Re: Treatment of subjugated people (and bagpipes)
>> But do remember that St Patrick >> wasn't Irish at all. He was an English boy, stolen by Irish pirates >> and sold into slavery in Ireland. De-lurking briefly to correct this... St Patrick was a Romano-Briton. There were no English in Britain at the time he lauched his Irish mission. There was no English language, and certainly no English identity. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes that make up the English (an identity that only established itself when the Franco-Norman ruling dynasty in England lost its territories in France) were spread across Germany and Denmark at the time. >> But this is mostly just laziness. When Patrick didn't do what he >> was told, I'm sure that his masters made no effort to learn his >> language. They just shouted at him louder in Gaelic. Patrick would have spoken Gaelic or Latin as his first language. The Irish would have been no more difficult to understand than a Californian to a Noo Yawker. The upper echelons of Irish society may even have spoken Latin. All the best Tiarnan
Re: Treatment of subjugated people (and bagpipes)
> There are ancient inscriptions in Wales > that no one has been able to read in modern times. Deciphering > an unknown langauge, not related to known languages, when it is > written in an unknown script is a feat of linguistics that > transcends mere cryptanalysis and has, so far, rarely or never > been done. However, one cannot discount the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics the Rosetta Stone. I imagine it would be extremely difficult to decipher a language that very structurally different from what is known. It is interesting to speculate about artificial grammars. Most human and computer languages (with interesting exceptions, such as the Hopi Indians' concept of time -- others can describe computer exceptions) follow the verb, noun, preposition-based method of signification. I don't know whether any work has been done on constructing a seriously structurally different artificial grammar. Jorges Luis Borges has an interesting riff on the idea. If anyone's interested, I'll dig out the details. > "Poor Man's Crypto", possibly even better than digital crypto, > may consist in creating an artificial language together, and > then using it whenever you don't want to be eavesdropped on. As in thieves' cant. Or Irish. Speaking Irish was such a crime that schoolchildren wore a 'tally-stick' around their necks. Each Irish word meant a notch on the stick. A certain number of notches meant punishment, probably not gentle. Those who imposed this system were Irish, not English. In France, the Africans have an argot called verlins (an anagram of l'invers - the inverse) where syllables within words are transposed, or words are spoken backwards. Not very popular with the Corps Republican Securite. All the best Tiarnan
Re: Treatment of subjugated people (and bagpipes)
--- Start of forwarded message --- >Actually, St. Patrick is mostly a mythical creature constructed >from the actual Roman ruling family Patricias. Humph, said the camel... If so, did this 'actual Roman ruling family' author the works attributed (with scholarly acuuracy) to Patrick? More likely Patrick came from a romano-british family, probably an aristrocratic one. Many british chieftain families would have arrogated to themselves the name 'patrician', which was no more than a descriptive term for the gentes maiores in Rome, the Valerii, Claudii, Fabii and so on. A bit like the second names 'King' and 'Knight'. > The whole St. Patrick >chasing out the snakes is clearly a metaphor for the Roman church >killing off the pagans. >As is typical amonst the Roman church, the peasants, once suitably >under control are made to believe the destruction of the old way of >life was actually a blessing. The Romans pushed this on them until >the old ways faded into the memory hole. First off, the Church as it existed then was not the 'Roman church'. This was before the schisms and the rise of Islam, when the Christian Church was administered from distributed nodes (the Patriarchates of Byzantium, Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Rome). Secondly, your assertion about the meaning of Patrick and the snakes is dubious. I agree it is evidently a myth, but would posit a more likely source in paganism. Many Irish gods and godesses survived well into the Christian era (some even to this day) as 'saints' of the Church. While Patrick was a historical figure, the scribes may well have thought his career too dull for one of such fame, and decided to conflate several already existing myths, and add them to the story. A common practice in Hollywood these days -- a recent example is Braveheart, where the military innovations of Robert the Bruce (a Norman, just like the French-speaking Edward I, which is not mentioned) were ascribed to the medieval feminist, democratic new man William Wallace. Hagiographies are propaganda aimed at the time in which they are written. [Off topic completely here, but I read that for the last years of his life, Stalin's only reading was his own official biography... falling in love with the myth of himself, or taken in by his own deceit?] Thirdly, Patrick's conversion of the Irish was not a conquest. Nor was the conversion of much of Europe. It's very easy, from a post-religious perspective, to be nostalgic about paganism, since we understand almost nothing of it. Neo-pagan movements are generally comic, not in their internal ideas, but in the notion that they are somehow recapturing an old religion, a religion without scriptures or documents or a continuous tradition. All the best Tiarnan
