The Saxons were mainland Europe. Angles were the native British. Anglo-Saxon means everyone in between the Romans & Normans. More or less..
We were never that great on European it’s a knockout ,je sen frontier I think it was as a kid used to think why is our 8ft inflatable man so rubbish
But Anglo Saxon is a mixed race, which other nationalities are mixed race? At a point people want to suspend our historical multi culturality, it’s already formed. We’re only slightly less daft than Americans when we start with anti immigration.
Fu ck me Betty. It’s the extraordinary variety of topics one gets on this Board that keeps me going. To quote a departed friend (probably). “We’d be fooked if we could only discuss the football.”
Serious answer. We believe our own propaganda. We have many things to be rightly proud of and an awful lot to be ashamed of. We're no better and no worse than many other proud countries and peoples of the world. Distinctly average I'd say.
Hold on Helen - Despite the efforts of the English! following the16Century Act of Union there are now 900,000 + Welsh speakers in Wales and about 100,000 Welsh speakers living outside Wales. (there are thousands of Welsh speakers in Patagonia Argentina - descendants of the Welsh families who migrated there in the C19 from the Welsh Valleys.) In the 50's ? there was a thriving Welsh Chapel in Carlton. Over the years the Senedd in Cardiff has passed legislation which protects the Welsh language - e.g. all children do a basic course in Welsh at school - all signage and notices are bilingual - all government departments give callers the option to speak with a Welsh speaker etc. And my Welsh grandfather assured me that Welsh was the language of Heaven! In Northern Ireland the DUP has stubbornly refused to pass legislation for the teaching of the Irish Language in schools - probably only a matter of time before Sinn Fein implement this.
There was a gap though, its taken time and a real campaign and drive to get it as the universal language of Wales again.
I Aye. It’s nothing you could expect your average Trumper/Brexiteer to understand. The ‘Great’ bit means a larger, diverse but united national community. & by that definition, we’re not very great at all nowadays. In fact we’re a bit *****. ***** Britain, that’s what’s they should call us in Europe. They probably already do..
TV - Boris Rosling, Eduoard Belin and Phil Farnsworth have good claims to have beaten Logie Baird and the first two transmitted moving images first Telephone - Bell was Scottish, but was working in Boston, MA - and his patent application was beaten by Elisha Gray but Bell paid the fee first so got the patent. Jet Engine - Karavodin and Maxime Guilliame were earlier, and von Ohain & Heinkel had a working jet first. Internet - the internet is based on ideas developed by Arpa in the USA. The HTTP protocol and HTML "language" were developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and team while on downtime at CERN, but are based on expansions of earlier protocols and scripting languages. Steel is over 4000 years old and evidence has been found in several cultures including Anatolia, India and the Roman Empire The rest you can have, but there many were improvements on previous ideas, or improved to become the product that eventually became popular - Edison's lightbulb was much better than Swan's for example, and the German's and American's had boats operating on the same principle as the hovercraft but without the skirt and the ability to transition from water to land.
In the new immigration rules, the Patagonian Welsh speakers are unable to immigrate to the UK unless they speak English to an acceptable standard too.
I watched an interview with a Welsh speaking British soldier ...he was saying that he came across a Welsh speaking Argentinian POW during the Falklands War, but they couldn't understand each other.
Sunday roasts Our beautiful countryside Some classic tv comedies James Bond Yorkshireness Our passion for sport The NHS Our multitude of takeaways David Attenborough Corner shops
My favourite vagary of the English language is that the word queue has five letters, four of which are absolutely superfluous
Whilst I agree, often, people all over the world are working on similar projects and more often than not are building on the work of earlier developments. In the late 1990's Tokyo university ranked the most influential inventions of the 20th century...their conclusion was that 51% were British. Whittle designed and patented his jet engine 6 years before Ohain...it would have been flying long before the german version had the Air Ministry backed Whittle rather than actively obstructing him...Whittle's engine was also far superior to Ohains which was actually a failure and dropped in favour of a later design by Anselm Franz for the Messerscmitt 262...Whittle's engine provided the USA with their first jet and was also the engine in the Soviet Mig 15 during ( both sides used Whittle engines) and long after the Korean war. Franz's design was also dropped due to a very short engine lifespan and high fuel consumption, although some aspects of good design were adopted by US engineers. Karavodin and Guillaume were Pulse Jet engineers....relevant to the V1 Doodlebug, but not to Jet aircraft. Ohain definitely designed 'a' jet engine, Whittle designed 'the' jet engine. As to the light bulb Swann demonstrated and patented the light bulb before Edison, and also won a patent court case brought by Edison, the answer was to amalgate as Edison-Swann...later Ediswan. I can't comment on the telephone detail but I would say most of the world accepts Graham Bell as the inventor of the modern system. Steel...should have said stainless steel....Firth Brown, Sheffield Hovercraft....."German's and American's had boats operating on the same principle as the hovercraft but without the skirt and the ability to transition from water to land."...clearly they hadn't designed and built hovercraft. Television...Baird was the first to put pictures over miles...in fact transatlantic in the 1920's...he was instrumental in the development of European TV, France and Germany employing him....I'm not sure about Farnsworth...he seems (on google) to be a few years behind Baird but working on a different system, so I can't comment.