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I don't know. If I'd paid for this subscription only to find I get to read 6 more short paragraphs I'd be pretty annoyed.
These online subscriptions just do not make sense if you don't want to read everything they've ever written. And it's the price of a book every month!
I'm not a subscriber so I'm not arguing it is or isn't worth paying for, but calling a site-wide subscription bad value based on the length of a single article is clearly missing the point, they're not expecting anyone to pay for a single article (even if you might think there ought to be a single article option).
Beer is læne: you never actually hold it in perpetuity; your possession is but ephemeral.
You rent it.
You buy the beer, you rent the glass and the barstool you sit at to consume it.
No you only rent the beer. You will almost certainly return most of it to where you "bought" it, in a slightly changed state.
Nevertheless, you’ll take the spirits with you.
In dutch, we use "lenen", very similair.
aha, the contemporary english cognate would then be 'loan'.
I thought the word looked familiar, and wiktionary says it comes from old Norse. In Swedish today it would probably be "låna"
Ah, hence also German Lehen ('fiefdom'). Oh, how I love Proto-Germanic!
I’m always fascinated by languages. As a native English speaker fluent in other languages but not any Germanic languages beyond basic vocabulary, this comment piqued my interest.
> I love Proto-Germanic
Is there something specific (aside from noticing these kinds of similarities in vocabulary) you love about proto-Germanic? Maybe its syntax, or grammar? Or sounds?
Mostly the similarities in vocabulary - it's exciting to be able to reconstruct what could may been spoken thousands of years ago by noticing the links between present-day languages! But I also like the case system, mostly because it feels like English has lost something of its poetic utility by dispensing with it. To expand on that, with cases, you can allude to the relationship between a thing and a situation without actually specifying what that relationship is, leaving something up to the reader's imagination.
What is that large, long-legged, ostrich-like bird in the painting? Was there a now-extinct bird like that in Anglo-Saxon England, or did people keep ostriches or emus or something like them?
An ostrich or a crane: https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/555039/view
I'd say a crane is a pretty good guess though, given it's a falconry picture; Wikipedia says
> The common crane (Grus grus) is generally believed to have been a breeding bird in Britain in the Middle Ages. English people prized cranes as the "noblest quarry" for a falconer, and gladly ate them. In December 1212 King John flew his gyrfalcons at cranes at Ashwell, in Cambridgeshire, and killed seven, and on another occasion in Lincolnshire in February 1213 he brought down nine.
I want to know what happened to the cranes - you'd think a few would escape and survive in the wild. Were they all hunted, or did the environment of Britain become somehow completely unsuitable for them between the middle ages and now? Relevant reading lists welcome :)
Historic crane populations crashed due to hunting and then loss of habitat as wetlands were drained and agriculture and housing expanded etc. Today you can find cranes in the wild in Norfolk, Suffolk and the Fens district which are all regions with sizeable wetland habitats due to active protection and reintroduction programs. There are small groups of other breeding pairs elsewhere in the UK as well. See following for a quick backgrounder:
https://www.rspb.org.uk/whats-happening/news/the-great-crane...
I think it's a common crane https://ebird.org/species/comcra?siteLanguage=en_GB
The ostrich seems plausible to me. It is mentioned briefly twice in the Old Testament (Job 39:13 and Lamentations 4:3), and considering that publishing was almost exclusively done by the Church at this time, I presume that the illustrators would have been familiar with it. The Bible doesn't given any description however, so there must have been another source if it is indeed an ostrich.
I went down a related rabbit hole recently after realizing based on a passage in don quixote that all of the characters (and the reader!) were assumed to be familiar with the size and general appearance of an ostrich.
DQ was written in like 1600 but based on chivalric romances from 200-400 years earlier, where it turns out ostriches also come up from time to time, even in heraldry of some characters.
Basically what I came to is that southern europe of that time had a high degree of exchange with other mediterranean cultures including asia minor and northern africa where ostriches were present. And these seafaring cultural and trade spheres also extended into nothern europe and the british isles.
So ultimately I don't think they were going off the bible for it. It's no more unusual than someone from that area being aware of lions or crocodiles and their general appearance. It would probably be very unusual to have seen one, but they would appear in puppet shows and travelers tales for sure. Literate people may have seen them in manuscript illuminations as well.
> Basically what I came to is that southern europe of that time had a high degree of exchange with other mediterranean cultures
There were people in England in Anglo-Saxon times. who had been as far away as Alexandria, or Constantinople.
Icelandic sagas in the late 1000s, wrote about William the Conqueror in England, and noted that many of the surviving Anglo-Saxon nobles fled to Byzantium. So, even in Iceland they knew about Constantinople, and probably ostriches too, and that these were real things and places, which you might travel and see, even if they were basically at the other end of the known world. At the other end of the world, Byzantine records mention Anglo-Saxon warriors being recruited at that time.
People got around even back then.
The Egyptians domesticated the ostrich and it has been familiar to Mediterranean civilization since. England was part of the Roman world just a few hundred years before the period in question. At that time at least, there were lions in London's zoos and gladiatorial games. I don't know of records to this effect, but there might even have been been ostriches - a favourite animal to import for the games elsewhere in the empire.
