Re: Scandinavia and the Germanic tribes such as Goths, Vandals, Angl

--- On Mon, 11/3/08, Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...> wrote:

> From: Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...>
> Subject: [tied] Re: Scandinavia and the Germanic tribes such as Goths, Vandals, Angli and Saxones.
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Monday, November 3, 2008, 10:29 PM
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
> <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> >
> >The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of
> > Anglo-Saxon England is a good reference book, though
> of course it's
> > meant for the general reader.
> >
>
> That's pretty much what I'd identify myself as --
> my knowledge in this
> field is, maybe surprisingly, limited.
>
> >
> >
> > By the way, I've just found this online: it seems
> to be at least partly
> > identical with Davis's article in ASE 35 (though I
> can't compare them
> > closely right now):
> >
> > http://www.mun.ca/mst/heroicage/issues/5/Davis1.html
> >
> > Piotr
> >
>
> Thanks, I read it, and I don't know if you want any
> feedback/commentary but I will say that this article makes
> the
> Anglo-Saxons seem identity-challenged. Although I know it
> has nothing
> to do with this, I nevertheless tend to think that English
> seems
> destined to have become a language in which the
> overwhelming majority
> of dictionary entries have foreign etymologies. I also go
> further and
> wonder whether such a fundamental identity crisis could be
> related to
> the current prestige that English enjoys as the most
> widely-spoken
> second language (if one of the Chinese languages has not
> taken over
> this title). Do other nationalities have similar identity
> confusion
> in their histories? (Maybe you might want to take this
> over to
> Cybalist_admin.)
>
> Andrew

Everyone wants cool ancestors and the farther back you go, the cooler your ancestors because the documents are sketchy enough for you to squeeze in your ancestor to the closest correspondent. So while every one of my adult male ancestors alive in the 1770s is listed in the Daughters of the American Revolution Books as a "patriot" in the US War of Independence, only one of my ancestors is documented as participating in the Civil War. This is because in every line of my family, some fool with more money than brains did some research and convinced the DAR that our ancestor John Doofus was the same guy who served in the Continental Army. And so, I imagine that probably half the DAR material is bogus So just like Alfred,
my family was endowed with the manna of powerful ancestors.

Regarding English and its lack of chicness. Because it's a multi-national language that doesn't belong to a single empire and doesn't have a single standard, it's seen as a tool rather than a mark of identification. Rather like Vulgar Latin, it tolerates differences that would have been seen as separate languages in most language communities. My ancestors all arrived in America speaking other languages and certainly did not see themselves as bound into a community by knowledge of English. For them, integration into an American community occurred when former Gaelic, Welsh, French, Dutch and German speakers began to intermarry in the mid-1700s, after 50-150 years in America.