...can I be something else?

[burntcopper]

Hmmp. Sometimes I really wish I wasn't Home Counties English. Mostly in the wishing I had a nicer more musical accent like the Scots, Welsh and Irish, and I'm really pouty over the fact that due to the Angles being the dominant warlike sods with an eye toward stomping on any of their neighbours that they were, we don't have an extra private language like the Welsh and Irish do. Dammit. Plus there's the fact that they're more tonal/musical than Home Counties English.

This post brought to you by the author having read too much in the way of myths and legends as a child and going 'I wanna separate language!'. Suspect it may have been slightly induced by the fact that I *had* a separate language when I was little, even though it was the mainstream dominant one of that country. Which isn't quite the same, because I'm pretty sure I spent more time sniggering over the fact that my parents didn't speak the proper language half as well as I could.

Still vaguely amused that due to the more 'romantic' nature that all the celtic mythology has for historians/victorians/etc, it's far easier to find myths and legends for that culture, or for the vikings. I don't think I've ever seen any anglo-saxon mythology books. The only one I can even vaguely think of in that vein is Beowulf, and Arthur, who's the most likely to get labelled as 'English', is, as everyone knows, actually British rather than English. Robin Hood is distinctly post-Norman Conquest. Did they just disappear due to no-one recording them as obsessively? Were their myths and legends the same as the viking/norse ones due to having the same gods?

Comments

[derryderrydown.livejournal.com]

we don't have an extra private language like the Welsh and Irish do

And the Scots. Gaelic is still holding on in the highlands and islands. (And don't get started on people either a) calling Irish Gaelic or b) insisting there is no language called Gaelic.)

[mrslant]

Did they just disappear due to no-one recording them as obsessively?

This Wikipedia article suggests it was because pre-Christian English society was illiterate, whereas Iceland, where most of our knowledge of Norse mythology comes from, was both literate and pagan for a good few centuries afterwards.

[burntcopper.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but that doesn't account for the fact that, say, fairy tales didn't really get written down in their (utterly bastardised) form until fairly recently, and there's plenty of non-european cultures that didn't have a written language and yet theirs survived. Hmp.

[andromakie.livejournal.com]

I'd be Home-counties English, at least then I could live there! Try being Canadian! We have no culture, no identity, and NO THEATRE!

[mingmerciless.livejournal.com]

No culture?! But what about Shatner, Bryan Adams, Celine Dion etc?

[andromakie.livejournal.com]

:P