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Sunday, November 13, 2022

Germans in France


These are German soldiers enjoying a French beach.

 

10 comments:

  1. I wonder if this is Deauville, Normandy. There is a particular quality to the light along the Normandy beaches, which tend also to be very long and flat - hence the need for the Mulberry Harbours. Up on the cliffs, you can still see the concrete fortifications they built which formed part of the 2,000 mile chain of fortresses known as the "Atlantic Wall" - built, I must add, by forced labour.

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    1. I visited the monoliths at Carnac, Bretagne, and I was surprised to see the number of large coastal defense bunkers that remained on the nearby beaches. The Celtic Nationalists were using them as billboards . . . in their language which sounds a lot like Welsh.

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    2. Breton is indeed a form of Welsh. Although with regional dialects, Welsh, Cornish and Breton are the descendants of Brythonic, one of two insular Celtic languages. As the Anglo-Saxons invaded, so they drove the Romano-Celts West to become the Welsh and the Cornish. Some of Cornish then went to the peninsula of what today is mainland France, "Brittany" meaning "Less Britain" as opposed to the island known as "Great Britain". Brythonic was spoken right up into what is now the Scottish Lowlands. The Gallic is a form of Gaelic - the native language of Ireland - both the descendants of Goidelic, the other branch of Celtic languages native to the British Isles. The Scoti were originally a Celtic tribe from Ulster in Ireland and migrated to the Scottish Highlands. Gallic and Gaelic are now not mutually comprehensible, but a speaker of the Ulster dialect of Gaelic can get a gist of what is being said. Welsh, Cornish and Breton, however, remain more or less mutually comprehensible.

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    3. All true. My genealogical research caused me to delve into the world of the Goidelic languages. (I have an ancestor who could sing the Psalms a capella in both Gallic and Scots.) A professor at Sabhal Mor Ostag, the Gallic language college on the Isle of Skye, has come up with a list of consistent phonic equivalents between the Scottish and Irish versions. Once the speaker of one language learns those, they can understand the other in most situations. That college is really a brilliant little place and beautifully sited, too.

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    4. When the Vallum Antonini - the Antonine Wall, constructed under Emperor Antoninus Pius and extending from the Firth of Forth to the Firth of Clyde - was abandoned in 162CE, Hadrian's Wall - constructed in 122CE - became the effective border between Roman occupied Britain and the land of the Gaels. The Vallum Aelium or Vallum Hadriani is today a mere nine miles South of the existing historical border between Scotland and England. Hibernia (Ireland) was never conquered by the Romans, and so the Gaels, unlike the Romano-Celts, were never exposed to Latin resulting in the vast and overwhelming majority of Latin words in both the Gallic and Gaelic being later loan words. This was not the case for the descendants of Brythonic, Welsh and Cornish having a vast number of Latin loan words in their respective vocabularies. This was key to the emerging discipline of Linguistics in the late Victorian period which sought to reconstruct the pronunciation of Classical Latin. Classical Latin had gradually segued into what is known as the Vulgate, or the Latin of the common people, inflected by the accents of the various lands of the Empire. The Vulgate would also be subjected to what was effectively an Italianate pronunciation, decreed to be the liturgical pronunciation of the Church in the early 17th century. It was by studying the pronunciation of Latin loan words, chiefly in Welsh - as Cornish was by this time a dead language - that led linguisticians to be able to tell, inter alia, that in Classical Latin all "Gs" and "Cs" - originally the same letter - were hard and that the Æ dipthong was pronounced as in eye, or me, myself, I. Thus Cicero became Kikero rather than Sisero and Gaius Julius Cæsar became Gaius Iulius Kaisar, the "S" pronounced as an "S" and not a "Z". Ave!

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    5. So the Germans were closer to the correct pronunciation of their equivalent of "emperor" than the Italians. Now that's not what one would expect. Having spent quite a bit of time in Wales, I had just assumed that the obvious Latin borrow words were modern infusions, but now I know better.

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    6. Yes, absolutely. The Germans used the new Reconstructed Classical Pronunciation of Cæsar and transliterated it into phonetic modern German. It was a direct reference to Ancient Rome which perhaps betrays their real intent which was to erupt in the concept of Lebensraum, Julius Caesar being the conqueror and founder of the first Roman trans-Alpine colonial possession, Gaul. The final irony, of course, was that Julius Caesar was never an emperor. Having crossed the Rubicon, he broke convention by leading his troops into Rome itself against the constitutional conventions of the Roman Republic. He was in fact a "dictator", theretofore a legitimate position in the Roman Republic which allowed for a member of the patrician class to be elected for the term of one year with absolute powers to settle some sort of issue that had arisen that the Senate had been unable to resolve. Such was the disruption of the civil wars and breakdown of the Republic's constitution during his absence fighting the Gallic Wars, he broke with convention and had himself declared dictator for life. The rest is history. The first emperor proper was Gaius Octavius, the blood nephew but adopted son of Julius Caesar, who reigned variously as Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Imperator Caesar, and latterly Imperator Caesar Augustus. "Imperator" is the Latin for emperor, but what happened was that successive emperors used both the names Caesar and Augustus as replacements to legitimate their authority and ancestry. At the end of the 5th century, the last Roman Emperor was Romulus Augustus, after the first emperor Octavian and one of the mythical founders of Rome, Romulus (twin of Remus). Incidentally, the declaration of an Irish Republic in the Easter Uprising of 1916 resulted ultimately in the creation of the Irish Free State, which is a back formation, because, as the Welsh-speaking British prime minister of the time, David Lloyd George, knew, the Irish Gaelic had no word for "republic".

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  2. Nudity on a French beach nowadays would probably not be remarked upon.

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    1. Well, I've been to several beaches in France, both generic and naturist. Topless women are fairly common on the generic beaches, but only recall seeing fully nude men on the naturist ones.

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  3. German loves to be naked, i mean even their movies, there's a lot of full frontal scenes, i was like, this is kinda country

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