This is what assimilation looks like. Someone with an Irish name calling themselves Anglo-Saxon. It’s like a Hispanic person calling themselves Latinx, proof that they have lost all organic connection to the culture of their ancestors.
That said, I question the relevancy of this comment to the story.
I'm curious: what kind of Native Americans were they that would willingly adopt Spanish names as indigenous, and not mestizo, peoples, especially given that Spanish contact was pretty violent across most of North America?
My wife's ancestors are likely genetically pure going back many centuries from the other side of the world. Her mother's family were nobility before they came to America. Our kids are a thing that probably didn't exist at all prior to the 20th century and they're fantastic. And they know their culture to be New Yorkers.
Now if we take the gender out of every word in that sentence it would look something like "lx doctorx toma (we loose el, here) café por lx mañana", el wasn't necessary in the sentence to beging with, so that's fine, but the rest of the sentence becomes pretty hard to read to anyone that speaks Spanish, there's no practical way of pronouncing that unless you use the English pronunciation of the letter x.
To add more depth to this, in spanish to give a gender neutral statement, you default to the male version of the noun, for example, for a group that has boys and girls, you would just refer to them as "los niños", people feel this could be dismissive of girls, if there is at least one boy in a group of girls you'd say "los niños" and depending of the context it is implied that the group has both girls and boys, so in some latin american governments they are required by etiquette to form sentences like "las niñas y los niños" instead of just "los niños" this is called around here "inclusive language" but even then most Spanish speaking people think that is impractical and unnecessary.
That said, the latinx movement is kind of relevant in Argentina IIRC, but in most other latin american countries the idea will be met with a lot of resistance and rejection.
I would go even further than that. The US-centric idea of Latino as a unified identity (let alone with the x), often based on North-American stereotypes of Mexican and Caribbean cultures, can be off-putting in Latin American countries. As an example, here's the comedy-rock song «No Somos Latinos» («We are not Latinos») from Uruguayan band El Cuarteto de Nos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onQU3sp8_Jk
Generally speaking when you're in your country you'll sometimes have strong opinions about your neighbouring countries, Hondurans are this, Guatemalans are that, but when you're outside your country and you run into other latin american people, in my experience it was something really special we would greet each other as if we were long time friends, I think there's something more to it than language, I think most latin american people can relate to a certain kind of burden that comes with living in a latin american country, those burdens and the problems our societies have are pretty similar all around and I think when we meet in foreign countries we immediately relate in the way we perceive our societies and the things we've lived through.
Just as an anecdote, I went to Paris for a vacation and I went into a Five guys restaurant, usually you have to pay for a soda refill, but there was a dominican guy who was a waiter and he heard me and my SO speaking Spanish and he immediately smiled and came over and we had a nice conversation about our countries, and he let me refill our sodas for free, it's really nice and I don't know if other regions have something like this
It’s mostly used for political purposes in the US by non Latin American people as well as a few Latin Americans in the political sphere because it’s a useful political tool for the time being.
To my untrained ear, les neen-yes sounds more in line with los neen-yos and las neen-yes than lecks neen-yecks (if that's how you'd pronounce it).
I’m in agreement with you that é is the natural neutral replacement letter. But I don’t think this is a serious attempt to change the language so much as a serious attempt to signal group membership.
It became popular in writing first too.
Some people do say Latine. Probably it will replace Latinx eventually.
Most “Latino” people are of at least part Native American or African ancestry; whereas “Latin” refers originally to speakers of Romance languages. Thus most (of course not all) “Latinos” who call themselves that are identifying with the subset of their ancestors who enslaved and conquered the others.
Please don't deny their agency.
This is a somewhat tenuous topic too because there's a whole lot of history and bad blood after the times I'm speaking of and there's a different but similar issue currently brewing over there as well.
I guess you meant more that the term fell out of use in England at some point, and Norman-descended people in England called themselves English. But even so, Norman is still a recognisable ethnicity - norse people who settled in France, spread by conquest into England, Malta etc. It could be a useful contemporary or historical label even if those people at a given time called themselves something else.
