This will be a tad self-indulgent not to mention long, so bear with me. Something in another thread provoked me to write it. Mercifully it is only tangentially about politics.
What sets Anglo-Saxons apart? To an extent that is not much appreciated it is their language. I appreciate and understand this more than most because French was my first language.
French is the language of passion and poetry. And yet in my humble opinion a much larger volume of great poetry has been written in the English language. Why is that? My answer is because poets writing in English have to work for it. I would draw an analogy to working with putty versus working with marble. There is a hardness and precision and rigor to working with marble. People in the Anglo-Saxon world don't really understand this, but their language shapes the way they think. In ways that give them an advantage.
In other cultures, people are keenly aware of how their language sets them apart. Not so English-speaking peoples today, probably because it has become the world's language. In the old days, the English were much more sensitive to how their language set them apart (especially in the period after the Norman conquest).
I want to show a clip of perhaps the greatest speech in modern French history.
You don't have to understand what is being said to feel the emotion. No American or Englishman (except maybe a Southerner) would ever give a speech like that. Not saying that makes Anglo-Saxons better or worse than Frenchmen. Just different.
I don't speak Arabic, but whenever I hear it being spoken it seems very French to me. In the sense that it brings the emotions very close to the surface. The Arabs are a very emotional people. Is that because of their language. Or is their language that way because of their character. Hard to say.
Within this country I find Southerners to be the least Anglo-Saxon of Americans. New Englanders are the most Anglo-Saxon and Midwesterners are somewhere in between. And some of those differences have to do with language.
There is a novelist named Julian Green who is very highly regarded in France. He wrote mostly in French. But he was a son of the South who moved to France as a young man. He made some interesting observations about affinities he saw between the people of the South and the people of France. I suspect most Southerners and most Frenchmen would reject his observations and may even be offended by them. But that doesn't mean they don't have an element of truth.
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