#even the term ''celtic'' now has racist connotations

[that-cunning-witch]

Ancient Celtic religion (Irish, Scottish, Welsh, etc.) has been and is continuing to be culturally appropriated to absolute filth, but idk if y'all are ready to have that conversation yet

[wild-at-mind]

I’ve been thinking about the reason I feel so weird about people on tumblr who aren’t living in the UK making jokes about how great it would be if the UK split up and abandoned England (where I live) and made the great Celtic aliance and whatnot....like, I acknowledge I really have no good social justice approved reasons for feeling weird about this. I’m English in England and I do understand the long history of England oppressing and colonising all the other nations. This isn’t in question. I’m sure it would be better for all the other nations if they left England, and if there was a way it could be done very easily and quickly for everyone, then I’d say do it in a heartbeat. It feels really daft of me to be like thinking about actual logistics because of a fucking joke post which no one really needs, but I always do for some reason and it’s just so stressful to think about. The UK is fucking falling apart right now, it can’t manage anything. Our last Prime Minister lasted 49 days. No one has been elected as PM for like a decade, they all just take over from the last failure in this fucking endless conservative government. It feels never ending. I feel like it was also really easy for people outside the UK to judge Brexit as a terrible idea, but from the inside it was never that simple. It was a really bad idea for sure, and it caused this massive influx of xenophobia, but while it was going on it was all so complicated and there was so much shit on both sides. You would think it would be easy to say like ‘I don’t want to be on the side of xenophobia so I’m anti-Brexit’, but then you would get accused of being in an ivory tower and not affected by the employment issues concerned caused by EU workers or w/e. Someone would write a thinkpiece calling you classist or something, using the exact same emotive language people deploy all the time on here for their good causes. It’s not so easy to be like ‘ok this is good emotive language making me think the right thing, and this is bad emotive language making me think the wrong thing’. In reality, of course, it was never a case of just working class people wanting Brexit and just middle class people wanting remain, that was more fucking propaganda and it was sooooo much more complicated than that. I hope this is starting to get across the problem a bit. A few people were even arguing that Brexit was good because more workers of colour could come into the country if we stopped having so many white EU workers so Brexit could actually be anti-racist. (As if the current government would willingly do anything like that...lol.) What I’m trying to say is it split the country in so many ways, it was a really ugly time. I have heard similar things from people living in Scotland about the last push for Scottish Independance. Whether you were pro or anti, it got ugly and caused massive painful rifts. Now, i do think at some point Scotland will gain independance and I will cheer them on. But it won’t be an easy split, because they never are. The other thing I think gets glossed over is that we aren’t a very big country, of course there’s a lot of movement, many people in England have very recent roots in Scotland, Wales and/or NI. When you make it more distant roots, then it’s a vast percentage. And it’s worth noting that identifying as English specifically, if you live in England, has some connotations of racism and xenophobia against immigrants. (England for the English, that kind of fucked up thing.) People who do not want those connotations who live in England will tend to use the term British to self describe. I don’t know what it means to be ‘English’, specifically, without racism coming into the frame pretty quickly. I think that’s why these posts also read a bit as if annexing England will free the other nations from racism, whether or not that was the intention.

[firstpuffin]

The English Language and why it’s fascinating. Potentially part One.

For something that we use so casually and on such a regular basis, often without a thought, language is an astonishingly fascinating… thing. Wow, I should really be better at this.

  So I’m in my third and final year of university where one of the things that I have been studying is the English Language. There has been an unfortunate focus on the sounds of English which I struggle with (I suspect this is due to me being dyspraxic but that is a topic for another time) but I have still had the opportunity to learn a lot and I figured I could try and share some of what attracts me to language in order to share the love and to encourage you to look into it yourselves.

 I figure I’ll start with what I brought up earlier; language is astonishing. We humans are the only species to have language (do I really need to add the caveat “on Earth”?). Yes animals can communicate, but they don’t Talk. They don’t discuss things, they don’t have a means of bringing up abstract concepts and they don’t have different ways of saying the same thing.

  There is the matter of Koko the gorilla who was taught sign language and apparently used it to communicate a number of things thought to be uniquely human. Now we don’t know for sure what was going on in her head, and critics suggested that things weren’t quite as they seemed, but it is one of an increasing number of examples of animals being smarter than we thought. Still, sign language is a human creation all the same and learning is not the same as developing.

  The more words a person has access to the better they can express and even understand ideas; Japan used to consider green to be a shade of blue and didn’t consider green to be its own colour until after World War II. You may see their traffic lights as being red, orange and blue. And the more words you know about a subject the better you can explain it, and quite possibly understand it. How would you explain a round plate without using the word round? Circular? Well what if you didn’t know that word?

  How would you describe anything if you didn’t know any adjectives? How would you understand the difference between round plates and square plates if you didn’t have the words round and square? They would be different, yes, but how would you describe or interpret these differences? A plate is a plate, what’s the difference? I hope you understand what I am trying to say but I can easily understand why you wouldn’t, so let me try something else.

