History questions not worth their own thread III

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Is there something comparable to Shakespeare's sonnets?

Probably not, but there were Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge - at least their early careers, not to mention the boy Chatterton. And people were spending their time going on "sentimental journeys" and writing about them. Plus you have figures like Henry Mackenzie. The literary world of the second half of the eighteenth century was dominated by sentiment and emotion. It was only at the end of that century that the tide turned and people started mocking such things, as in Austen's Sense and Sensibility. So if you want to know how people in England stopped being all emotional and became all uptight, the period to ask about is the nineteenth century, not the seventeenth and eighteenth.
 
Even then this is a question of "Why did English poets act a certain way" and even more specifically "Why did they act a certain way compared to Shakespeare" then any trend in English behavior.
 
I've seen that the Mughal Empire is formable for the Timurids in EU3, so I was wondering (apart from Babur's ancestry), what was the relation between the Mughal Empire and the Timurid Empire?
Over the course of the fifteenth century, Timur's empire slowly spun apart into various polities. Initially, there were only two major fragments, Iran (and Iraq-e-Ajam, and western Afghanistan) and Transoxiana. Abu Sa'id Mirza reunited these fragments for about twenty years, but after his death, it all fell to pieces again, with Iran itself dominated by the Aqqoyunlu sultans and Transoxiana split among several warlords.

Babur ruled one of the Timurid polities that controlled part of Transoxiana, namely Mughalistan and Fergana. He was a key player in the confused politics of the region, repeatedly attacking Samarqand (controlled by the Shaybanids), losing and gaining Fergana, and even taking Herat for a time. Eventually he decided that further failed attempts at conquering Samarqand were pointless, and was drawn into the politics of the north Indian plain.
 
How did the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain happen? I thought that when the Anglo-Saxons invaded they ended up mixing with the local population, but I been told by someone that new evidence says the Anglo-Saxons "desecrated and massacred" the native Britons and that genetically the English have more in common with the Danish than the British.
 
The former is vastly more accurate than the latter.
 
The latter is the traditional story. I think it was to explain the linguistic change. But newer evidence suggests the disruption was not quite as bad as originally suggested.
 
The latter is the traditional story. I think it was to explain the linguistic change. But newer evidence suggests the disruption was not quite as bad as originally suggested.
That, and to provide justification for the profoundly contemptuous attitude of the English towards the remaining Celtic peoples.



SCIENCE! :goodjob:
 
That was one of the things he mentioned, as part of the new evidence they measured the faces and skulls of people form Cornwall and Wales and found them different from people from England, who had more Scandinavian features.
 
Do you know which part of England was the comparison being made to? Hopefully not just "England" in general, because the average Englishman typically has a few heaping spoonfuls of Irish, Scots and miscellaneous Brythonic in his ancestry. Maybe rural East Anglia or Northumberland might show up some differences, but London, Manchester or Liverpool are half Irish to begin with.
 
Well, Newcastle is in the same boat as London and Manchester in that regard, so I'm not sure what that would actually prove.
 
I was told it was the newest genetic evidence that proves the old theory of the Anglo-Saxons killing all of the native Britons..
There is no such thing.

You can't tell if somebody was "Germanic" or "Celtic" or "Romano-British" by looking at their DNA, much less by looking at their descendants' DNA a millennium and a half down the line.

The genetic marker testing that has been done to try to validate theories of migration into the British Isles has been carried out with fundamentally flawed assumptions, and would fail even the most basic tests of scientific rigor. There are no controls that have been sought from individuals not living in either Britain or the Netherlands/Germany/Denmark, so the whole thing amounts effectively to comparing the mitochondrial DNA of a person in Britain and a person in Lower Saxony and saying, "why, yes, these do look awfully similar". There is no merit in such studies.

There is even less merit in studies about skull measurements, which are better suited to nineteenth-century understandings of race than to twenty-first-century understandings of ethnicity.

There have been studies with more valid lines of inquiry that have been conducted in recent years. For instance, one study looked at the mineral content in the teeth of the skeletons found in period grave-sites, in order to determine locations at which the person may have drunk his water. They have yielded some interesting results - one being that, apparently, some of these "Anglo-Saxons" spent considerable time in Skye - but they are of dubious utility in attempting to determine ethnicity, much less political orientation.

Linguistic evidence is not nearly as solid as any of the others, partially because there are no real linguistic 'laws' to govern findings. The fact that the modern inhabitants of England speak a language that is part of the Germanic language family does not mean that they are all descendants of Germanic language-speaking people that moved to England, slaughtered all the native inhabitants, and took their place. Nor does it indicate any sort of 'interbreeding', such that every modern Englishperson must have had at least one ancestor who came from modern Germany. Many, if not most, of the inhabitants of the British lowlands must have elected to learn the English language because it was more advantageous for them to do so. There are some theories bouncing around as to why that happened, but none is particularly solid. Try these two posts from Guy Halsall's blog, especially the comments, some of which were written by Actual Historical Linguistics Experts like Alex Woolf.
 
Linguistic evidence is not nearly as solid as any of the others, partially because there are no real linguistic 'laws' to govern findings. The fact that the modern inhabitants of England speak a language that is part of the Germanic language family does not mean that they are all descendants of Germanic language-speaking people that moved to England, slaughtered all the native inhabitants, and took their place. Nor does it indicate any sort of 'interbreeding', such that every modern Englishperson must have had at least one ancestor who came from modern Germany. Many, if not most, of the inhabitants of the British lowlands must have elected to learn the English language because it was more advantageous for them to do so. There
Case in point, I happen to be sitting in a town which has primarily used an Anglic language for the last thousand years, despite never having been an Anglo-Saxon or English settlement.
 
Case in point, I speak English but am not English :p
 
There is even less merit in studies about skull measurements, which are better suited to nineteenth-century understandings of race than to twenty-first-century understandings of ethnicity.

That and assuming that skull dimensions are purely a genetic thing with no environmental inputs would be pretty sketchy too. One's skull dimensions would probably be examined as a quantitative trait loci and not some simple model of "Anglo skull gene" vs. "Celtic skull gene".
 
Case in point, I happen to be sitting in a town which has primarily used an Anglic language for the last thousand years, despite never having been an Anglo-Saxon or English settlement.
Quite.

A related phenomenon is the tendency to try to figure out where a given place-name came from. In theory, the linguistic origin of a given place-name would indicate widespread settlement, and permit one to create some sort of timeline of ethnic habitation based on that. But, for instance, York tears that construction to shreds: we know that the site was heavily settled by Danish and Anglo-Saxon persons (although there's no way to figure out if they were ever a 'majority'), and the site's supposed Germanic-language name is frequently connected to this. But the name York originates from the Roman Eburacum, so:

Eburacum -> Evrawg (late Brythonic)
Evrawg -> Eoferwic (Englisc)
Eoferwic -> Yorvik (Danish)
Yorvik -> York (English)
 
Good point.
 
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