But the Normans who invaded Ireland came via Wales largely and were not called English until the 16th century
Are you claiming that the Duchy of Normandy is a post 1800 ret-conned invention? You think it never actually existed?
> only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves, according to a nationally representative, bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019 by Pew Research Center.
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
[1] If you are not a monarch giving yourself a numeral is pretentious.
that's mostly cultural. in some cultures (e.g., asian ones), it's normal to have multiple names for different levels of familiarity, and to adopt new names as circumstances dictate.
with that said, criticizing (someone else's) naming choices is a wholly aesthetic opinion and should be disregarded (perhaps politely).
The people in Wales, Scotland and Ireland were the Celts, with some subdivisions (Picts etc).
But it looks like both terms are more loaded in the USA [1], so I don't want to speculate on the intent of the comment.
This isn’t true. The Lowland Scots are no less culturally Anglo-Saxon than the English. They were slightly less successful than the English at extirpating all traces of Celtic culture from their homeland but it wasn’t for want of trying.
I know I’m being hit with downvotes to my name the more I try to explain this but I’d rather speak the truth and be punished than stay quiet and take it to the grave.
The whole "woke" / "political correctness" movement is mostly bored white people.
This is the result of a group of people with no real major battles left to fight. You make up an enemy to give your life purpose.
I am an Irish-American who plays the music, hates the food, but if I wanted to call myself of "European" ancestry, that wouldn't abandon all of my musical culture, it may just be a trendy label in the zeitgeist.
The comparison to "latinx" is apt though - I should see it as a flag but instead it's like nails on a chalkboard because it's everything I don't like about language policing.
Maybe in USA, I don't know anyone who uses it like that.
I don't think there is such a thing as losing the culture but a development into a different direction after the fork (migration).
A classic identity problem of the Indian diaspora or the Turkish immigrants in Germany or the Irish in Boston, or the Italian in NY is that they have retained many of the traditional values that were popular at the time in their countries before they left. But their old countries have moved on in every sense. These tribes then become more conservative because they feel like they have to defend their values from outside groups and from lack of new values that they can tie to their old labels. But what they "defend" no longer reflects the reality back in the old country.
This leads to some strange (but IMO understandable behaviors) where the old is much more idealized than what their peers do back in the old country. E.g.:
- Turkish AKP voters in Germany who only remember all the prosperity Erdogan has brought to an economically failing Turkey. - The 3rd or 4th gen Italians in the US are hardly Italians in todays sense of Italy (even their food is laughed at back in their own country. - Eventually the culture changes so much that it has no parallel to what it used to be.
That is neither good nor bad IMO it just is a natural progression and adaption to their new environment. Shedding the old values and stories people tell themselves takes not years but generations. The odd thing about the US is that despite its many influences from all around the world it is still a country where many groups hold on to what they think are their roots while actually it's a constant state of change and no longer exists.
Modern historians don't use the term Anglo-Saxon much these days, so it's not especially important.
To you. And to a bunch of people who have to live in fear of being canceled - a.k.a., fired for - in the case of historians - reminding the world of uncomfortable truths.
Just as an illustration of why the term "Anglo-Saxon" muddles things, we have the person in the article who seems to think that Murphy is an Anglo-Saxon surname, when it is clearly Celtic in origin. I'm not doubting that the author is Anglo-Saxon... just pointing out that his suname, itself, is not.
I'm not a historian, so I'm just relating the parts of the issue that I understand. There are articles online by historians that go into greater depth explaining why historians tend to avoid the term "Anglo-Saxon" these days, and why the term became so popular in the 18th and 19th century.
Not sure what "uncomfortable truth" you are referring to. If you have something to say, spit it out. I also don't understand why someone would "fear being canceled" just because they used a somewhat obsolete term.
Akin to saying that someone from Philly might as well be from LA, it’s all just a city. Or that the Warriors might as well be the New York Yankees, it’s just sports.
