How are the English different from us?

dpe

Lord Riverside wrote: »

That's because unlike the Irish, the welsh structured the teaching of welsh in schools correctly.
The pedagogy and curriculum for the teaching of Irish in Ireland is abysmal.
NI school children who opt to take Irish, get to take far less hours, yet can can speak and write it much better. Most people in the Republic who've gone through the Irish school system and who took languages are far better at French, German Spanish etc. with only 5 years, vs 13 or so years wasted in Irish classes in the Republic.

Certainly talking to my wife, who went through learning Irish around the time I was learning Welsh, Irish sounds horrific. Having said that, that was the 70s/80s, I don't if its still that bad. People I know speak very highly of the Gaelscoil system for example.

dubhthach wrote: »

No the issue is simple Welsh didn't suffer a major calamity during the 19th century. There was more Welsh speakers in 1900 than in 1800, population of Welsh speakers kept growing, though obviously at slower percentage than total population growth. In comparison during the 20th century Welsh suffer major drop, only stablishing around 1991. Teaching of welsh school actually didn't really have an affect, after all 50% of population in 1901 were native Welsh speakers, they didn't need education system to speak the language.

In comparison Irish drop below 50% about 100 years prior around 1800, and as we know post 1850 population of Ireland was unique in western Europe in undergoing constant population decline for close on 100 years.

Its not as simple as that. Yes Welsh wasn't as decimated as Irish, but if you wanted to "get on" in the 19th/20th century, you learned and spoke English. I'm not actually Welsh, but have Welsh ancestry, and my Dad told me that his grandfather banned his (seven) sons from speaking Welsh in the house at all, and that kind of thing wasn't that uncommon.

The other difference was that Welsh grammar was completely overhauled by Victorian revivalists, and by all accounts is much easier to learn than Irish (I don't remember much but I do remember it being remarkably similar to French)

StonyIron

dpe wrote: »

Interesting thread, and as a Brit who's lived in Ireland for several years now, I've thought about it a lot. First of all I think class is a more significant area of common ground across lots of countries, so I'll put that out there right now; if you're middle class in the UK, and middle class in Ireland, the differences are superficial. Yes there's the funeral thing (weddings on the other hand are exactly the same), and the GAA is more significant difference than I first realised (I only really started to understand as my kids reached school age); and there's still some Catholic hangover (religion is a complete non-issue for the vast majority of nominally protestant Brits). Interestingly Irish should be a bigger difference than it is (I spent years living in Wales and Welsh is a much bigger part of daily life than Irish is for most people here), and I think that might end up being more important in another generation.

Finally the biggest thing you notice day-to-day? Rules. The English believe in rules, they stick to them (generally) and they expect to be held to them. In Irish life things are a bit more fluid, more of a guideline (to paraphrase Dara O'Briain). Example, if you lost your train ticket in the UK, you would expect to pay the fare and the penalty as the rules say; in Ireland, you'd be waved through. I've seen this kind of thing countless times; more of a respect for the individual rather than the system in Ireland (another example, the shop assistant who tells you to go to the rival store down the road because they have a better deal on). I think to a certain extent this is also why Ireland comes off as a bit friendlier than England; Ireland is a society that puts people first in general, and is all the better for it, although the dark side of that is that sometimes people have a poor understanding of the greater good.

I've been waived through in England with the wrong train tickets twice.

Irish Rail applied the full penalty fare for a minor mixup in similar circumstances.

I was also grilled at a dart station one day because my ticket was blank. The machine had issued it and encoded the magnetic part but not printed the text. I didn't read it and it opened the barrier.


Think it's very much pot luck.

My experience is both countries have their humans and their total jobsworths in those kind of positions.

Schalker

The Irish never put half the world into slavery.
Thats the one important difference so far. ))

dpe

Schalker wrote: »

The Irish never put half the world into slavery.
Thats the one important difference so far. ))

There's always one isn't there? And yes, you did.

dpe

StonyIron wrote: »

I've been waived through in England with the wrong train tickets twice.

Irish Rail applied the full penalty fare for a minor mixup in similar circumstances.

I was also grilled at a dart station one day because my ticket was blank. The machine had issued it and encoded the magnetic part but not printed the text. I didn't read it and it opened the barrier.


Think it's very much pot luck.

My experience is both countries have their humans and their total jobsworths in those kind of positions.

