I like Theroux’s travel writing a great deal, but he’s a very unreliable narrator.
Ah, five year old thread. Sorry.
Did a double-take when I realized I was reading a Tamerlane post.
So, genetically speaking, English folk are mostly Celtic folk.
Why did I just type this in English?
I’m surprised the Oxford Companion uses the ambiguous term ‘Scottish’ to talk of Scots, the latter being how I’d have expected to talk of it. This being becase ‘Scottish’ is sometimes used to mean Scottish Gaelic, as a parallel to ‘Irish’ referring to Irish Gaelic.
Also, just to muddy the never-clear waters between ‘dialect’ and ‘language’ further, my Irish-speaking grandfather insisted that the Donegal Irish he found himself speaking late in life was much closer to Scottish Gaelic than to the Cork Irish he’d learnt as a boy.
Aquila Be writes:
> Why did I just type this in English?
No one is quite clear why this happened, but it’s now believed that while the language of the Anglo-Saxons who came to Britain (i.e., the ancestor of English) supplanted the Celtic languages of Britain pretty quickly in England except in the Cornish peninsula, the Anglo-Saxons did not push the Celtic people there aside. The Celtic peoples stayed and intermarried with the invaders. Within a few more centuries English mostly supplanted the Celtic languages in Cornwall, the Isle of Man, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. No one knows why this happened this way. Norman French didn’t supplant English, despite being the language of the dominant group, although it added a lot of words to English. There aren’t even very many Celtic-derived words in English compared to French, where a lot of Celtic-derived words are found. France was also mostly a Celtic-speaking land before the time of the Romans. I’ve seen a list of words in English that are eventually derived from Celtic languages. A lot of them (and certainly most of the common ones) are actually words from Celtic languages that were adopted into French and then brought into English by the Normans.
You can hypothesize about why things happened this way (and doubtlessly other posters will, stretching this thread to great lengths), but basically you just have to say that that’s how it happened and no one is sure why.
Yes there are racially pure ethnicities, today the Scots are a cross between Anglo-Saxon and Norse
The ‘highlands’ Scots are Celtic
The Scots are an 100 % germanic culture (norse and Angle and Saxon are all germanic)
They also share a germanic culture and language of it’s own cultural group (not sub english but a brother of old English)
The house of Wessex was on the islands of Britain before any celts but they died off and the celts took their place, except for the ‘lowland’ Scots who survived and during the times of the Romans the Scots were infant germanic and not Celtic (they never met the highlands Scots or Cimbrians who are of Celtic descent)
The Scots are a different type of the first group of Anglo-Saxons who later returned and repopulated both England and Scotland with germanic peoples who became the English and the Scots even the norse were there before the celts and mixed with the Scots years before the Normans and norse return (for orkney, and shetland currently scotland were norse)
Sources, many I’m the expert on cultural ethnicities
Hate to say this
The ones of u who said english and Scottish are Celtic are misinformed due to current un updated studies…
If the point of this is to educate, I’m helping all of u…
If you don’t believe me u truly are straight dopes
Nah, I’m just kidding
But seriously I can’t stand it when people learn the wrong stuff not your faults
Re: Posts #27 and #28. See this link.