UK Politics Thread IX: Try turning the UK off and on again.

[Ifreann]

Yes, I assumed that he was referring to the Normans. Clearly it was not more difficult for the English to keep their language under the Normans than it was for the Irish to keep our language under the English, as the English are not speaking French.

I was referring to the Normans though? We don't speak French. The Irish have no excuse.

And as I said, clearly it was not more difficult for the English to keep their language under the Normans that it was for the Irish to keep our language under the English. This is clear because you don't speak French. If it had been more difficult, as you said, then you would be speaking French and not English.

[Nationalist Northumbria]

I was referring to the Normans though? We don't speak French. The Irish have no excuse.

And as I said, clearly it was not more difficult for the English to keep their language under the Normans that it was for the Irish to keep our language under the English. This is clear because you don't speak French. If it had been more difficult, as you said, then you would be speaking French and not English.

As the Irish song goes, they were under foreign rule from the 1100s. While some may dispute the accuracy of the song given it was written by terrorist sympathisers and says we would never beat the IRA, which the British government did in the end do, independent sources make it clear that this is basically true. We were under foreign rule from the 1000s. Your claim, therefore, has been fact-checked as false.

[Adamede]

And as I said, clearly it was not more difficult for the English to keep their language under the Normans that it was for the Irish to keep our language under the English. This is clear because you don't speak French. If it had been more difficult, as you said, then you would be speaking French and not English.

As the Irish song goes, they were under foreign rule from the 1100s. While some may dispute the accuracy of the song given it was written by terrorist sympathisers and says we would never beat the IRA, which the British government did in the end do, independent sources make it clear that this is basically true. We were under foreign rule from the 1000s. Your claim, therefore, has been fact-checked as false.

That does nothing to counter act their claim

[Nationalist Northumbria]

As the Irish song goes, they were under foreign rule from the 1100s. While some may dispute the accuracy of the song given it was written by terrorist sympathisers and says we would never beat the IRA, which the British government did in the end do, independent sources make it clear that this is basically true. We were under foreign rule from the 1000s. Your claim, therefore, has been fact-checked as false.

That does nothing to counter act their claim

It completely proves their claim wrong, actually.

[Ifreann]

And as I said, clearly it was not more difficult for the English to keep their language under the Normans that it was for the Irish to keep our language under the English. This is clear because you don't speak French. If it had been more difficult, as you said, then you would be speaking French and not English.

As the Irish song goes, they were under foreign rule from the 1100s. While some may dispute the accuracy of the song given it was written by terrorist sympathisers and says we would never beat the IRA, which the British government did in the end do, independent sources make it clear that this is basically true. We were under foreign rule from the 1000s. Your claim, therefore, has been fact-checked as false.

So as I surmised earlier, your understanding of the relevant periods of history really is no deeper than "conquered by foreigners". You fail to understand that conditions were not the same in Ireland and England with regards to preservation of the native language, and thus you cannot comprehend that the differences in outcome for Irish and English can be the result of anything but a failure on the part of the Irish.

[Nationalist Northumbria]

As the Irish song goes, they were under foreign rule from the 1100s. While some may dispute the accuracy of the song given it was written by terrorist sympathisers and says we would never beat the IRA, which the British government did in the end do, independent sources make it clear that this is basically true. We were under foreign rule from the 1000s. Your claim, therefore, has been fact-checked as false.

So as I surmised earlier, your understanding of the relevant periods of history really is no deeper than "conquered by foreigners". You fail to understand that conditions were not the same in Ireland and England with regards to preservation of the native language, and thus you cannot comprehend that the differences in outcome for Irish and English can be the result of anything but a failure on the part of the Irish.

Aside from foreign rule being longer, conditions were worse in England, actually. Our nobility wasn't co-opted like Ireland's was.

[Ifreann]

So as I surmised earlier, your understanding of the relevant periods of history really is no deeper than "conquered by foreigners". You fail to understand that conditions were not the same in Ireland and England with regards to preservation of the native language, and thus you cannot comprehend that the differences in outcome for Irish and English can be the result of anything but a failure on the part of the Irish.

Aside from foreign rule being longer, conditions were worse in England, actually. Our nobility wasn't co-opted like Ireland's was.

Again, clearly conditions were not worse, with regards to preservation of the native language. If the conditions had been worse then obviously English would be less spoken than Irish is today.

[Nationalist Northumbria]

Aside from foreign rule being longer, conditions were worse in England, actually. Our nobility wasn't co-opted like Ireland's was.

Again, clearly conditions were not worse, with regards to preservation of the native language. If the conditions had been worse then obviously English would be less spoken than Irish is today.

That's a nonsense argument.

[Ifreann]

Again, clearly conditions were not worse, with regards to preservation of the native language. If the conditions had been worse then obviously English would be less spoken than Irish is today.

That's a nonsense argument.

How so?

[The Huskar Social Union]

Thousands gather in Belfast to rally for Irish Language Act

What is the point in this?

Irish language is spoken by tiny amounts of people in Northern Ireland. Am I wrong?

