The map has some surprises, like the huge overlap between Ireland and Holland (Is there an historical event that clarifies this?), and the lack of overlap between Finland and everywhere else.
There are counter examples, though, like Latin and Arabic.
There would probably be overlap with Finland and Estonia, if the latter were included. Finnish is a Uralic language, not related to any Indo-European language. Whether the Finnish people are descendants of Uralic people (instead of Indo-European people who adopted a Uralic language) is yet to be determined, although that data would tend to support that hypothesis. The Saami (Lapps) are undoubtably different, genetically, but it should be noted that a large number of ethnic Swedes live in Finland as well. At any rate, I’m a bit suspicious of the “no overlap” result given the long contact Finland has had with the rest of Scandinavia.
mmm… Cheddar Man [/homer simpson]
The “civilized” language wins, i.e. the languege already used in administration in the region. If one language has a written form, and the other does not, the written language wins.
Note that the red/blonde hair and blue eyes of northern Italy is most likely due to the original Celtic population of this area before it was conquered by the Romans, rather than later Lombard invasion.
yes
When my class took a trip to Greece (it’s a university tradition in Spain; not the Greece part, just the class trip), some of my classmates complained that the guys there “didn’t look like the statues.” I pointed out they might be luckier looking for George Michael lookalikes instead 
In Spain we refer to certain people by their WAG’d ancient ancestry casually enough to be done in everyday conversation, as shorthands for certain looks. For example, you may hear someone from Galicia indicate “Xoan is Celt but his brothers are all Iberian” to indicate that Xoan is tall, thin and pale, whereas his brothers are your typical short, small and dark cartoon Spaniard (may still be able to pull an ox backwards, mind you, those Iberians are a lot stronger than they look). Redheads are much more common in Catalonia than in other parts of the country, and in Catalan they’re often called fenicis, phoenicians, because tradition has it that’s where they got their shiny locks. Whether those traditions are true or not, I don’t know, and of course Xoan and his brothers are all a similar amount of Celt and Iberian… but, being Galegos, they’re a lot more likely to have Celt and Iberian blood than, say, Hun blood.
Little known fact:
In 1942, under the orders of Adolf Hitler, the entire population of Norway was exterminated and replaced with a Romanian minority group. This group was ordered to adopt Norwegian names and the Norwegian language. Finding that they’d never had it so good, they made a thorough study of the culture and history and have, to this date, never revealed the ruse.
Learning from this example, Joseph Stalin made a game of forced culture/language/territorial swaps in the Soviet Union in the wake of WWII. For example, the people we currently know as Georgians are, in fact, Lithuanians.
Yes, to make it perfectly clear, since we are in GQ, the above post is full of shit.
Not necessarily.
After the Norman conquest, French became the language of government in England, but never the language of the land. Obviously, a lot of words were adopted into Middle English and beyond, but the basis of the language remains.
There was a programme on British T.V. called Blood of the Vikings that traced the population history of Britain through genetics.
It found that virtually everyone in the U.K.was descended from mostly Danish Vikings(though it was predominately Norweigen Vikings in the Isle of Man) with a good mixture of Germanics,the majority from Holland.
In Ireland it was found that the Irish maintained their Celtic integrity due probably to there being no intermixing,if I can put it delicatly,of the two peoples.
The Norsemen enslaved the Irish but didn’t marry them.
I was told by a Greek girl(slightly embarrassed)that due to the occupation of Greece and Eastern Europe by the Turks for so many hundred years that they were actually more kin to the Turks then the Classical Greeks.
Obviously this has no provable scientific basis but if present day Greeks (who loathe and despise all things Turkish)believe this then who knows it may have some sort of foundation in fact ,though I have no opinion on this subject either way.
Do you have any evidence for this? I’m not disagreeing, I just don’t know that we have specifics on the physical appearance of either group (except of course the long beards of the Lombards).
>Welcome to the board, Mr Duncan Mc Leod.
HAH! Well, how silly of me. Moreover, I had no idea who Duncan Mc Leod was, but Wikipedia fixed me up. They say it is MacLeod, BTW.
In a weird coincidence, my namesake, mathematician John Napier, actually WAS born about 800 years after Charles. But that wasn’t what I was thinking about.
I converted the 800 from a birth year to a time period. So there are 1200 years worth of generations, 60 of them, with 2^60 or about ten billion billion lines back, etc etc.
Good reading, there, clairobscur!
My understanding is that the Romans left surprisingly few words behind in GB when they departed, but surely they would have controlled the administration and the writing?
Is it just me or does this sound kind of kinky?
Well. if you still know her you can tell her she’s wrong.
Of course there was a certain amount of interbreeding, but the populations seem to have remained pretty distinct - even those Greeks that converted. At least according to most historians. Anyone got genetic evidence?
I read somewhere that the working-class population of the Trastevere quarter of Rome is descended from the original ancient Roman plebeians. Meanwhile all lines of descent from Roman emperors and aristocrats were broken off after the Germanic conquests. I think this is a reliable pattern in history. Whenever nationality changes by conquest, the aristocratic stratum is replaced. The masses of peasants and proletarians stay pretty much the same. You don’t get rid of them because you need them to work the farms. There have been cases in history where a ruler ordered an entire country depopulated and replaced by people of his own choosing, but that hasn’t happened very often, I think.
When we say, for example, “the Hittites” or “the Babylonians” etc. we’re thinking of the rulers who made all those monuments, inscriptions, and libraries that we know them by. This was the work of the top 1% or so of society. The masses of common people from whom present-day Turks are descended aren’t our usual referent when we think of “the Hittites.” But as the indigenous population of Anatolia they could be considered Hittites too, if we thought about them.
It’s like ancient statues were said to be polychrome painted but all we see is bare stone or terra cotta. The finer, delicate aspects of the art were eroded away over time, leaving only the underlying mass of hard material. Populations remain genetically in place over time like that too, in rough outline if not in fine detail.
They didn’t keep them in Ireland. Instead they took them home with them, which is why the gene-pool of the Scandinavian countries is merrily mixed with celtic genes.
It helped that (a) Old English had a written form already, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was maintained in English until 1154; (b) the invading Normans mostly married local Saxon women, who taught the English language to their children - the next generation was mostly bilingual; © the Normans never tried to eradicate English - William I even tried to learn it, though without success.
I don’t have a link handy, but I remember reading it was actually the other way round - the Turks are basically descended from the previously existing Greek (and non Greek but Hellenicized) populations of Asia Minor. The article said it was because the actual Turks, who were from Central Asia and had epicanthic folds, were few in numbers compared with the local population, and often ended up marrying local people. In addition to that, you could “become” Turk, so to speak, by converting to Islam and adopting the Turk culture - or being forced to: consider the case of the Janissaries during the first centuries of the Ottoman Empire.
So the Turkish culture remained but the Turkish genes were diluted, so to speak. The result was that there is strong genetic overlap between Greeks and Turks. When I mention this, both Greeks and Turks get angry. 
In addition to the previously listed exceptions, note that that hypothesis also fails with the example of Arabic.
Slightly tangential, but it in relation to the above, it is perhaps worth noting that the word “Turk” as used by the Ottoman ruling class was a synonym for “backwards hick” until the 19th century. The Ottomans were self-consciously cosmopolitan and Turkish nationalism per se is a very modern phenomenom.