Definitely not my experience. Jobsworth is a badge of honour in the UK.

tac foley

I went to school in Wrexham in the late 1950's, and Welsh was compulsory all the way through. Those who were natural Welsh speakers had a separate class called 'Special Welsh' where they did a lot of esoteric study - so I'm told. The Welsh pay a lot more than 'lip-service' [excuse the pun] to their language - it really is a living and vibrant part of everyday life, as a drive around the countryside would convince any visitor. Not only are all the road-signs in Welsh, but the painted on the road signs are in Welsh and English - sometimes, without the English, too.

When I was in the Army, two of our attached RAFVR crew were from North Wales, and it confused the heck out of everybody else in the crew-room coffee breaks as we yacked away in 'sgrabwl'.

tac

tac foley

Schalker wrote: »

The Irish never put half the world into slavery.
Thats the one important difference so far. ))

Huh?

tac

Lord Riverside

tac foley wrote: »

I went to school in Wrexham in the late 1950's, and Welsh was compulsory all the way through. Those who were natural Welsh speakers had a separate class called 'Special Welsh' where they did a lot of esoteric study - so I'm told. The Welsh pay a lot more than 'lip-service' [excuse the pun] to their language - it really is a living and vibrant part of everyday life, as a drive around the countryside would convince any visitor. Not only are all the road-signs in Welsh, but the painted on the road signs are in Welsh and English - sometimes, without the English, too.

When I was in the Army, two of our attached RAFVR crew were from North Wales, and it confused the heck out of everybody else in the crew-room coffee breaks as we yacked away in 'sgrabwl'.

tac

Indeed, if Welsh had been taught in the way Irish is taught here, it would be almost dead now as well.

tac foley

Incidentally, my grandad, at school in the late 1890s and noughties of the 20thC, was shamed into learning English after being constantly made to stand in a corner of the schoolroom wearing a dunce's cap and with a placard around his neck on which were the words 'Welsh - NOT'.

There also seems to be an element of revisionism going on as well, with regard to the alleged timing of compulsory Welsh in schools at all levels. As I wrote, in the late 50's it was compulsory everywhere in North Wales, and my Great Uncle Ifor and his younger brother Iestyn both taught Welsh as part-time teachers in schools in the area of Wrexham from the mid-forties on. In addition, there were, of course, Ysgolion Cymru - Welsh Schools - where no English was spoken at all during the school day. Again, these were at all levels of the teaching curriculum, too. My Welsh GF and her brother had gone to one such school in Corwen.

tac

StonyIron

Lord Riverside wrote: »

Indeed, if Welsh had been taught in the way Irish is taught here, it would be almost dead now as well.

I just remember learning tables of verbs off by heart in primary school and "chanting" lists of prepositions out of context!

The same teacher used to wheel out a big 1960s slide projector which still had the giant round pin plug on the end and an extension lead to plug it into a modern socket and she'd show slides of deadly boring cartoons about Mhammi in the kitchen or something.

This was in the late 1990s!!

It's no wonder I never took to it.

Going off topic but, also French and German teachers in second level made absolutely zero attempt to get people interested in media or film in those languages. There's a wealth of French film, rap, hip hop, magazines, papers, TV, websites to plug into - huge media. Same for Spanish and maybe a little less so film but still other content for German and most languages.

Instead we were reading photocopied articles from the 1990s about the TGV and discussing the scourge of youth unemployment !!

Lazy, stale language teaching kills language learning.

Ipso

Schalker wrote: »

The Irish never put half the world into slavery.
Thats the one important difference so far. ))

Saint PTrick would disagree with you.

AnLonDubh

tac foley wrote: »

I have to agree. Modern English is a healthy stew of many other languages, including some Irish, of course.

English is grammatically virtually purely Germanic, phonologically is purely Germanic and in vocabulary is only moderately mixed (compare with Persian and Armenian for Indo-European languages which have truly mixed lexicons). English is no different from most languages in this regard.

AnLonDubh

dpe wrote: »

The other difference was that Welsh grammar was completely overhauled by Victorian revivalists, and by all accounts is much easier to learn than Irish (I don't remember much but I do remember it being remarkably similar to French)

Welsh was not over hauled by Victorian revivalists, it is spoken in essentially the same form as the 19th century.

Irish however is the more difficult of the two, as it retained its case system and the phonology is less regular than Welsh.

AnLonDubh

Fratton Fred wrote: »

Is that a train station, or the sound of a cat being sick?

Even if this is a joke, come on. The spelling is unusual to you, so the language sounds like a cat getting sick?

Lord Riverside

StonyIron wrote: »

I just remember learning tables of verbs off by heart in primary school and "chanting" lists of prepositions out of context!

