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Jul 27, 2007 18:14:42 GMT -1
Post by Tegernacus on Jul 27, 2007 18:14:42 GMT -1
I don't think there is a specific way of connecting with ancestors, no ritual. With near ancestors, you connect with them every time you put flowers on a grave, take out an old photo, raise a glass to them with a nod and a wink.
Far ancestors are slightly trickier, given the gulf of time. What I would suggest is to immerse yourself in their world for a bit. Go to places like Flag Fen or Buster or Castel Henllys, experience the sights, sounds and smells of their way of life. Then visit the ancient sites in your area. Get an OS map and find your local spring, go visit it (maybe take a bin-liner and clean it up a bit). Walk the local hills and woods. The more you walk in their footsteps, literally, the more connection with them you will feel. They weren't aliens, they were people, same as you, living in the same place, feeling the same rain on their faces. Take a picnic to a local iron-age site or spring, raise a glass to the people who walked there before you. Respect and connection isn't learned, it is deep and heartfelt. Just be open, see what happens.
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Jul 27, 2007 18:46:27 GMT -1
Post by exprocella on Jul 27, 2007 18:46:27 GMT -1
There is an oppertunity for me to do this soon. Although not an ancient site (as far as I'm aware) I'll be camping out in the woods a stones throw from where my family orginate.
I'll bear what you've said in mind as I cut wood and hunt, thank you.
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Jul 27, 2007 19:00:58 GMT -1
Post by littleraven on Jul 27, 2007 19:00:58 GMT -1
Tegernacus
Well said.
LR
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Jul 28, 2007 8:51:24 GMT -1
Post by Craig on Jul 28, 2007 8:51:24 GMT -1
Utilising old Occam I have been thinking... Has any of these learned men thought this:
When the areas in question were colonised by certain Saesnegs they asked the locals "What's that then?"
The local Roman-Brythons answered in brythonic and someone translated it into Saes. The Saesnegs then called it by that translated name, and as they came to dominate the area it became the regular use-name. It is something we did all over the Empire.
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Jul 28, 2007 9:40:16 GMT -1
Post by Tegernacus on Jul 28, 2007 9:40:16 GMT -1
its hard to work out. if you take Cumbria, about half the river names are of Brythonic origin, and half of old-English. If you take the lakes, ALL the names are either old-English or old Norse. You see lakes like Haweswater, which is 'Hafr's lake' from the old-Norse "hafs vatn". Its like the incomers are completely taking over these places - this is MY lake, you're going to call it Horsa's Lake from now on. I think, places where the Brythonic names DO survive, probably weren't important enough for the new chiefs to claim, or on the very boundries of their lands. Dunno, you could probably peace together the "manor" areas from the Domesday Book or something, but I betcha the Brythonic areas are outside them. Or am I talking out of ye olde arse? Dunno, its a thought en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_Cumbrian_Place_Names
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Jul 28, 2007 10:39:00 GMT -1
Post by Tegernacus on Jul 28, 2007 10:39:00 GMT -1
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Jul 29, 2007 10:08:48 GMT -1
Post by Lee on Jul 29, 2007 10:08:48 GMT -1
*demetian hat on*
LR... can we have our pigs back please?
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Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
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Aug 17, 2007 6:31:55 GMT -1
Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2007 6:31:55 GMT -1
TOO LATE!....mmm crispy bacon ;D
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Aug 17, 2007 7:45:21 GMT -1
Post by Francis on Aug 17, 2007 7:45:21 GMT -1
If you take the lakes, ALL the names are either old-English or old Norse. You see lakes like Haweswater, which is 'Hafr's lake' from the old-Norse "hafs vatn". I'm not sure this is 100% right. I'm thinking of Derwent water for instance - sounds a bit Brythonic and oakey to me "Derw" ?
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Aug 17, 2007 10:58:58 GMT -1
Post by megli on Aug 17, 2007 10:58:58 GMT -1
Derwent undoutedly is a brythonic name. The river Eden (Idon) also crops up in the Taliesin corpus.
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Sept 17, 2007 14:27:07 GMT -1
Post by arth_frown on Sept 17, 2007 14:27:07 GMT -1
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Sept 18, 2007 5:35:51 GMT -1
Post by Craig on Sept 18, 2007 5:35:51 GMT -1
Thanks Arth, I've dropped that to my pen drive to read later.