Its spoken by a low number of speakers because of its history of suppression, which includes hundreds of years of attempted outright elimination by subsequent English and British governments in Ireland, and more specifically in the last one hundred years, Unionist dominated governments in Northern Ireland who treated the language with suspicion and a threat to their culture (despite the fact that the Orange Order and Protestant Clergies used to speak the language themselves) though Unionists tended to do that with literally every aspect of Irish Culture. That kind of discrimination is one of the main reasons the Troubles happened in the first place as they deliberately attempted to crush and side-line any attempts at Irish Expression in the country, be it parades, the language, art, demonstrations and more.

In the last twenty years ever since the end of the Troubles and the Good Friday Agreement there have been pushes for legal recognition and protection for Irish to the same level afforded to Welsh and Scottish Gaelic in Wales and Scotland Respectively. This comes in the form of the Irish Language Act, which has been repeatedly pushed away by the British Government and Unionist parties, despite agreeing to implement it on multiple damn occasions such as the St. Andrews Agreement in 2006 which states the following:

* "The Government will introduce an Irish Language Act on the experience of Wales and Ireland and work with the incoming executive to enhance and protect the development of the Irish Language" Page 11, bullet point 5.

And more recently in 2020 as part of the New Decade, New Approach Deal as part of a joint language act with Ulster Scots.

The New Decade, New Approach deal aimed to do the following in regards to the Irish Language:

-Grant official status to both the Irish language and Ulster Scots in Northern Ireland;[23]
-Establish the post of Irish Language Commissioner to "recognise, support, protect and enhance the development of the Irish language in Northern Ireland" as part of a new Office of Identity and Cultural Expression (alongside an Ulster Scots/Ulster British Commissioner);[7]
-Introduce sliding-scale "language standards", a similar approach to that taken for the Welsh language in Wales, although they are subject to veto by the First Minister or deputy First Minister;[24]
-Repeal a 1737 ban on the use of Irish in Northern Ireland's courts;[7]
-Allow members of the Northern Ireland Assembly to speak in Irish or Ulster Scots, with simultaneous translation for non-speakers,[25] and
establish a central translation unit within the Northern Ireland government.[25]

So we are not allowed to have a standalone Irish Language Act, it has to be bundled in with Ulster Scots, that was the comprise the DUP and the British Government agreed to, and they cant even fucking implement that properly, with the DUP threatening to collapse the government in 2021 over the introduction of a language act. Not only them either, Loyalist paramilitaries making threats over it too. And now the British government promising last year to implement the act themselves, then backpedalling before the 2022 Assembly election. Irish Nationalists have been referred to as fucking crocodiles for wanting our ancestral language recognised in Northern Ireland by senior Unionist politicians, who only backtracked on it when they got hammered in an election.

So in short: We have a language that has endured hundreds of years of attempted extermination and suppression, outlawed its usage in court, suppressed its usage in English controlled territories, vilification over one hundreds year by Unionist political Leaders and repeated promises since the end of the Troubles to implement an act, to give the language the same status and recognition that Scottish and Welsh enjoy. Its supporters in recent years have been labelled terrorists and animals for wanting that recognition and so and so on

edit: And as for the busses comment, yes busses were used to bring supporters from the Republic. 25 Busses. The vast majority of supporters, which is at a minimum of seven thousand from all the estimates ive seen for the protest came from Northern Ireland, as did the overwhelming majority of protesters in the 2017 protest. But hey how dare people from the Republic of Ireland support Irish speakers and proponents in Northern Ireland.

You dont get the point of it, and frankly will never get the point of it because you are not Irish and you are not from Ireland.

[The Huskar Social Union]

Always amused me tho that without fail whenever the Irish language Act gets mentioned on here we have a bunch of dismissive comments from English posters about what the point of it is and how its all virtue signalling.

Never fucking changes does it.

[The Huskar Social Union]

Celritannia do you want me to make the new thread yet

[Mtwara]

If you think about reviving a language from a purely economic point of view then I'm not sure it makes sense. The world speaks English, what do you need a language nobody else uses for?

But very few things are purely economic.

Ultimately language comes down to a question of national identity. Many countries are proud to be their own countries (obviously) and their language is one of the main expressions of that difference with the rest of the world.

Whether it's practical or not is an entirely different question, and one I won't wade into.

Hello,

Just in case -

I'm not dismissing languages like Gaelic or Welsh. I suppose I was second guessing that other posters were thinking along purely economic lines when they asked what the point of the Irish Language Act was, when clearly it (and most things to be honest) are much more complex.

[Nationalist Northumbria]

That's a nonsense argument.

How so?

Faulty reasoning. "Conditions were better because English survived" is a nonsense argument, it is not an argument at all.

[The Nihilistic view]

Always amused me tho that without fail whenever the Irish language Act gets mentioned on here we have a bunch of dismissive comments from English posters about what the point of it is and how its all virtue signalling.

Never fucking changes does it.

I don't think I've ever asked or seen you say, can you speak it?