The same teacher used to wheel out a big 1960s slide projector which still had the giant round pin plug on the end and an extension lead to plug it into a modern socket and she'd show slides of deadly boring cartoons about Mhammi in the kitchen or something.

This was in the late 1990s!!

It's no wonder I never took to it.

Going off topic but, also French and German teachers in second level made absolutely zero attempt to get people interested in media or film in those languages. There's a wealth of French film, rap, hip hop, magazines, papers, TV, websites to plug into - huge media. Same for Spanish and maybe a little less so film but still other content for German and most languages.

Instead we were reading photocopied articles from the 1990s about the TGV and discussing the scourge of youth unemployment !!

Lazy, stale language teaching kills language learning.

I'm beginning to realise the vast wealth of material they kept from us. Incompetence breeds incompetence, and boy was the teaching of the Irish language incompetent nationally.

StonyIron

AnLonDubh wrote: »

English is grammatically virtually purely Germanic, phonologically is purely Germanic and in vocabulary is only moderately mixed (compare with Persian and Armenian for Indo-European languages which have truly mixed lexicons). English is no different from most languages in this regard.

It's Germanic rooted but, English grammar has a fair smattering of Gaelic languages and also a good dollop of French in it.

There's a lot of evidence of Gaelic languages in modern English, particularly in the use of continious tenses/verb forms. These don't exist in Germanic languages but they do exist in welsh and Irish.

Quite interesting actually as until relatively recently a lot of 19th century and older academics didn't really want to acknowledge non-classical elements in English.

It's inevitable given the proximity and mixed usage that the two languages would have crossover.

Ipso

StonyIron wrote: »

It's Germanic rooted but, English grammar has a fair smattering of Gaelic languages and also a good dollop of French in it.

There's a lot of evidence of Gaelic languages in modern English, particularly in the use of continious tenses/verb forms. These don't exist in Germanic languages but they do exist in welsh and Irish

That may be down to the pre Roman celtic languages that were spoken there.

AnLonDubh

StonyIron wrote: »

It's Germanic rooted but, English grammar has a fair smattering of Gaelic languages and also a good dollop of French in it.

There's a lot of evidence of Gaelic languages in modern English, particularly in the use of continious tenses/verb forms. These don't exist in Germanic languages but they do exist in welsh and Irish.

Benjamin Forston's "Indo-European Language and Culture" makes no mention of this. The English continuous present forms evolved from earlier proto-Germanic tenses.

He also mentions that grammatical influences previously attributed to French have been shown to be the natural development from Old English. Current linguistic research (post-1970s) considers English to be Germanic grammatically.

English's progressive is quite different from the Celtic languages in both form (does not use a verbal noun) and function (Celtic has a wider range of meanings).

StonyIron

It would seem absolutely bizarre and very unlikely that you'd have a large population of bilingual speakers of English and the Gaelic languages and you'd get zero crossover in syntax, vocabulary, phraseology etc.

These languages lives cheek by jowl for centuries and evolved in parallel, interacting with each other.

From a human perspective, it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense that there would be no crossover.

Fratton Fred

AnLonDubh wrote: »

Even if this is a joke, come on. The spelling is unusual to you, so the language sounds like a cat getting sick?

Of course it was a joke.

I actually mistook it for Welsh (hence the train station comment), which if you've ever tried speaking it, involves a lot of throaty sounds.

tac foley

Fratton Fred wrote: »

Of course it was a joke.

I actually mistook it for Welsh (hence the train station comment), which if you've ever tried speaking it, involves a lot of throaty sounds.

What language did you think it was?

tac

AnLonDubh

Fratton Fred wrote: »

I actually mistook it for Welsh (hence the train station comment), which if you've ever tried speaking it, involves a lot of throaty sounds.

Welsh has a single throaty phoneme, less than French or German. I would hardly call that a lot of throaty sounds.

AnLonDubh

StonyIron wrote: »

It would seem absolutely bizarre and very unlikely that you'd have a large population of bilingual speakers of English and the Gaelic languages and you'd get zero crossover in syntax, vocabulary, phraseology etc.

I never said there was no crossover in vocabulary, but that there was none in grammar.

Current linguistic research reveals no trace of Gaelic grammatical influence on the English language. It might be hard to believe, but that is what modern research in the Germanic languages shows. Any textbook on the evolution of the Germanic languages will mention this.

dubhthach

AnLonDubh wrote: »

I never said there was no crossover in vocabulary, but that there was none in grammar.

Current linguistic research reveals no trace of Gaelic grammatical influence on the English language. It might be hard to believe, but that is what modern research in the Germanic languages shows. Any textbook on the evolution of the Germanic languages will mention this.

