Who composed the most quintessentially English music? I'd say a strong contender would be Handel - a German immigrant.

Yemen?

The bit with the English language is in the second and third segments.

They were pretty good, actually.

That's the only corporate video of his I've seen. I have to say that it was pretty good. Funny and useful at the same time.

But then I thought about it, and realised that it's not true. Test Cricket as a summer ritual goes back no further than 1877, and that's pushing it; the Boxing Day Test, presented as the hoariest of traditional sporting events, is twentieth century, and as a fixture, post WW2. "Messiah" never had any particular association with Christmas until somehow or other it acquired one very recently.

Nevertheless, it felt as though I was participating in something immemorial, and that added something to the experience. Why? I'm blowed if I know, but it did.

I have a feeling that I need stuff like this to make sense of, well, life, I suppose, and I don't think I'm on my own. That's irrational. OK, so it's irrational. Show me where it says I have to be rational about everything.

But, speaking of Izzard... has he stopped wearing women's clothing? Or is he just dressing down for the documentary?

We acquired ideas, as well as words, from the Empire. My house has a verandah, a typical feature of English houses of the Victorian period - but both the word and the architectural idea are from India.

I don't know if Britain is unusually rich in immigrant history in the Old World, due to accident of location or climate, perhaps. From here, the other nations of Western Europe look a little more homogenous, but that could be a trick of perspective.

But even in the States, there's a persistant myth about the roots of the country being pure Anglo-Saxonism (handily ignoring the Celtic-Roman-Jute-Norman-Viking-Dutch parts) that pokes its ugly head up whenever the purity tendancy wants to exclude the Mexicans, Cubans, Vietnamese, Koreans, Chinese, Muslims, Native Americans, East Europeans, African-Americans, etc.

If you work at it, you can probably find similar "mongrel" backgrounds for most Western European countries. Spain would be an easy example: Celts, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Jews, Visigoths, Arabs & Berbers, French... plus more recent immigration from parts of the Spanish Empire once that got founded.

In some ways it's a bit easier to delineate things for Britain, since it's an island: when someone invades or arrives en masse, it's clear they're "immigrants" from elsewhere, rather than from a neighboring region that may or may not be a different "country."

(And as far as I know Izzard's always been bi-sartorial; he describes himself as an advocate for "total clothing freedom." I doubt he's really going mainstream in that regard so much as refusing to be pigeonholed, which is certainly one of the things I admire about him.)

That matches my experience. I live in Scotland (though I am American), and I'm studying Dutch at the moment. I find a lot of Dutch words that match Scots dialect terms.

kist - box, coffin
kerk/kirk - church
etc
My favourite example is that my Aberdonian father in law says, "ye ken?", while a Dutch speaker says "ken je?" Since the "j" in Dutch is pronounced the same as the English "y", it's a startling juxtaposition.

My husband, who grew up speaking both Dutch and English, is nearly blind to the similarities. He says he finds English much more similar to French.

I can understand why your husband sees the strong similarity between English and French - our French vocabulary really sets English apart from other Germanic languages.

One thing I've wondered about - of all the Germanic languages, do any others have as few vestiges of declension as English?

One thing I've wondered about - of all the Germanic languages, do any others have as few vestiges of declension as English?

Dutch is only mildly more inflected than English.

It has cases (subjective, objective, genitive) for its pronouns but not its nouns.

Nouns have gender, but the majority are "common" gender (using de for the definite article). About a quarter of them are neuter (using het), but all nouns act like they're common gender in the plural.

Adjectives change their form to agree with noun gender, which means they have two forms.

Verbs inflect across the singular, but are the same for all plural forms. On the other hand, it has fewer verb tenses in common use - the simple present takes the place of the English present and continuous present (as well as the future in many contexts).

In sum, I'd say that nouns and adjectives are slightly more complex, pronouns are about the same, and verbs are simpler.

Idiom, of course, is where the fun is, but that's another question.

Last stand up routine of his, i laughed so hard, my sides hurt the next day.

Gawds, if my history classes had been that funny, I might have stayed awake, instead of having to watch the Discovery Channel now to catch up.

good stuff.

A little poking around with Google suggests that modern Nordic languages (e.g., Danish) are perhaps similarly lacking in noun cases -- except for Icelandic, which appears to be similar to German in retaining them.

It is pretty cool. I've known for a while that Frisian is supposed to be closest Germanic language to English, but I've never had a chance to hear it. (I also like the fact that the farmer quotes a price in guilders instead of euros for the brun cu!)

