Englishman marrying a scottish girl!

[thanmuwa]

Indeed the funny thing is that Celts as a ethnic group didn't really come across to Britain & Ireland.

You are back on your flawed idea that there ever was an ethnic group known as the Celts. They never existed. The grouping known as the Celts is specifically a language-based (with the attendant cultural links) grouping. There are certain remaining Celtic languages. Irish, Scot's Gaelic, Manx, Breton, maybe Cornish. Therefore the Irish are Celts. The Scot's Gaelic speakers are Celts. The Bretons, Welsh, Manx speakers are Celts. People who don't speak the language but share all the other aspects of the culture have some claim to being Celts. Germanic language speakers including English speakers are not Celts. Simples.

[kiltedsawyer]

You are back on your flawed idea that there ever was an ethnic group known as the Celts. They never existed. The grouping known as the Celts is specifically a language-based (with the attendant cultural links) grouping. There are certain remaining Celtic languages. Irish, Scot's Gaelic, Manx, Breton, maybe Cornish. Therefore the Irish are Celts. The Scot's Gaelic speakers are Celts. The Bretons, Welsh, Manx speakers are Celts. People who don't speak the language but share all the other aspects of the culture have some claim to being Celts. Germanic language speakers including English speakers are not Celts. Simples.

For the love of Pete! Give it a rest will ya? This thread is about a wedding. Would it be impossible for you over-educated types to miss a chance to argue about something of little importance?

Respectfully,
David

[Philip S. Tibbetts]

You are back on your flawed idea that there ever was an ethnic group known as the Celts. They never existed. The grouping known as the Celts is specifically a language-based (with the attendant cultural links) grouping. There are certain remaining Celtic languages. Irish, Scot's Gaelic, Manx, Breton, maybe Cornish. Therefore the Irish are Celts. The Scot's Gaelic speakers are Celts. The Bretons, Welsh, Manx speakers are Celts. People who don't speak the language but share all the other aspects of the culture have some claim to being Celts. Germanic language speakers including English speakers are not Celts. Simples.

Yes we do tend to disagree on this point. I do hold that there was an original group/tribe/area that spawned the language and they lived some where on the continent way in the distant past. However I do believe (and on this I think we agree) they were not a large group of people and it was more their language and art that spread across Europe. (Hence my assertion that they never came to Britain holds true, I’m not advocating they were a ‘Victorian’ style mass of people even on the continent).

Am intrigued by the way why you say maybe the Cornish. No disbeliefe I’m just interest, from our previous debates I’ve learned to take great stock in what you say Thanmuwa.

However I would contend that language and culture blends very easily and I believe that this has happened both in Britain and in Europe. ‘Celtic’ culture has bled into various elements of ‘English’ language and culture both from before the Anglo-Saxons got here and then later when stuff bled back too.

Also ‘Anglo-Saxon’ traits crept into the more ‘Celtic’ nations – yes partly that was forced but there are several examples of how that happened naturally or willingly too.

Which brings me to why I’ve been putting things in inverted commas - not to be disrespectful - but to show how under any criteria things are not simple and are very blended. Anglo-Saxons when they first got off the boat probably weren’t Celts, (though it wouldn’t surprise me if we’re wrong in some way about that too!) but so much cultural (and language as apart of that) blending has happened since then. However I think that anyone now would have to admit to the ‘English’ being at least ‘Celt-ish’ if not ‘Celtic’

[Philip S. Tibbetts]

For the love of Pete! Give it a rest will ya? This thread is about a wedding. Would it be impossible for you over-educated types to miss a chance to argue about something of little importance?

Respectfully,
David

Oops, sorry - your post wasn't there when I hit reply!

In summary love conquers all - genetics, language & nationality included! Go for the OP!

When is the wedding btw?

[Rob]

Which genetic studies are those? I doubt very much that 95% of English people are indigenes and studies such as http://class.csueastbay.edu/anthropo.../Weale2002.pdf and this http://class.csueastbay.edu/anthropo...pf20005%20.pdf show something quite different. Although I do agree that the Victorian concept of complete population replacement is patently not true either. Plus, the implications of the genetic results are not as clear as they appear.