It's much less likely there were live ostriches in Anglo-Saxon times but the rich have always enjoyed mangeries and exotic animals. I wouldn't be surprised. And there would be traveller accounts and stories, increasingly mythical to be fair, as large population movements from places where people had actually seen them declined in the post-Roman era.
> England was part of the Roman world just a few hundred years before the period in question.
England was never part of the roman world. It was the collapse of the roman world that allowed the anglo-saxons to settle and create england. England was a post-roman world creation. Heck it was part of the destruction crew of the roman world.
The comment you are replying to likely meant Britain, not England.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Britain
USAmericans tend to say "England" interchangably with "United Kingdom", "Great Britain", and "The British Isles". Possibly more.
While I'm far from a professional, I'd rule out emu being known to Anglo-Saxons. As for ostrich, seems far more plausible of the two. Not that ostriches were indigenous to any part of Europe, but they were at least known to them through trade. Emu would just be far-fetched, I think.
An ostrich from travellers descriptions?
Possibly peafowl? They were kept in medieval England. There is some bright decoration on the head. The head and legs are too long, but other things in the picture are not to scale either.
Reminds me of the Buddhist idea of impermanence; psychologically important in an unstable world
That has to be the best paywall I've ever seen
Yeah, interesting idea. You either pay up or read it in Latin..
Are the germans the originnal eueropeans
No. The prehistoric Indo-Europeans appear to have had no words for the ocean, or ships, or other such things. Or if they did have words for these things, their descendant cultures did not inherit them. This, and many other clues, suggest they originated on the central Eurasian plains. Don't need a word for ocean if you've never seen one.
The Germanic languages are a branch of Indo-European, and this offshoot shares common words for those sea-related things, and also words for many dozens of species of plants and animals (all the tree species, for example, native to the region.) These words have similar properties, and were almost certainly borrowed from an earlier, unrelated culture already living there.
The Basque today speak a language, that, before Roman times, seems to have been spoken all across Spain; it's probably the only remaining relic of what was once hundreds of distinct cultures that existed in Europe, in the neolithic era, before the Indo-Europeans.
> The Basque today speak a language, that, before Roman times, seems to have been spoken all across Spain; it's probably the only remaining relic of what was once hundreds of distinct cultures that existed in Europe, in the neolithic era, before the Indo-Europeans.
I don't think that a piece of land the size of the Iberic Penninsula could have spoken a single language in prehistory. Even in the modern day, in places that didn't have a concerted effort to impose a single language, we see a huge diversity. Dagestan for example has 14 different official languages, in a region with 3 million people, and an area almost half the size of Portugal.
Even in the Italian peninsula in the times of Caesar, there were at least 4 major languages spoken - Latin, Umbrian, Venetic, and Etruscan (which is not even indo-European).
The question makes not much sense because the concept of "original Europeans" oversimplifies the complex history of human migration and settlement across the continent.
Europe has been inhabited by various groups of people over hundreds of thousands of years, starting from early human ancestors like Homo erectus, followed by Neanderthals, and eventually Homo sapiens. The idea of a singular "original" group of Europeans doesn't align with our understanding of prehistoric migrations and the genetic mixing that occurred over time.
Modern populations, including Germans, are the result of these extensive, multi-directional movements and interactions, making any one group not "original" but rather a product of ongoing historical processes.
There are Germans, Slavs (although Slavs might be a Germanic subpeople?), Celts, the pre-Roman peoples in the Iberian Peninsula (they still exist in Spain IIRC), the Romans and the Greeks. Possibly the Finnish and the Hungarians as well? All are white of course. IIRC European has 50k years of breeding only with Europeans, separating them from the rest of the world (Africa, Asia, etc.).
> All are white of course. IIRC European has 50k years of breeding only with Europeans, separating them from the rest of the world (Africa, Asia, etc.).
Uhhh, no. Europe as we know it today is primarily a tripartite congregation of its first hunter-gatherers (such as Cheddar Man), Proto-Indo-European pastoralists from around the Caspian, and agriculturalists from Anatolia and the Levant, with further minor contributions from Central and North Asian peoples such as the Magyars, Huns, and the people who would give the Finnish the language they speak (Finnish not at all being an Indo-European language but an Uralic language, having a Siberian origin). Their varying combinations were only established within the last 4 - 8K years.
How did Europeans become white if other IndoEuropeans are brown?
Slavs call Germanic people “njemac”. It means “mute” as in “people who can’t speak our language”. I’m sure they’re distantly related (Europeans, duh), but I don’t think there’s any direct cultural relation enough to call them “Germanic subpeople”.
Germans are not even the original Germans.
The history of Europe is fascinating. I think there's not a single "country" today whose ethnicity was not almost entirely replaced with another in the last 10,000 years.
EDIT: I think even 2,000 years is enough.
I don't know much about this stuff but I think Wales and Ireland might be confounding examples here for your 2000-year example
Both had their language replaced (or taken away) but the people are still Celts going back to the Beaker culture, aren't they?
Of course it does help to be on the far edge of Europe
No