  Superfluous is a word that I really like, although using it in conversation is usually superfluous in and of itself. The word basically means extra or unnecessary, like “in and of itself” where “by itself” would suffice. But the reason why I like it so much is because while extra or excess or even unnecessary all have positive connotations of abundance and “something to spare”, superfluous feels redundant. If I say something is superfluous then there is no misconception about whether the excess is good or not, superfluous is bad. Superfluous is that online arsehole who uses big fancy words to try and sound good and refers to themselves as “an intellectual”.

  I hope that’s gotten across to you guys but regardless of whether or not it did, I’m moving onto the history of the English Language after this last example. Have you ever stumbled upon one of those web-pages where they have a list of words from other languages that perfectly describe something that English requires an entire sentence for?

  I’ll provide examples of these lists but I’m going to bring up an example of my own: I like Japanese stuff, manga and anime and the like, and one thing that I have noticed is that sometimes the translators will retain the word “nakama” instead of translating it. Yes this can be annoying if no reason is given, but sometimes they take the time at the start of an episode or chapter to explain this. See, nakama can translate to comrade or companion or such, but it appears to have a stronger emotion attached to it. The way that I choose to understand it is by quoting something my nan had hanging by her door: “Friends are the family we choose for ourselves”. This is a line that has stuck with me ever since I first saw it and let me tell you, my memory is awful; it does however appear to fit the definition of “nakama”.

  An entire sentence to describe one word.

  So into the history of the English language we go! Now I’m not gonna pretend that I have never said some stupid, offensive and probably racist shit as I grew up, I was a pretty dumb kid (by which I mean I was dumb for what, 18 years?) but I at least never intended to be racist and having had more experience I can say that I know better now. I grew up thinking of racism as bloody stupid and this I usually ascribe to knowing that England is a melting pot of different cultures and so what’s the point of racism?

  This small island started off as the home of the Celts, or at least some of them (Celt is a term used for a large number of people, but I’m gonna use it explicitly to refer to those who lived in England before the Romans came along) and they spoke what can only really be described as Celtic. Then the Romans came along, kicked ass and made Latin the dominant (note the word “dominant”) language. Around this time there were the Celts, the Picts and the Scots.

  The Picts were settled in what is now called Scotland, and the Scots lived in Ireland; just to make things a bit more interesting, the Picts originally came to the British Isles via Ireland and were chased off by the Scots. See? Language is fun!

  Anyway, Celtic was mostly overridden by Latin, but the Romans had to leave to defend the Empire and the Celts were suddenly at risk from both the Scots and the Picts. One of the kings (possibly the same Vortigern from some King Arthur tales) asked the Saxons to come over and protect them. This brought the Saxons, the Angles and the Jutes, collectively known as the Anglo-Saxons (and Angle becoming Angle-land and later into England) who chased off the invaders only to decide to stick around themselves, bringing their Germanic languages along with them.

  It also seems that the Celts were kicked into what we now call Wales which comes from Wealas, meaning “foreigner” (which is ironic as they were called that by invading foreigners).

  Then some hundred years later the Vikings came along and brought their Scandinavian languages along, adding to the melting pot of language. And finally came the Norman invasion bringing French with them and that my friends is what we call Middle English. Yes, Modern English is more complicated still; see, French was the dominant language in England for a long while but that doesn’t mean that the English and the French got along. There were a number of wars between the two countries and a number of English kings, particularly Henry III and Henry V (I can’t tell you what happened to Henry IV) started using English more often than French as an act of solidarity to their people, particularly the working classes who still used English.

  Isn’t it amazing how death does so much for language? Invasions, wars and finally the Black Death. Yes, the infamous bubonic plague which killed a third of our population helped English become what it is today. A large part of that third was the workforce which naturally increased demand and wages became competitive. With larger incomes came the opportunity to rise in the social ranks and as they did, so did their language. Now French was still used by the upper classes but if you think of English as a gelatinous blob that absorbs whatever it touches then you should get the idea of what happened.

  I quite like that gelatinous blob analogy. English has no shape of its own and so it continues to change and grow as it absorbs more and more from other languages: Japanese, Italian and even American. Had the internet not been a thing then it wouldn’t surprise me if American English had eventually became its own language, yet technology keeps us in contact enough that many of the changes lead by America becomes assimilated by us Brits, in keeping with the very nature of English.

 So that seems to be enough for now, I need to upload this, or really anything, soon. Maybe I can do a part two; language is fascinating for all sorts of reasons so there is a lot of potential content. I’d like to close up with a phrase I heard during the time this took to write, and it is one of the things that I love about our language: the flexibility and potential for humour. This example shows how two words with similar meanings can also mean such different things.

              “I may be predictable, but at least I’m consistent.”