For example, someone could have 7 out of 8 great-grandparents who were Vikings and one Irish. That person could easily have inherited a single genetic trait that was being tested for that would show him as Irish when the vast majority of his DNA, and probably his language and identity, was Viking. So the genetic studies are not that straightforward. And that is assuming that that particular trait is 100% prevalent in one population and 0% in another.

There are visible signs of genetic variation in Britain though. Blonde hair is much more common in Hampshire and red hair is far more common in Oban. The red-head in Oban may even speak Gaelic making him a Celt!

The Weale et al study was very limited in scope, as it covered a very narrow transect from East Anglia to North Wales with very small population samples from each of the test sites. It was also flawed, because the assumption was made that the Y-haplogroup similarity between the samples from East Anglia/East Midlands and those from Friesland resulted from the 5th/6th century Anglo-Saxon migrations. Later analyses of the Weale data and other more recent (and more extensive) survey data conducted by Professors Oppenheimer and Sykes (Both of Oxford University) using Phylogeography and Exact Gene Match techniques have conclusively shown that the vast majority of the influx from North West Germany into Eastern Britain took place a thousand or more years before the Anglo-Saxon invasion/settlement, and that overall in England the Anglo-Saxon invasion accounted for no more than about 5% of the current English population. As about 95% of the English population have pre-Roman Occupation ancestry from Britain, these ancestors would have spoken a Celtic language.

The genetic studies I have used include:-
A Y Chromosome Census of the British Isles, Capelli et al,
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/tcga/tcgapdf/capelli-CB-03.pdf

Origins of the British, Oppenheimer.

Blood of the Isles, Sykes.

Even the Topf et al paper, which you linked to, shows a much closer genetic distance between the England and Scotland data on the Principal Component plot (fig. 3), than the distance between the England and Germany data sets. This is for the mtDNA data passed down the female line, and appears to be closely correlated with the Y-Chromosome data from the Oppenheimer and Sykes analyses.

Note that such analyses only give valid answers for statistically significant sample sizes. As you have rightly stated, results for individuals can be highly skewed as only the direct male or direct female lines are indicated by the Y-Chromosome and mtDNA analyses respectively.

Incidentally, you may be interested to know that the ‘red head’ characteristics of some Scots is due to particular variants of the MC1R gene, which are fairly common in the Scottish population, and also occur at fairly high frequencies in Ireland, Wales and South West England (Cornwall, Devon and Somerset). It is not specifically a ‘Celtic’ marker, just as Blond hair is not specifically an Anglo-Saxon marker.

I don't think you can stretch the definition of Celt back the requisite 1500 years to make the English Celts . Let me make the meaning of what I initially said clearer. The English who have the most Anglo-Saxon cultural influence, predominantly in the south, could not except by the wildest stretches of the imagination, be considered Celts, which is a language and culture based grouping...

How do you know which ‘cultural’ characteristics (apart from language) are Anglo-Saxon in origin, and which are Celtic?

The grouping known as the Celts is specifically a language-based (with the attendant cultural links) grouping. There are certain remaining Celtic languages. Irish, Scot's Gaelic, Manx, Breton, maybe Cornish. Therefore the Irish are Celts. The Scot's Gaelic speakers are Celts. The Bretons, Welsh, Manx speakers are Celts. People who don't speak the language but share all the other aspects of the culture have some claim to being Celts. Germanic language speakers including English speakers are not Celts.

The Celtic languages have dwindled throughout Britain since the arrival of English. In some parts of England, there is documentary evidence for the survival of Brythonic Celtic centuries after the Norman Conquest (particularly in the West). Even in Scotland and Wales the Gaelic and Welsh languages have been minority languages for some time now, and Manx is classed as an extinct language as far as common speech goes. What are the specific Celtic cultural links, which separate the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh and the Manx from the English?

I know this has very little to do with the subject of the OP, but although you indicated that it was a good idea for any man to wear a kilt on his wedding day, you also implied that he could not be considered as a ‘cultural’ Celt if he was English.