Each nation has various stereotypes associated with them. For example, the French are thought of as passionate lovers, Germans are cold and rational and methodical, the English have bad food and Italians are loud and talk with their hands.
If you go back in history, how far back do these various stereotypes go? Did the English bowmen who were battling in Agincourt believe that their French foes were passionate lovers? Surely we didn’t believe the Romans were loud hand talkers so there must have been some discontinuity in that belief? Are there moments in time or specific circumstances we can trace the origin of such beliefs down to?
The idea that the Greek language is especially difficult for non-native speakers to master seems to date back to at least the middle ages. In fact, a large number of languages have some sort of “it’s Greek to me” idiom that is used to refer to anything that is seen as incomprehensible.
One thing that you are going to run into is that ancient and even medieval ideas of nationality and ethnicity were not the same as the ones we have today. For example, around the year AD 500, the idea of someone being “Scottish” as a distinctive ethnicity apart from Irish did not exist, and the terms were actually interchangeable. The kingdom of the Dal Riata united much of Ireland and Scotland into a single nation that spoke Gaelic. Were they Irish people or were they Scots? Also, many Vikings who lived in their own settlements all throughout the British Isles likely considered themselves to be of Norse ethnicity regardless of what region or island they lived in. Modern ethnicities came about from the gradual changes and mergers that took place. “English” people are partly Anglo-Saxon, part Brythonic, and part Norse. Should modern “English” people be considered the same people as the ancient Anglo-Saxons, or should they be considered modern versions of ancient Scandinavians or Celto-Roman peoples?
If you went back two hundred years, the stereotypes would be that the French were a violent and warlike people and the Germans were a bunch of artists and intellectuals.
The English stereotype today is that they’re prim and proper. But the old stereotype was that Englishmen were ruthless pirates and thieves. And a common saying in Europe was that somebody that used a lot of profanity was “swearing like an Englishman” (a slang term for the English was the “goddamns”).
The Italian loud voices and gesturing hands are characteristic of Southern Italians. The Italian immigration to the United States has been mostly Southern Italian, who also invented pizza.
The real national characteristic of Italians that goes back many centuries is music. Italians’ love of singing and playing music is quite real. It isn’t just a stereotype. Often when listening to Italian song, it sounds so perfectly formed that I could practically come to believe that Italians invented music in the first place. Of course, evidence of human music making goes back centuries before anything called Italy was even invented.
But in a certain sense, Italians did invent music. Music as we know it.
Shakespeare depicted Captain Fluellen in Henry V as a stereotypical Welshman (along with others in other plays) but I don’t know how well this corresponds with modern Welsh stereotypes.
If any Welsh stereotypes still exist, (which I doubt) it would simply be that the Welsh language is utterly unpronounceable and/or is an elaborate practical joke.
Watch the TV show Torchwood sometime. I recall many stereotypes about Wales (particularly Cardiff) and the Welsh being brought up over and over, usually for comedic purposes.
Technically Austrian (before 1938 and again since 1945), but still, good call. It serves as an example of what I was talking about: even in other countries, Italian=music.
I’m an American. 100% of the stereotypes about Wales I know come from Monty Python and comparing Terry Jones as a Welsh housewife to my MIL. He nailed it. He even looks like her.
Culturally and ethnically Mozart was a German and identified as such, and would have been identified as such by the society in which he lived. The Austrian empire was inhabited by people of many nationalities, but “Austrian” wasn’t one of them.
In Mozart’s Vienna, the “high” music scene was dominated by Italian artists and Italian modes of composition and performance, and all serious composers and performers, regardless of their own nationality, adopted Italian styles. But more populist works were frequently in German, and there was some crossover, which Mozart exemplifies. His operas are in Italian or German, depending on the intended audience. There’s a passage in Peter Schaeffer’s play, Amadeus, in which Mozart argues for opera in German to exemplify “proper German virtues”, but I don’t know to what extent - if at all - this is based on any historical evidence that Mozart wanted German to be taken more seriously as a vehicle for high musical art.
