Posted on 06/14/2013 7:16:26 AM PDT by James C. Bennett
LONDON: Prince William, second-in-line to the throne, will be first British king with proven Indian ancestry, DNA analysis has revealed.
The DNA analysis of saliva samples taken from the Duke of Cambridge's relatives have established a direct lineage between the 30-year-old prince and an Indian housekeeper on his mother Princess Diana's side.
It is his only non-European DNA and means he will become the first head of the Commonwealth with a clear genetic link to its most populous nation - India.
William is now likely to be encouraged to make his debut mission to India soon after the birth of his baby next month.
Researchers have uncovered the details of his lineage via a doomed relationship of William's Indian great-great-great-great-great grandmother.
Eliza Kewark was housekeeper to Prince William's great grandfather Theodore Forbes (1788-1820), a Scottish merchant who worked for the East India Company in the port town of Surat in Gujarat.
Eliza's mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) was passed on by her daughters and granddaughters directly in an unbroken line to Princess Diana and then on to Prince William and Prince Harry.
Eliza is claimed to have been Armenian, possibly because her surname is rather like the Armenian name Kevork and letters from her to Forbes have been found which contain Armenian script.
This in turn suggests a degree of Armenian cultural heritage and the possibility that her father may have been of Armenian descent.
"But we believe that all the evidence we have gathered shows that her genetic heritage through her motherline is Indian," Britains DNA, a DNA ancestry testing company, said in a release.
"Princes William and Harry carry Eliza Kewark's markers but will not pass this Indian mtDNA onto their children, as mtDNA is only passed from mother to child," it added.
Jim Wilson, a genetics expert at the University of Edinburgh and Britains DNA who carried out the tests, said that Eliza's descendants had an incredibly rare type of mtDNA, inherited only from a mother.
It has so far been recorded in only 14 other people, 13 Indian and one Nepalese.
The revelation explains why the Scottish father of Eliza's children suddenly deserted her and sent their daughter, Katherine, to Britain at the age of six
“All this DNA testing in a way is messing up natural selection.”
It also points out how ridiculous Affirmative Action is. Where does it end? Go back far enough and everybody has been wronged. Racial purity? Everybody is a cousin, some more distant than others.
I bet there are a lot of disappointed Indians out there.
Not to hi-jack the thread, but ok, yes, I am. What is the Hemmings hoax?
I sort of assumed that the Hemmings descendants having the Jefferson DNA was set in stone?
“You sure you’re not Pintinjarra tribe? “
Read about St. Gildas someday. He preached Ahemsa (a Jain doctrine) and came from beyond the wall (Hadrian’s Wall). There may well have been an Indian ‘mission’ there during the 6th century AD.
No, we’re the Fukawi Tribe, mate..............
It is, the same way the JFK assassination is set in stone.
Searching for the Welsh-Hindi link
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1363051/posts
BBC ^ | Monday, 14 March, 2005, 10:31 GMT | BBC
Posted on 03/15/2005 2:58:17 AM PST
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.”
Odds are good that both Yassir Arafat and Jesus had that same Y-chromosome!
They have 7-elevens all over the planet.
My buddy’s son spent a semester in Denmark and he
ate there every day, as it was about the only place
he could afford.
“...Sally Hemmings did father some Jefferson children.”
Hey, now this is REALLY getting complicated!!!
dot or feather?
Well yes, Welsh and the other Celtic languages are related to the languages derived from Sanskrit—they are all Indo-European languages, descended from “Proto-Indo-European” (not “proto-European”). Some languages are more conservative in preserving old features than others. Lithuanian is thought to be the most like PIE of all the living members of the I-E family.
DNA testing on Obama.....perfect. Go for it.
Okay, what movie?
IIRC, Lithuanian dictionaries use Sanskrit for etymology / word roots.
Thank you, I’ll give it a look.
Umm.....who cares? People should be judged on what they are and do, not on their ancestry. We’re all descended from Adam anyway.
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