PS; this is why Italians, Irish, Polish etc weren’t considered white until pretty late into the 1900’s in USA – not anglo-saxon
There is a lot more melting recently. Europe historically has been pretty big on cultural identity because everyone had/has a grudge with their neighbors for trying to assimilate them at the edges.
Slavs for example (I’m from Slovenia) can trace or Slavic lineage all the way back to the 600’s and the fact we haven’t been assimilated into German or Italian despite being part of their countries for centuries is a point of pride.
There is still a recognized small German minority in Slovenia from back in the 1300’s when they tried to deal with the slavic problem by encouraging people to go settle in our area, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire but we of course wanted to keep it Slavic.
To be fair, as late as the 1940’s the germans were trying to germanize the slavs.
Some of these grudges are very fresh and ongoing. Look at how the Catalonians are fighting against being called Spanish
No, there really isn’t. It may look like there is because of the post WW2 ethnic cleansing leading to more or less monoethnic monolinguistic nation states but the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were always indifferent to what the peasants “were“, like the peasants themselves, mostly. People cared a lot more about religion than ethnicity almost everywhere in Europe until after the French Revolution. The tiny urban, bourgeois or well traveled population were the exception. Everybody else mostly just rolled with it. Most French people didn’t speak a Romance dialect modeled after the Parisian one until well after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.
The bigger question is whether we want to.
As a fellow European I don't think it's going to happen. Not in a hundred years. We speak different languages that alone prevents it from happening. We might get to the point where people will define themselves with dual nationalities, like Polish-German, but this we see even today.
I recall some people from Netherlands getting upset that English was becoming quite prolific to the point that University courses are sometimes held in English.
I think this happens to some extent in other countries in EU too?
Germany, Spain, and France seem highly unlikely to adopt English without a fight - not sure about other countries. But I wouldn't rule out some movement towards greater dominance of major languages.
This is not true. They were the worst sort of white, the worst sort of people, Catholics, but the US legal system went to great lengths to categorize people by racial category and all of the ethnic groups you named were always considered white.
https://theundefeated.com/features/white-immigrants-werent-a...
At points in time, some states have had laws on the books that 100% differentiated between "white" people and other European immigrants.
methinks, the Protestant elite wanted to keep out the Catholics
Take an ancestry / 23andme/ myheritage test and see what comes up. You would be surprised.
Are not all black people Yoruba? (Well, of course they aren't...)
It also doesn't help that our literary sources for this period are very few, non-contemporary (i.e., talking about what happened a few centuries ago), and reliant on state societies talking about non-state societies. Naturally, they use inconsistent terminology for talking about the ethnicity of who is where, and the term "Saxon" appears to be pretty interchangeable for much of northern Germany. The modern term "Anglo-Saxon" thus effectively means "English German," arising largely to distinguish the Saxons who lived in England from those who lived in Germany.
Functionally speaking, you can divide the ethnicities of Britain into 5: the original Celtic speakers, the Romanized Celtics who were part of the province of Britannia, the first wave of Germanic immigrants (Anglo-Saxons), the second wave of Germanic immigrants (the Norse), and the third wave of Germanic immigrants (the Normans), this one largely limited to a very small ruling class.
But that's surely an anachronism, since correctly it would need to be "Danish German"?
One question, do the Normans count as Germanic? I thought they were from Scandinavia originally and then spent enough time in France to pick up the language?
It is much less clear if Normans should also count as Germanic. I wrote it as such mostly for the pun of having England be invaded by three waves of Germanic peoples from three different places. The actual reality is murkier, as the Normans themselves are an amalgamation of existing Breton, Gallo-Romanic, and Frankish (another Germanic people!) peoples with a hefty Norse influx both before and after the ceding of territory to Rollo. It's probably more accurate to say that the Normans represent a new cultural identity which is a fusion of several that came before it, just as the English did with their several invasions, or the French did during their centralization push in the Early Modern.