Nationality - a poll for Brits

[ladyofastolat]

This is a poll just for people from Britain. Sorry, everyone else!

Having nothing pressing to do tonight, I decided to say "yes" when the BBC website asked me if I had a few minutes to evaluate the bit of it I was on. The survey went on to ask me what my nationality was, offering me a list of options that included "British" as well as "English," "Scottish", "Welsh" etc. It made me wonder how many people would select the country-specific answer, and how many would go for the general. I would imagine that English people are more likely to select "British" than Scottish people are, at any rate.

[Poll #1611063]

(This all reminds me of the chap who filled in our library user survey, and in the ethnic origin section, disdained the "white - English" option, and angrily wrote "I'm white Anglo-Saxon (not on list!)"

EDIT: Curses. I just accidentally voted as Pellinor, who is currently in a wet field in Yorkshire and nowhere near a computer. Since I seem to use the laptop for LJ a lot more than he does, perhaps I ought to change the LJ login manager to default to my login, not his.

Comments

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Though those same genetic studies suggest that, indeed, the peoples of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany and Cornwall were actually populated from a different refuge at the end of the Ice Age, and came up from Spain - though they are unrelated to the so-called 'Celtic' Hallstatt culture of central Europe.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I didn't know that. (Or possibly I did once, but have forgotten it - I've read that book 'Tribes' which is about that sort of thing.)

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

The Origins of the British, by Stephen Oppenheimer, is the only book I've read on the subject. It comes to the conclusions that lil_shepherd mentions.

I wish all this stuff had been around when I did the Anglo-Saxons at Oxford. I read loads of works by historians arguing madly about issues of continuity vs. radical change at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions, but none of this genetic evidence was available back then. (Or, at least, didn't appear in any of the books my tutor told me to read.)

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

The genetic evidence for this sort of thing often seems to go against the conventional wisdom (which is fun I think). There's a brilliant book by Tudor Parfitt (I forget the name of the book) in which he investigates the story of a southern African tribe called the Lemba who despite appearing to all intents and purposes to be just like any other black southern African tribe, reckon they are Jewish. He traces their story and tries to work out where they might have come from (they were supposedly the architects of Great Zimbabwe for example). For the most part it's fun but sounds like the sort of work that people like Graham Hancock put together (they even had the Ark of the Covenant at one time allegedly) by multiplying together a succession of 80% probable events to get an extremely improbable end result.

Then right at the end, he gets the DNA results back from the genetics lab. Turns out that those Lemba descended from their hereditary priest caste have the same genetic markers as Jews descended from the Jewish hereditary priest caste, and that yes, in all probability, the Lemba were descended from Jews.