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Feb 14, 2008 22:43:27 GMT -1
Post by poseidia on Feb 14, 2008 22:43:27 GMT -1
The English language for me is a great mystery. Welsh seem to have changed little in 2000 or so years but historians would have us believe that English metamorphosed from the highly germanic language of Beowolf with very few words derived from Latin to the wholly different Middle English containing lots of Latin in just a few hundred years. There is a brilliantly entertaining little book on this subject which makes a strong claim that English is a much older language than we think and was the native language years before the Saxon invasion of the Island. It certainly accords with Craig's view that the Saxon "invasion" had no greater effect on the underlying peoples than the later Norman invasion. I would highly recommend it - "The History of Britain Revealed" by MJ Harper. If nothing else get it to enjoy his sheer exasperation with the views of the establishment and his wonderful mastery of biting sarcasm.
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Feb 15, 2008 18:44:21 GMT -1
Post by Tegernacus on Feb 15, 2008 18:44:21 GMT -1
It's more complicated than that. Middle-English didn't appear until about... 1200? Which means you had 700 years of olde-Beowulf English. In that time it mixed with the Brythonic language, latin, greek, Viking, old-French etc. That is a LOOOOOONG time, in language terms. For example, would Charles Dickens have been able to understand your average Jerry Springer guest? "Yo homie, yo dissin me? Dang, no' what I-sayin man? Sheeeeiiitttt". And that kind of language has only been around since the 70s-80s, but now it's a common way of speaking amongst certain groups of people. Twenty years. Or even "I Googled for your Facebook". Whaaaat? Even Welsh has changed, incorporating English words, morphing into Wenglish etc. Language isn't static, nor should it be. Otherwise we would still be calling stones "Ugg-ugg" like Neanderthals did lol
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Feb 15, 2008 22:48:19 GMT -1
Post by Heron on Feb 15, 2008 22:48:19 GMT -1
The English language for me is a great mystery. Welsh seem to have changed little in 2000 or so years but historians would have us believe that English metamorphosed from the highly germanic language of Beowolf with very few words derived from Latin to the wholly different Middle English containing lots of Latin in just a few hundred years. There is a brilliantly entertaining little book on this subject which makes a strong claim that English is a much older language than we think and was the native language years before the Saxon invasion of the Island. It certainly accords with Craig's view that the Saxon "invasion" had no greater effect on the underlying peoples than the later Norman invasion. I would highly recommend it - "The History of Britain Revealed" by MJ Harper. If nothing else get it to enjoy his sheer exasperation with the views of the establishment and his wonderful mastery of biting sarcasm. It's not that difficult to fathom. Following the Norman invasion French became the everyday language for anyone that mattered. Latin was already established as the language of religion and 'literature' (such as Geoffreys of Monmouth's History. English effectively went underground as far as written records are concerned for a while after the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ceased. There were a few brilliant very regional alliterative pieces such as Langland's Piers plowman and the anonomous Gawain and the Green Knight but when Chaucer effectively got things going again for English he was writing as a fluent speaker of French and Italian who had the model of Boccaccio before him. Latin and French remained parallel languages of administration up to this time so it's hardly surprising that the English language absorbed them. I know the theory that the La Tene 'celts' actually spoke a Germanic language from the claims of Oppenheimer to support his genetic research. He also claims that neither Celtic nor Germanic invaders had much effect on the genetic makeup of the population which had come to Britain after the Ice Age from Iberia. He suggests they were of the same origins as the Basques.There is a postulated 'Celt-Iberian' language which is thought to have been Goidelic rather than Brythonic. But there's no getting away from the fact that Brythonic and its Latinised descendant Welsh was spoken (and written) across southern Scotland and down the Western side of Britain as late as the 6th century. How did that happen if everyone spoke an early form of English?
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Feb 16, 2008 7:01:06 GMT -1
Post by Tegernacus on Feb 16, 2008 7:01:06 GMT -1
I read that PDF that arth posted above, and while it was mostly gobbledegook to me, its conclusion was interesting. Basically (correct me if I got this wrong) the proposition is that, generally, languages either get melted into the invading language (the invading language becomes dominant, with a large percentage of native) or the invading language gets melted into the native one (the native language remains dominant, with a large percentage of the invading).