One very minor complaint I have is that the whole segment on Old English does perpetuate the idea that what really matters about language is vocabulary -- that Old English is similar to Frisian primarily (or only) because there are lots of basic words in common. Which is true, and significant, but ignores everything else that makes up a language (phonology, grammar, syntax, etc., etc.).

Messiah came over to British culture in the Regency era, around the same time as the Tannenbaum, which also didn't exist there at all until Queen Charlotte brought it to the royal family. Oratorio-style music happened to be in vogue, and Handel's Messiah was a good example. so while the two elements came up in separate manners, their introductions into British culture are at nearly the same time.

in contrast, on the other side of the pond the Hessians and German settlers brought the Tannenbaum to America during the revolution. therefore, America was ahead of the curve as far as the length of time the tree tradition has had to settle into the culture. however, Messiah came into vogue here later than in England, and i've no clear knowledge of when that started.

i also vote Purcell for the quintessential English composer - his Nunc Dimittis/Magnificat is beyond ken. ;)

thanks for the post, Teresa! Eddie was truly fun to watch, and the comment path has been intriguing.

Interestingly, he learned Dutch in Limburg, which is as far from Friesland as you can get, but he says that at the brown cow and cheese level, the two dialects are pretty much the same. He understood almost all of the farmer's conversation, while I, who am studying the more standardised Hollands accent, was mostly lost.

I cheated: I'm hard of hearing. I'm used to hearing vowels more reliably than anything else, and running pattern-matching on what I can make out of the consonants -- f/v, d/th, t/ch, s/z, etc.

And seemingly closer to the German word, käse.
Though apparently they all derive from Latin caseus.

And then I saw a further note in my dictionary, which mentioned that the "cheese" in "big cheese" has nothing to do with tiis or kaas or käse, but is instead (perhaps) from Urdu (chiz, "thing") -- yet another import from the subcontinent.

The Dutch for 'cheese' is 'kaas'. The phrase I wrote was Frisian (a language which I make no claim whatsoever to speak), and 'boter en tjiis' was used in an article I read long years ago to show the relationship between Frisian and English. It was interesting to hear the farmer say 'for the cheese and butter' and realise that (a) he wasn't speaking English and (b) I understood it.

I had a similar experience, viva voce, back in the early 90s when I was doing field research in Surinam. At a bar in Paramaribo called 'Tori Oso' ('Story House' in Sranantongo), I heard one man say to another (Sranantongo transliteration very approximate) 'Wij de proletariaat da loek pun joe de élite' and understood it as a sentence in Jamaican Creole ('Wi di proletariat da look pon yu di elite').

Good stuff.

I think I learned more history, and might actually retain some of it, than I did in some of my history classes. Of course, I wasn't hung over, watching this, which might have helped....

tnielsenhayden: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT0LKMSSAW0&NR
pnielsenhayden: * all die *
pnielsenhayden: it is the ultimate YouTube video. we can all shut down the internet now.

Teresa responds: Not Thomas Tallis?
hypochrismustreefuzz says: The most British of all the English composers is one person you wouldn't think of as a composer. Anthony Burgiss.

So...are you all being deadpan or are you just not noticing the pun?

I wouldn't say it was a revelation at all. Like all Englishmen I enjoy curry, though as an Englishman I'd claim that that kind curry kind comes more from Bradford/Birmingham/Wherever than India in particular.

I'm the grandson of a Polish man and in the community where I grew up many claimed some kind of Irish heritage.

I'd say most English people are aware of our history of invasions. And they are aware of some of what we took from the invaders and those we invaded.

Obviously there's the football hooligan sterotype who goes on about Ingerland while washing down his chicken tikka masala with guinness, beating-up Germans in the name of the Queen and so on. They aren't truly representative of England. I hope.

The little skit he does as a store owner of the old school is actually very well-observed, presumably because he is also of an age to have remembered what a dreary pinched existence life could be in the less affluent parts of British cities, in particular.

Next week I'm travelling back to blighty (hindi word),and I'll meet up with closest friend, Mahesh.He invited me back for lunch from school one day when we were seven, and I ate some chicken curry,chapati and aloo ghobi...which was a revelation. And my seven-year old self decided these people knew things we could learn from,and that otherness needed to be embraced.

Bless my parents for never putting any doubt into my head that would have made me refuse that invitation, because there were plenty of parents who did, and probably many who still do.

Thank you. Now that the spasms have stopped, I'll take a moment to reinsert my lungs into their approximately proper place in my chest cavity.

And yes, I was warned. We can shut the internet now - it's complete.