A depiction of early man for The Story of Wales series
Posted on 06/20/2012 5:01:13 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Professor Peter Donnelly, of Oxford University, said the Welsh carry DNA which could be traced back to the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago.
The project surveyed 2,000 people in rural areas across Britain.
Participants, as well as their parents and grandparents, had to be born in those areas to be included in the study.
Prof Donnelly, a professor of statistical science at Oxford University and director of the Wellcome Trust centre for human genetics, said DNA samples were analysed at about 500,000 different points.
After comparing statistics, a map was compiled which showed Wales and Cornwall stood out.
Prof Donnelly said: "People from Wales are genetically relatively distinct, they look different genetically from much of the rest of mainland Britain, and actually people in north Wales look relatively distinct from people in south Wales."
While there were traces of migrant groups across the UK, there were fewer in Wales and Cornwall.
He said people from south and north Wales genetically have "fairly large similarities with the ancestry of people from Ireland on the one hand and France on the other, which we think is most likely to be a combination of remnants of very ancient populations who moved across into Britain after the last Ice Age.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
A depiction of early man for The Story of Wales series
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It would explain the accent :-)
hasn’t it been dogma that the welsh are Britons pushed into the mountains by the anglo-saxon invaders?
I’m still shaking my head over the study in England a couple of years ago that identified a direct descendent of Chedderman. I just find that amazing.
Very enjoyable movie that gets into that a bit:
Well, Tom Jones did have an Afro.
Yes, but before that, the Welsh may have been the indigenous Europeans who were on the island at the time the Celts migrated there. Those populations are still present in Europe genetically, although their languages are dead except for Basque.
True, but it has also been conventional wisdom that the Welsh are Celts that arrived sometime around 500 BC and that there were others there before that that built Stonehenge, which was built around 2500 BC. Turns out the Welsh built Stonehenge.
I LOVE hearing Welsh people speak!
That’s a really CUTE movie!
perhaps they are the ancestors of the Amerindians if there is any truth to the Salutrean hypothesis
perhaps they are the ancestors of the Amerindians if there is any truth to the Salutrean hypothesis
Saint Gildas (who had 20 brothers, a typical jain way of describing it) has a name that means JOYFUL SERVANT in Sanskrit ~ and probably the Gujarat equivalent of Hindi at the time.
There are others.
Gildas taught a particularly rigorous type of pacifism called AHEMSA.
I"m sure everybody's read everything there is about this fellow.
I was watching a sheepdog trial from Wales on RFDTV one day. The announcer mentioned that today, 23 of our 26 contestants have the last name of Jones.
Thanks for posting this interesting article, SunkenCiv!
Monday, 14 March, 2005, 10:31 GMT | BBC
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1363051/posts
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
"We tend to pronounce everything - all the consonants, all the vowels."
Sonia Mathur
'Apu from the Simpsons holidaying in Swansea' or Pete Postlethwaite?
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