TheCunningStunt

I like saying chips and gravy in a Brum accent. It amuses me. I also like saying up the Brum, we're in the prem in the accent. I like the Brummie accent, I've never been to Birmingham, but you have a better shopping center than Manchesters. Also you have attractive ladies. But still, I'm a typical Manc so, Manc > Birmingham.

Scarlett O'Hara

Bah have you heard Birmingham accents?! Corro accents all the way!

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Gareth Brown

I had a chance to go to manchester tommorow but the seats on the coach ran out quickly, if any of you mancs see a load of, as you would refer to them 'southern cunts' that'll be kids from my college.

TheCunningStunt

We're a friendly bunch really, despite what people think Southern cunts will be welcomed nicely.


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I'm of course joking, we will burn the coach.

Gareth Brown

Heheh. Its pretty difficult for you to be cruel to us nowadays since half of you are down here! Taking our jobs....

jackhammer

Yeah I owned one for 20 years

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right-track

Just to steer away from what the essence of Britishness is and put out some hard genetic facts about the inhabitants of modern day Britain.
This taken from wiki on the results of the renowned geneticist Brian Sykes studying 'The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland.'
And it makes for some interesting reading with a few surprises thrown in;

Sykes examines British genetic "clans". He presents evidence from mitochondrial DNA, inherited by both sexes from their mothers, and the Y chromosome, inherited by men from their fathers, for the following points:

* The genetic makeup of Britain and Ireland is overwhelmingly what it has been since the Neolithic period, and to a very considerable extent since the Mesolithic period, especially in the female line.

* The contribution of the Celts of continental Europe to the genetic makeup of Britain and Ireland was minimal.

* The Picts were not a separate people: the genetic makeup of the formerly Pictish areas of Scotland shows no significant differences from the general profile of the rest of Britain.

* The Anglo-Saxons made a substantial contribution to the genetic makeup of England, but in Sykes's opinion it was under 20 percent of the total, even in southern England.

* The Vikings (Danes and Norwegians) also made a substantial contribution, which is concentrated in central, northern, and eastern England - the territories of the ancient Danelaw. There is a very heavy Viking contribution in the Orkney and Shetland Islands, in the vicinity of 40 percent. Women as well as men contributed substantially in all these areas, showing that the Vikings engaged in large-scale settlement.

* The Norman contribution was extremely small, on the order of 2 percent.

* There are only sparse traces of the Roman occupation, almost all in southern England.

* In spite of all these later contributions, the genetic makeup of the British Isles remains overwhelmingly what it was in the Neolithic: a mixture of the first Mesolithic inhabitants with Neolithic settlers who came by sea from Iberia and ultimately from the eastern Mediterranean.

* There is a difference between the genetic histories of men and women in Britain and Ireland . The matrilineages show a mixture of original Mesolithic inhabitants and later Neolithic arrivals from Iberia, whereas the patrilineages are much more strongly correlated with Iberia. This suggests (though Sykes does not emphasize this point) replacement of much of the original male population by new arrivals with a more powerful social organization.

* There is evidence for a "Genghis Khan effect", whereby some male lineages in ancient times were much more successful than others in leaving large numbers of descendants.

Some quotations from the book follow. (Note that Sykes uses the terms "Celts" and "Picts" to designate the pre-Roman inhabitants of the Isles who spoke Celtic and does not mean the people known as Celts in central Europe.)


[T]he presence of large numbers of Jasmine’s Oceanic clan … says to me that there was a very large-scale movement along the Atlantic seaboard north from Iberia, beginning as far back as the early Neolithic and perhaps even before that. …The mere presence of Oceanic Jasmines indicates that this was most definitely a family based settlement rather that the sort of male-led invasions of later millennia.


The Celts of Ireland and the Western Isles are not, as far as I can see from the genetic evidence, related to the Celts who spread south and east to Italy, Greece and Turkey from the heartlands of Hallstadt and La Tene...during the first millennium BC…The genetic evidence shows that a large proportion of Irish Celts, on both the male and female side, did arrive from Iberia at or about the same time as farming reached the Isles. (…)

The connection to Spain is also there in the myth of Brutus…. This too may be the faint echo of the same origin myth as the Milesian Irish and the connection to Iberia is almost as strong in the British regions as it is in Ireland. (…)

They [the Picts] are from the same mixture of Iberian and European Mesolithic ancestry that forms the Pictish/Celtic substructure of the Isles.


Here again, the strongest signal is a Celtic one, in the form of the clan of Oisin, which dominates the scene all over the Isles. The predominance in every part of the Isles of the Atlantis chromosome (the most frequent in the Oisin clan), with its strong affinities to Iberia, along with other matches and the evidence from the maternal side convinces me that it is from this direction that we must look for the origin of Oisin and the great majority of our Y-chromosomes…I can find no evidence at all of a large-scale arrival from the heartland of the Celts of central Europe amongst the paternic genetic ancestry of the Isles… can

To summerise.
The modern day Celts (The Irish and the Welsh) living in Britain, did not originate from central Europe, but instead from Iberia (Spain).
That the Scots (Picts) are not different from any of the other Celtic clans of Britain and are also descended from Iberia.
The English are not made up of predominantly Anglo/Saxon (German) stock (only 20%) either.
The Viking invaders however, had a bigger impact on the English gene pool particularly in the North of England much more than the Romans and the Normans but, overall, the English still remain predominantly Celtic.

Conclusion.
The people of Britain (England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales) all have a common genetic link...we're all Spanish!

Janszoon

Dios mio!

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A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

right-track

It could explain why this summer will be my 3rd Spanish holiday in a row!

TheBig3

According to Adidasss, you're not.

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I've moved to a new address