[The Huskar Social Union]

Always amused me tho that without fail whenever the Irish language Act gets mentioned on here we have a bunch of dismissive comments from English posters about what the point of it is and how its all virtue signalling.

Never fucking changes does it.

I don't think I've ever asked or seen you say, can you speak it?

I used to be able to speak it a bit when i studied it in school (took a GCSE in it, my choices were Irish or Spanish), enough for partial conversation but i didnt keep learning after the course finished (mainly because i didnt like the course itself and wanted to focus on my art courses) so ive forgotten most of what i learnt. its something i always wanted to go back and learn, just as a personal thing.

So at the moment i just know various words and phrases. Mentioned it a few times over the years on here.

[The Huskar Social Union]

Im genuinely speechless at how creepy this is

[Space Squid]

Im genuinely speechless at how creepy this is

Oh boy...

Like, even if I was a research scientist, doing some kind of study into how humans react to the smell of other humans. I would still try to not ever say that. Because that is creepy as fuck. I'd lose all my funding.

[Chan Island]

Im genuinely speechless at how creepy this is

Icky. Thus is why the word icky exists.

[Ifreann]

How so?

Faulty reasoning. "Conditions were better because English survived" is a nonsense argument, it is not an argument at all.

You're not explaining what is nonsense about it, you're just repeating yourself. I don't know what you find so nonsensical. Different conditions today obviously arose from different conditions in the past. That Irish is spoken by so few and English spoken by so many is because the conditions of the past hampered the speaking of Irish in Ireland and did not hamper the speaking of English in England.

You seem to be proposing that conditions for the preservation of English over the last thousand years were worse than the conditions for the preservation of Irish over roughly the same time period, but that makes no sense when we look at the languages today. How can worse conditions for the preservation of English lead to it being spoken widely all over the world and better conditions for the preservation of Irish left it as a minority language in Ireland? That is nonsense.

---

Im genuinely speechless at how creepy this is

Eugh, skin crawling. Serial killer energy.

[The Archregimancy]

And as I said, clearly it was not more difficult for the English to keep their language under the Normans that it was for the Irish to keep our language under the English. This is clear because you don't speak French. If it had been more difficult, as you said, then you would be speaking French and not English.

As the Irish song goes, they were under foreign rule from the 1100s. While some may dispute the accuracy of the song given it was written by terrorist sympathisers and says we would never beat the IRA, which the British government did in the end do, independent sources make it clear that this is basically true. We were under foreign rule from the 1000s. Your claim, therefore, has been fact-checked as false.

Comparing the interactions between Norman French, Anglo-Norman, Latin, and English in the post-1066 period with the interactions between English and Irish in the modern period is, frankly, silly.

Irish only really underwent a significant linguistic decline from the mid-18th century, and only went into catastrophic decline in the 19th century. In the period where you're trying to make a direct comparison - the medieval period from the 11th and 12th centuries onwards - not only did Irish hold up significantly better than Old English did, only a very small part of Ireland (the Pale of Dublin) was under direct Anglo-Cambrian control. It's only really in the Tudor period that the English state comes to enforce its control over the entirety of Ireland, with the Flight of the Earls in 1607 marking the end of the effort to maintain a Gaelic cultural order outside of direct English control. It's then in the 18th century that a significant cultural shift in the role of Irish begins.

Comparing A) the profound transformation of English from the more purely Germanic Old English into the creolised Germanic-Romance form of the language that eventually emerged in Middle English via centuries of linguistic co-existence in the multi-lingual context of post-Conquest England with B) the eventual modern-era decline of Irish via the direct attempt of an industralised modern state to legally extirpate the Irish language by force, a process which was facilitated - even if only unintentionally - by the mass emigration and death brought about by the Famine (which disproportionately impacted the rural areas where Irish remained a community language) is simply historically untenable.



For what it's worth, though, you're perhaps both ignoring the extent to which English was indeed transformed by Norman French in order to make your respective points.

Taking just two of the most obvious examples, here's the opening ten lines of Beowulf:

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,
oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra
ofer hronrade hyran scolde,

And here's the opening ten lines of the Canterbury Tales:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,

The latter may be somewhat obscure to a modern reader, but it's clearly much closer to modern English than the former. That's because the Conquest completely changed English. As noted above, it shifted from being a primarily Germanic language into a creolised Romance-Germanic language that may be clearly Germanic in its underlying structure and core vocabulary, but which lost many traditional Germanic grammatical structures while absorbing significant Romance vocabulary.

[Nationalist Northumbria]

Celritannia do you want me to make the new thread yet

I'll make the new thread. I already have an idea for a poll.

[Fartsniffage]

Celritannia do you want me to make the new thread yet

I'll make the new thread. I already have an idea for a poll.

Nah.

[Celritannia]

Yes, I assumed that he was referring to the Normans. Clearly it was not more difficult for the English to keep their language under the Normans than it was for the Irish to keep our language under the English, as the English are not speaking French.

I was referring to the Normans though? We don't speak French. The Irish have no excuse.

The Norman's didn't speak French either.

[Celritannia]

Celritannia do you want me to make the new thread yet

Go for it.