call it is North Germanic language (like Dutch or Norwegian) with a largely German vocab (partic. concrete domestic nouns (house not maisonette) and a Latin (ie Roman) gramatical (ie logical) structure. But there many indigenous Celtic words there too (partic. place names like rivers and hills). Beyond this all Germanic languages are derived from Persian, or at least have the same root. Gaelic/Celtic appears to have orginated in the same place as modern Kurdish. I have kurdish friends who say that they recognise many Gaelic words and thus English place names. There is also a fairly big Romany input to Uklish and lately Danish words (like 'law', yiddish words (especially in UK versuon of American), in Yukilish you have a lot of Indian concrete nouns anf Arabic. You have linguistic innovation especially among young people with verbs like "diss" and punctuation-like expressions such as "innit". All of these innovations ensure that American continues to grow and spread around the world in essentially Darwinian terms.
ReplyDeleteThe best intro to this is the BBC series a few years ago all The Routes of English - really excellent exposition. The proh on swearing I think is especially good way to look at it. Please have a dip into the progs and blog about it.
Just put "bbc radio 4 - routes of english" into google. Listen to progs one and two a blog on that.
Also on Irish migration...
Do you know "Thousands are sailing" by The Pogues. I think that is a very affecting exposition on Ireland after the Act of Union
There's lots of versions on You Tube.
Also on the web you can find A MODEST PROPOSAL - a brilliant satire on the empiricists and also an important document on the history of Ireland.
On the (continuing) evolution of English
Also - on it being good that 'England' industrialised first - that I thinki is a very double-edged sword. That process started really with the Tudors who allied the settlement of North America with the cultivation of the 'commodities of death' (Tobacco, Sugar, Cotton, Potatoes)with the Acts of Enclosure (which led to the expropriation and destitution of the Anglo-Saxon peasants try (see: March of Grace, Acts of Enclosure). The poverty and starvation of the 'English' peasantry in the 16th century (onwards) was akin to the destruction of the Irish and Scottish peasantry in the 17th-19th centuries.
ReplyDeleteHampshire was particularly badly hit and was after Ireland and Scotland one of the major sources of emigrant (ie virtually slave) labour for the new world and later australia. So 'thousands are sailing' also applies to people from Portsmouth and Hants as well as Co Mayo and the Scottish Highlands. Many of the destitute who remained in Hampshire joined the British Army and Hants remains to this day a major source of manpower for the army. So that was the Hobsons choice created by 'industrialisation' in Hampshire was destutition and the poor house if stay; emigrate on a coffin ship to Canada or join the army to be shredded in Afghanistan (in the mid 19th century) and later in the first world war where the proportionate losses on the Somme were I think far greater for Hampshire than for any other than the Irish and Scottish regiments.
In (what became) my part of the world English peasants (many of them also facing religious persecution in Catholic north west England) were forced into factory alongside peasants from Scotland and Ireland forced off the land. Hideous slums like Manchester developed full of disease and alcoholism. The factory system was a form of slavery by any other name and the rates of death and injury in the cotton mills (cotton being produce in the american arm od this system by slaves from Africa) was horrific.
So that's where we have come from in the UK as far as I can see. Some glory (not much) but a lot of misery and oppression. Progress has happened in the last 100 years but it seems to me to be very fragile and to be honest bought vert much at the cost of the 'third world' (eg oil fuels our relative properity.
You people are younger than me - so y'all will need to have a good hard think about how you are going to organise yourself in the future...
please update daily - with what you have read in the papers.
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