Who Do You Root For: Barbarians or Romans?

[Admiral Yi]

Damn straight.

[Razgovory]

Spoken like a fucking anthropologist.

Never really bought it.  As soon as a tribe or band adopts a more despotic government it immediately stops being a tribe or band.  I can think of lots of tribal societies that were in fact pretty despotic.  For instance the Zulus.

[Malthus]

Spoken like a fucking anthropologist.

Never really bought it.  As soon as a tribe or band adopts a more despotic government it immediately stops being a tribe or band.  I can think of lots of tribal societies that were in fact pretty despotic.  For instance the Zulus.

Youse both wrong - Germans and Zulus were not "tribal" in organization, but examples of "chiefdoms" in anthro-speak. 

Anthropologists and archaeologists have demonstrated through research that chiefdoms are a relatively unstable form of social organization. They are prone to cycles of collapse and renewal, in which tribal units band together, expand in power, fragment through some form of social stress, and band together again. An example of this kind of social organization were the Germanic Peoples who conquered the western Roman Empire in the 5th century CE. Although commonly referred to as tribes, anthropologists classified their society as chiefdoms. They had a complex social hierarchy consisting of kings, a warrior aristocracy, common freemen, serfs and slaves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiefdom

[Razgovory]

Yeah, yeah.  As soon as we give them a close look and find they aren't really noble savages they get bumped up to different social structure.

[Sheilbh]

King Arthur? DNA? Archeological record?

And that's the basis of self-identification with the past?

What aspects of current English culture do you ascribe to the Anglo-Saxons?  Apart from the soccer hooliganism of course.

More or less everything, certainly everything good - the class system, snobbery, absurd titles and feudalism were the Normans.

With the exception of a couple of city names and a few (still used) roads, I don't think there's any legacy of the Romano-British.  They don't have an identity in the popular imagination.  Our olive oil using, villa-dwelling, wine quaffing Romano-British ancestors have never had a great hold on English sense of self.

[Ed Anger]

I root for whoever makes the women do the housework.

[Eddie Teach]

 

Well, the Romans were more likely to own slaves to do it for her.

[Neil]

The class system is the best part of British culture.  The modern tendency to worship the lower classes as if they are valuable is a mistake.

[Queequeg]

No-one identifies with the Romano-British

The Welsh and Yorkshire shepherds? 

[Admiral Yi]

Open question: why do the Welsh speak a Celtic language and not a Romance one?

And how the fuck did the Basques hold on to a motherfucking pre-Celtic language?

[Sheilbh]

The Welsh and Yorkshire shepherds?

I don't know why Yorkshire would.  The Celts see themselves as being here before the Romans, often at war with them and occasionally beating them off.

Open question: why do the Welsh speak a Celtic language and not a Romance one?

The Welsh are Celts

[Admiral Yi]

The Welsh are Celts

So were the Gauls.  So were the folks in Spain.

[ulmont]

The Welsh are Celts

So were the Gauls.  So were the folks in Spain.

And anyone with a serious mountain range or other natural barriers to separate themselves from the Latins maintained a Celtic language, to greater or lesser degrees.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_nations#Iberian_Peninsula

[Sheilbh]

So were the Gauls.  So were the folks in Spain.

The Welsh never got properly conquered by the Romans and many of the remaining Romano-British (who often spoke a Celtic language - as would Gallo-Romans) were forced into to Wales (Old English for 'foreigners') by the Anglo-Saxons.

[katmai]

Open question: why do the Welsh speak a Celtic language and not a Romance one?

And how the fuck did the Basques hold on to a motherfucking pre-Celtic language?

Cmon Yi. We are bad ass people, you've met me and I'm only half basque