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Me and you are not real Irish in Bob's eyes. here's me with Gael Ancestry and Catholic. must be the planter blood in me that makes me not Irish in Bob's eyes.
Bob is one of the few that are 100% Gael
sorry , was confusing you with someone else , thought you were british
Agreed. While I can go along with the Catholic thing, I find most Irish to be more culturally aligned with northwestern Europe than the Mediterranean.
I mean, I wouldn't exactly say that the Irish propensity for being a bit maudlin and binge drinking is particularly Mediterranean in style. In fact, it sounds a bit Scandinavian.
Agreed. While I can go along with the Catholic thing, I find most Irish to be more culturally aligned with northwestern Europe than the Mediterranean.
I mean, I wouldn't exactly say that the Irish propensity for being a bit maudlin and binge drinking is particularly Mediterranean in style. In fact, it sounds a bit Scandinavian.
Maudlin? I don't think the Irish are particularly renowned for being maudlin. If anything the Irish are known for their humour and capacity to use humour to deflate the kind of situations that are maudlin to other cultures and nationalities.
Funerals, or more accurately Irish wakes , for example and the open casket where everyone gathers around relaxed as you like around the open casket was one way growing up as a child that I became accustomed to the natural inevitably that evreything has a time in life and people die. I can always remember people laughing and joking and saying brightly and breezily things like "Goodbye Mrs O'Connell, there you go now, say goodbye to Mrs Connell children" or whoever it may have been with the doors wide open and the whole street popping in to pay their respects.
As the Irish playwright Sean O'Casey wrote in his play 'Shadow Of A Gunman' "the trouble with the Irish is that they treat a serious thing as a joke and a joke as a serious thing".
The Irish are known worldwide for their poetic flair and razor sharp wit. Was Oscar Wilde known for his maudlin warbling? Or his charisma and visionary wit which was extraordinarily ahead of its time? Even the most popular comedians in England either are Irish or have Irish backgrounds, Michael McIntyre, Dara O'Briain, Frankie Boyle and Jimmy Carr who holds an Irish passport to name a few at random.
In fact there's an astonishingly high percentage of Irish comedians/entertainers on British television when you compare the ratio per percentage of population to the Scots and the Welsh. And even alot of the Scottish ones are proud Celtic fans and come fro families of Irish immigrants. So though some posters on here may not have much time for Eire the British people can't seem to get enough of the Irish in terms of literature 'Ulysses' consistently tops all time best novels lists, poetry (Yeats, Wilde to name but two), humour and entertainment. Hardly the ringing endorsement of a nation invariably mired in the dour.
The British on the other hand. Now there's a people known worldwide in some countries for completely lacking in humour and renowned for their maudlin, whining personas. They don't call em "whinging poms" in Australia for nothing. A whole nation cannot possibly be wrong. Scientific fact.
I can see a Scandanavian influence on the physical features of some Irish people and it has left its mark in English cities like Liverpool too but certinly not in terms of personality. An Irish bar is full of warmth and charisma and there's a reason why Irish music and culture is so popular all over the world.
Last edited by Fear&Whiskey; 08-29-2012 at 06:35 PM..
Not saying they are hugely similar or anything, but Ireland has a 'Latinesque' passion to its culture that is a bit different from the stoic, Germanic culture of England.
Ummm...no. They are not similar at all. What compels you to think about silly ideas like this?
Ummm...no. They are not similar at all. What compels you to think about silly ideas like this?
Well if you are going to take it that literally then obviously you are missing the point somewhat.
But regardless and back to the original subject matter at hand which has kind of been lost in a fog of by numbers inertia towards this subject of the Irish Gaelic language from a pro-monarchist/Unionist/British perspective in a thread that (for reasons I do not know) got hijacked very quickly by a convoy load of Loyalists and Brits who jumped on this thread without really adding much context to the subject matter at hand.
You may as well ask the French about double Dutch and expect a 10 page dissertaion on the sublteties and variances from a beamingly enthusing Frenchman as much as you'd expect staunch British Unionists/monarchists to care about Irish Gaelic. Quite simply the fact that Irish gaelic isn't of particular interest to those whose main Irish historical references are Oliver Cromwell and the Battle Of The Boyne is hardly the world's biggest Newsflash.
We've gathered it isn't widely spoken fluently but it is culturally still very symbolic in Irish culture, there are succesful Gaelic schools and most citizens in the Republic Of Ireland (the country that is independent from the UK and has nothing to do with the monarchy) have a basic grasp of the basics.
There is certainly a Latin influence on the language of Irish Gaelic as well as a Meditteranean influence as I covered in an earlier post before this thread got somewhat derailed for no apparent reason.
Last edited by Fear&Whiskey; 08-29-2012 at 07:08 PM..
Well I have been to Spain and Italy and there is noway in hell that Ireland has Mediterranean style culture. They aren't even remotely similar. The people of Ireland aren't even descended from Spain.
Well I have been to Spain and Italy and there is noway in hell that Ireland has Mediterranean style culture. They aren't even remotely similar. The people of Ireland aren't even descended from Spain.
This is a thread about the Irish Gaelic language which undoutedly has similarities to other Celtic and Latin languages and that much is an irrefutable fact. Do we really have to divert this thread down the path of how great or how little the Spanish have influenced Ireland on a non-linguistic level?
What am I missing here? How this thread has somehow turned into a thread about whether the backstreets of Crumlin in Dublin, Ireland somehow resemble in culture a Latino tapas bar on the Costa blanca is beyond me.
Of course Ireland is nothing like Spain in terms of climate and many other things and if you're looking at the differences the list would be endless. Some posters have referred to a few obvious and hardly controversial similarities and it has triggered a very bizarrely hostile response.
Northern Irish British Unionists have this very weird push me pull you approach to their Irishness. on the one hand they want to be able to dictate the discourse of what parts of Irish history are acceptable to a Republic Of Ireland that is independent from the British unionist culture they unswervingly bear allegiance to and on the other hand get very tetchy about acknowledging any symbolic tokens of Irish history for contrition's sake displayed in the six counties (even if it is just a little Irish gaelic on a few road signs) where their culture does exist that doesn't pertain to British soverignty, deference to the ruling German-bloodline monarchy of the UK and a culture that the Ulster unionist community have complete and absolute oversight of.
Very peculiar indeed. Having it both ways or when its convenient. That's Unionists for you. Very difficult people to deal with. Ah well, not for the lack of trying.
Last edited by Fear&Whiskey; 08-30-2012 at 06:27 AM..
Ummm...no. They are not similar at all. What compels you to think about silly ideas like this?
Well quite a few things. For one thing Celtic languages are closer to Romance languages than they are to Germanic languages. Celtic languages originated in the Alps, in what is largely a German-speaking area today - but Germanic languages originated in Sweden. Celtic languages diverged from the Italic languages spoken to directly to the south much more recently than they diverged from Germanic tongues.
Language and culture tend to go hand in hand, and usually the more linguistically related a culture is to another, the more it's related in other ways. Certainly Celtic culture is different from Latin culture, but it shares at least as much with Latin culture as it does with the culture of Germany, Sweden etc. Genetically speaking the Irish and other Celts are very close to Scandinavians and people from the Low Countries, but also have ties to Spain, Portugal, France and northern Italy.
I'm just saying the 'personality' of Irish culture has as much in common with Italian culture as it does with English culture, though it's unique and different from both.
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. Now there's a people known worldwide in some countries for completely lacking in humour and renowned for their maudlin, whining personas. They don't call em "whinging poms" in Australia for nothing. A whole nation cannot possibly be wrong. Scientific fact
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