At Sea
Today we continue northwards along the Western seaways to enter the approaches to the English Channel or as the French call it, less possessively, Le Manche (The Sleeve). Tomorrow morning we plan to arrive in St Malo in Brittany where we will meet another of the minority peoples that we have been learning more about in the course of our voyage.
We began in Seville where a vigorous Romany culture has given the world its song and dance. These people were thought by some to have originated in Egypt (hence the designation gypsies) and by others to have come from Flanders (hence the word flamenco). In Santiago da Compostela we heard Galician bagpipes being played by a people who emphasize a distant Celtic heritage in order to distance themselves from both Spain and Portugal.
St Malo was a Celtic saint and many of the people of Brittany still speak a Celtic language, Breton, closely related to Welsh (and to Cornish, a sister language that died out at the end of the eighteenth century). All these languages - Romany, Galician, and Breton not to mention French, Spanish and Portuguese - are part of the great Indo-European language family that stretches in an arc from the south of India to the west of Ireland. It was a Welshman, William Jones, an employee of the East India Company, who first established the common root of all these languages in Sanskrit.
An intriguing exception is Basque. In the Basque Country where we spent a couple of days, the local language has defied the students of language history. These people, who even have a different predominant blood group to other Europeans (O Rh negative), speak a language unrelated to the other Indo-European languages of Europe. The general consensus is that the Basques speak the original language of mankind on the European continent.
Increasingly, the lingua franca of Europe is English, the subject of another stimulating talk by Robin MacNeil this afternoon. But as our guest lecturer pointed out, there are now more second language speakers of English in the world than there are native speakers. In the new Europe there has been a resurgence of interest in the preservation of minority languages and cultures even as the use of English as a lingua franca extends inexorably.
Today we continue northwards along the Western seaways to enter the approaches to the English Channel or as the French call it, less possessively, Le Manche (The Sleeve). Tomorrow morning we plan to arrive in St Malo in Brittany where we will meet another of the minority peoples that we have been learning more about in the course of our voyage.
We began in Seville where a vigorous Romany culture has given the world its song and dance. These people were thought by some to have originated in Egypt (hence the designation gypsies) and by others to have come from Flanders (hence the word flamenco). In Santiago da Compostela we heard Galician bagpipes being played by a people who emphasize a distant Celtic heritage in order to distance themselves from both Spain and Portugal.
St Malo was a Celtic saint and many of the people of Brittany still speak a Celtic language, Breton, closely related to Welsh (and to Cornish, a sister language that died out at the end of the eighteenth century). All these languages - Romany, Galician, and Breton not to mention French, Spanish and Portuguese - are part of the great Indo-European language family that stretches in an arc from the south of India to the west of Ireland. It was a Welshman, William Jones, an employee of the East India Company, who first established the common root of all these languages in Sanskrit.
An intriguing exception is Basque. In the Basque Country where we spent a couple of days, the local language has defied the students of language history. These people, who even have a different predominant blood group to other Europeans (O Rh negative), speak a language unrelated to the other Indo-European languages of Europe. The general consensus is that the Basques speak the original language of mankind on the European continent.
Increasingly, the lingua franca of Europe is English, the subject of another stimulating talk by Robin MacNeil this afternoon. But as our guest lecturer pointed out, there are now more second language speakers of English in the world than there are native speakers. In the new Europe there has been a resurgence of interest in the preservation of minority languages and cultures even as the use of English as a lingua franca extends inexorably.