The author's conclusion was that neither happened in the case of Anglo-Saxon, leading him (her) to the conclusion that there simply wasn't any British speaking people around when the Saxons came in. (He sites the Bretons etc as reasons why). Which seems strange, given all that fertile farmland. Abandoned? Why?
It reminds me of that chronicle, where it is said Vortigern gave lands in Kent to the Saes. Gave? Wonder what the Brits who lived on that land thought about that? Were they moved out by order of the King? Or moved West because they didn't like these new folk much? Or they just started dressing, talking and constructing like the Saxons, almost instantly (as seems to be popular current theory)? I doubt it. Look at the Channel Islands, who were occupied by the Nazis in WWII. Did the Islanders start "being German", lapping it up? Or when the Normans invaded, did the Saxons just start speaking old-French and eating frogs-legs? Nope. So I doubt the Britons did when the Saxons started spreading out. More likely there weren't any there (in great numbers). Did they move out or were they pushed out? Did famine or war do for them, even before the Saxons appeared? Who knows . But this is off-topic.
I don't buy the "English always spoke a kind of English, even before the Saxons came" blarney. Smacks (to me) of some kind of BNP rubbish (we're not a bunch of Germans, we're British, always have been). IF, and a big IF, "English" had been spoken by people living in Britain say, after the last ice-age, and British (Brythonic) had been a later import, it would have spread out from Dover, through the country Westwards, rather than appear on the fringe (Wales, Cornwall, Cumbria) in a neat circle around the English England. Doesn't add up. Good for debate, but I doubt very much.
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Feb 16, 2008 9:18:11 GMT -1
Post by megli on Feb 16, 2008 9:18:11 GMT -1
There may be a drop of truth in it. It IS odd that there are hardly any borrowed words in Old english from Neo-Brythonic/Proto-Welsh. It may be true that the AS conquered/expanded into areas like somerset and devon particularly easily and quickly because these regions were depopulated by mass emigration to Brittany in the preceding decades. ('Shit, the saxons are coming, there's a nice land one or two day's sailing away where lots of our people have already gone. Why don't we go too?')
But that is a tiny point in favour of a much larger argument the main thrust of which is palpable bollocks. So, well said Tegernacus.
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Feb 16, 2008 9:25:30 GMT -1
Post by megli on Feb 16, 2008 9:25:30 GMT -1
The English language for me is a great mystery. Welsh seem to have changed little in 2000 or so years but historians would have us believe that English metamorphosed from the highly germanic language of Beowolf with very few words derived from Latin to the wholly different Middle English containing lots of Latin in just a few hundred years. There is a brilliantly entertaining little book on this subject which makes a strong claim that English is a much older language than we think and was the native language years before the Saxon invasion of the Island.
As Heron says, there are compelling reasons to accept the scholarly status quo. You have to remember that a) the AS encountered Latin culture in Britain, as a resulty of becoming Christian, and b) most of the words of Latin derivation in Middle English come through Norman French. There's nothing at all unlikely in such a transformation of language. It happens all the time, and is exactly what one would expect.
Second, it isn't true that Welsh has changed little over 2000 years. 2000 years ago, 'Welsh' didn't exist, in the same way that French or Italian didn't. Instead, their respective immediate parent languages, British and Latin, were being spoken. There were a large number of radical changes that totally transformed British around 450-550 AD, turning it into proto-welsh. It has continued to change since then, as one can see if one turns back from the pages of 'Golwg' to Theophilus Evans to Sir John Prys to the Four Branches to Culhwch to the Gododdin.
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Feb 16, 2008 10:36:32 GMT -1
Post by arth_frown on Feb 16, 2008 10:36:32 GMT -1
Here in the south east production of grain actually went up after the romans told us that we had to fend for ourselves, according to the pollen count from the soil samples.For us English turning Saxon I think it was us giving a two fingers to Rome for us turning Germanic was our way of getting less roman. Not long after the Saxons arrived they were converted to Christianity(most likely due to political pressure)IMHO they had the backing Catholic church to turn the rest of the Briton from Celtic Christianity to Catholicism.
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