Posted on 04/21/2009 8:00:17 AM PDT by decimon
Men are needed for DNA tests to prove their distant ancestors moved from the Mediterranean to north west Wales as migrant workers 4,000 years ago.
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The researchers are building on previous work carried out in the area which found a much higher-than-average presence of a DNA marker that is commonly found in people from the Balkans and Spain.
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(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
Prints of Wales ping.
It's much more likely this "marker" is a residual element of the conquerors than the workmen. There really weren't all that many guys ~ just that they owned the boats and the better weapons. Other researchers upon examining the Galician and Irish records have suggested there was a technological class that'd come earlier (4000 BC?) from the Balkans and that they'd also settled in the same part of Spain (Galicia) before moving on to the British Isles.
Sounds to me like the DNA studies are supporting the Galician and Irish traditions, and are discounting the Spanish and English denigration of those traditions.
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Could you place me on the GG list?
Monday, 14 March, 2005, 10:31 GMT
A BBC journalist is urging helpful linguists to come forward to help solve a mystery - why the Hindi (India's official language, along with English) accent has so much in common with Welsh. Sonia Mathur, a native Hindi speaker, had her interest sparked when she moved from India to work for the BBC in Wales - and found that two accents from countries 5,000 miles apart seemed to have something in common.
It has long been known that the two languages stem from Indo-European, the "mother of all languages" - but the peculiar similarities between the two accents when spoken in English are striking.
Remarkably, no-one has yet done a direct proper comparative study between the two languages to found out why this is so, says Ms Mathur.
"What I'm hoping is that if amateurs like myself - who have indulged in doing a little bit of research here and there - come forward, we can actually do proper research with professional linguists," she told BBC World Service's Everywoman programme.
No coincidence
Ms Mathur explained that when she moved to Wales, everyone instantly assumed she was Welsh from her accent.
"I would just answer the phone, and they would say 'oh hello, which part of Wales are you from?'," she said.
We tend to pronounce everything - all the consonants, all the vowels
Sonia Mathur "I would explain that I'm not from Wales at all - I'm from India.
"It was just hilarious each time this conversation happened."
Her interest aroused, Ms Mathur spoke to a number of other people whose first language is Hindi.
One Hindi doctor in north Wales told her that when he answered the phone, people hearing his accent would begin talking to him in Welsh.
"I thought maybe it isn't a coincidence, and if I dig deeper I might find something more," Ms Mathur said.
Particular similarities between the accents are the way that both place emphasis on the last part of word, and an elongated way of speaking that pronounces all the letters of a word.
"We tend to pronounce everything - all the consonants, all the vowels," Ms Mathur said.
"For example, if you were to pronounce 'predominantly', it would sound really similar in both because the 'r' is rolled, there is an emphasis on the 'd', and all the letters that are used to make the word can be heard.
"It's just fascinating that these things happen between people who come from such varied backgrounds."
The similarities have sometimes proved particularly tricky for actors - Pete Postlethwaite, playing an Asian criminal in the 1995 film The Usual Suspects, had his accent described by Empire magazine as "Apu from the Simpsons holidaying in Swansea".
Proto-European language
But not only the two languages' accents share notable common features - their vocabularies do too.
'Apu from the Simpsons holidaying in Swansea' or Pete Postlethwaite? Ms Mathur's own research on basic words, such as the numbers one to 10, found that many were similar - "seven", for example, is "saith" in Welsh, "saat" in Hindi.
"These kind of things really struck me," she said.
"When I reached number nine they were exactly the same - it's 'naw' - and I thought there had to be more to it than sheer coincidence."
She later spoke to professor Colin Williams of Cardiff University's School Of Welsh, who specialises in comparative languages.
He suggested that the similarities are because they come from the same mother language - the proto-European language.
"It was basically the mother language to Celtic, Latin, and Sanskrit," Ms Mathur added.
"So basically that's where this link originates from."
Ms Mathur noticed the similarities after moving to BBC Radio Wales
Sonia Mathur
"We tend to pronounce everything - all the consonants, all the vowels."
'Apu from the Simpsons holidaying in Swansea' or Pete Postlethwaite?
Looks like another potential confirmation of the Milesian Legends, to me.
British DNA is very old and has been there for a long time.
"Now Stephen Oppenheimer’s groundbreaking genetic research has revealed that the ‘Anglo-Saxon invasion’ contributed only a tiny fraction to the English gene pool. In fact, three quarters of English people can trace an unbroken line of genetic descent through their parental genes from settlers arriving long before the introduction of farming."
My dad's mother (Mrs Smith) is related to this (Cheddar Man) 9,000 year old skeleton.
The Welsh accent is now imbedded in the tongues of those Indians for whom English is a first-langauge (and there are tens of millions of such folks).
I doubt it.
Many of India’s royal families, who’ve been tutored by Englishmen, also have similar accents.
Besides, the article speaks of other similarities, too.
Of course ~ all the Indo-European languages derive from the same sources. Even Englisha and Russian share the same sounds but they use them in different ways ~ but the Welsh predominance in the colonial service AND as English teachers in India is nothing to be sniffed at.
Knowing Hindi, I can see the Indian accent following the pronunciation allowed by the sounds of the Hindi alphabet.
The fact is, there is no single Indian accent- the accents change from north to south, east to west, and all tend to reflect the language used in the region concerned.
For example, it's hard to get the 'Ae' sound in the word 'apple' using the Devanagiri script.
Interestingly, it's easier to compose English words in Hindi with American accent-like sounds, than it is, with the British accent, for many words.
Our accents are far closer to those of Wales than to UK.
Look, Wales was a desperately poor country during the glory days of the Raj. Welshmen found themselves faced with working in the mines, milking cows or going to India.
They went to India.
What’s the haplogroup in question?
I am haplessly inadequate in reply. Perhaps blam can spare you a gene.
Y-chromosome DNA :
Y-Chromosome DNA Y-DNA represents the male lineage, The Indian Y-chromosome pool may be summarized as follows where haplogroups R1a, H, R2, L & NOP comprise generally more than 80% of the total chromosomes.[3]
H ~ 30% R2 ~ 15%
L ~ 10%
NOP ~ 10%
Other Haplogroups 15%
Mitochondrial DNA :
Mitochondrial DNA mtDNA represents the female lineage The Indian mitochondrial DNA which is primarily made up of Haplogroup M [4]
Haplogroup M ~ 60%
Haplogroup UK ~ 15%
Haplogroup N ~ 25% (Excluding UK)
(The most common mtDNA is Europe is haplogroup 'H'. The most common yDNA in Europe is R1b.)
At about 70% each.
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Thanks decimon. My great-great-grandma's family came from Wales... |
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