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A comment on The Ainu, Japan’s Indigenous People. Parent comment

Re:The Ainu, Japan’s Indigenous People by h0l0cube on Saturday May 23, 2020 @09:41PM (#23288343)
Genocide isn't required to fundamentally transform or extinguish a culture. My knowledge of the history of the British isles is vague, but English culture has been heavily shaped by foreign occupation.

One example, large portion of words (~30%) are have either French roots, quite likely due to the Norman invasion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_England

And I believe several successive Roman conquests, spanning over a century, also left a significant imprint on the indigenous populations of Britain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_conquest_of_Britain

I believe there's a couple of Hardcore history episodes about the Roman invasions that are worth a listen.

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Re:The Ainu, Japan’s Indigenous People by barry-cotter on Sunday May 24, 2020 @12:41AM (#23289150)
> And I believe several successive Roman conquests, spanning over a century, also left a significant imprint on the indigenous populations of Britain.

Well, they Christianised the Welsh and left a lot of Roman ruins and roads but that seems to have been the extent of the long term influence. As far as I’m aware there’s no real genetic imprint of four centuries of Roman rule in Britain and culturally the Anglo-Saxon invasion just wiped everything out. Roman elite culture was urban culture; the withdrawal of the Empire led to a rapid economic collapse and they were completely unable to defend themselves in the end.

We have pretty strong evidence Vulgar Latin didn’t penetrate to the peasantry too. Brittany was settled by refugees from Roman Britain and that’s a Celtic language about as similar to Cornish as Irish Gaelic and Scots Gallic.

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