Let alone a Brythonic substrate, which appears totally lacking. Given contact between Brythonic speaking "British" and Germanic speaking Anglo-Saxon's over extended period it's rather remarkable how devoid of any Brythonic influence English is.

tac foley

That's hardly surprising when you consider that the incoming Angles/Jutes/Saxons and their Northern brethren - ALL Germanic-speaking folk - habitually used the word derived from the same Germanic root (singular Walh, plural Walha), which was itself derived from the name of the Celtic tribe known to the Romans as Volcae and which came to refer indiscriminately to all Celts and, later, to all inhabitants of the Roman Empire. The Old English-speaking Anglo-Saxons came to use the term Wælisc when referring to the Celtic Britons in particular, and Wēalas when referring to their lands.

As the incomers' languages replaced the native Brithonic in a form of near-national conquest, except in the far North, where the Pictish was supplanted by the incoming Irish, so the native speakers became isolated in the far West and Southwest - present-day Wales and Cornwall. The same happened to a certain extent in North Western France, where Brittany still has a large Breton-speaking culture. Cornwall, sadly, has succumbed to too many generations of 'grockles' to recover any real element of Cornish, although it survives in the many local place-names in the language.

tac

AnLonDubh

dubhthach wrote:

Let alone a Brythonic substrate, which appears totally lacking. Given contact between Brythonic speaking "British" and Germanic speaking Anglo-Saxon's over extended period it's rather remarkable how devoid of any Brythonic influence English is.

I think it's long been a popular myth that English is a mongrel language. Where as modern research shows no real Celtic or Italic (e.g. French) influence on the grammar and phonology. Of course there is influence on the lexicon, but the amount of influence is not unusual in the general context of Indo-European languages.

tac foley wrote: »

Cornwall, sadly, has succumbed to too many generations of 'grockles' to recover any real element of Cornish, although it survives in the many local place-names in the language.

I don't know exactly what you mean by recover, but essentially most of the grammar of Cornish is known and a sizable vocabulary. This is due to written texts in the language surviving.

tac foley

Unlike Welsh and Breton, Cornish as a language is not spoken by anybody as a daily language, is not taught in schools as the 'other language' , is not used in modern newspapers or literature, and is not used except to say 'this is what Cornish used to sound like'.

THAT is what I meant by 'recovery'.

tac

youreadthat

tac foley wrote: »

That's hardly surprising when you consider that the incoming Angles/Jutes/Saxons and their Northern brethren - ALL Germanic-speaking folk - habitually used the word derived from the same Germanic root (singular Walh, plural Walha), which was itself derived from the name of the Celtic tribe known to the Romans as Volcae and which came to refer indiscriminately to all Celts and, later, to all inhabitants of the Roman Empire. The Old English-speaking Anglo-Saxons came to use the term Wælisc when referring to the Celtic Britons in particular, and Wēalas when referring to their lands.

As the incomers' languages replaced the native Brithonic in a form of near-national conquest, except in the far North, where the Pictish was supplanted by the incoming Irish, so the native speakers became isolated in the far West and Southwest - present-day Wales and Cornwall. The same happened to a certain extent in North Western France, where Brittany still has a large Breton-speaking culture. Cornwall, sadly, has succumbed to too many generations of 'grockles' to recover any real element of Cornish, although it survives in the many local place-names in the language.

tac

There is some truth to this. The odd thing is that the Germanics coming and causing huge displacement and slaughter of Celts isn't supported by archaeology. Much of it shows fairly seamless and continual habitation and way of life through the period. The English also have a decent smattering of Celtic and pre-Celtic DNA.

What's important to consider is that it is rare, but entirely possible that one population switches to a dominant language very quickly, even within a generation or two, leaving little time for language change. The Normans themselves did this after all. What probably occurred at the time was a mixture of displacement and quick assimilation. It should also be remembered that this was all in the flux of post-Rome, Anglo-Saxons and native Britons would have had a similar way of life compared to the elites of Romano Britain. To the poorest and most rural it may not have been as traumatic a transition as you'd think.

steddyeddy

I think the English are more reserved tbh. I think the Irish are more chatty. The English seem to wait weeks to bury their dead. I also think the have a colonial mentality to some degree.

Fratton Fred

steddyeddy wrote: »

I think the English are more reserved tbh. I think the Irish are more chatty. The English seem to wait weeks to bury their dead. I also think the have a colonial mentality to some degree.

The Irish love to talk and bury their dead very quickly in a ceremony that goes on for days.

The Irish also suffer from "small neighbour" syndrome.

😜