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English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh


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Can you tell them apart? I don't mean by accent or culture. I mean by general physical appearance, and I'm referring to just individuals with deep ancestral roots. It's my understanding that people tend to have darker hair in the western regions of the four countries that I mentioned.

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When I was living down in Vancouver 25 years ago, there was the WISE club. That being; Welsh, Irish, Scottish, English Club. I've also been to the islands twice since 1977.

Darker hair? No. You can't tell them apart, unless they want you to.

eta: I was in a pub in Wales and was listening to two drunk guys speaking Welsh and an English speaking Welshman assured me that they didn't understand what the hell they were talking about either.

Edited by Likely Guy
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There's an online quizzie.... Hmm, let me see if I can find it.

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http://www.thejapang...-chinese-faces/

Cannot find the exact one I was thinking of. It specifically asked if you could pick out all the Japanese people in the quiz, and given all the time I've spent there, I failed it miserably.

This is like that. The blood is mixed over millenia, and the roots of all these people, is probably one place, eons back.

PS, this one is easy to tell who is what actually.

Edited by Simbi Laveau
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I guessed correctly on the men but switched Chinese for Korean on the women. I've always had the opinion that among Asian women the Japanese are the most attractive.

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The only ones i can think is redheads, Irish or Scotish

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Can you tell them apart?

No. By their accents, yes, but not by their looks.

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I'm genetically all of the above (English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh) plus a bit of Dutch. I'm kind of tall and have dark hair with reddish highlights and blue eyes. I have a horrible NE American accent. Here in America such mixing is the norm.

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My experience is that there are some definite Irish racial "types" which are common throughout Ireland but extremely rare in the rest of the UK. Fergil Sharkey fits a particular Irish type which I refer to as the sunken face. Then there is a particular heavy set farmer type which is quite widespread over here. Also there is the "Galway girl" look. Most of the more specific Irish types are to be found out to the west which was culturally isolated for the longest. I think there are also Welsh types.

Genetically many populations in Ireland have locally specific genes which date back thousands of years - so it is not unreasonable to make the assertion that there are specific Irish phenotypes. The Uk has a much more mixed population due to its cultural history so i would not expect to find many localized phenotypes.

Br Cornelius

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Can you tell them apart? I don't mean by accent or culture. I mean by general physical appearance, and I'm referring to just individuals with deep ancestral roots. It's my understanding that people tend to have darker hair in the western regions of the four countries that I mentioned.

Yes you can tell them apart.

1st line: These are Welsh. They most commonly have dark hair, dark eyes, pointy faces and are short.

2nd line: These are Irish. They most commonly have red or brown hair, green or blue eyes, even more pointy faces, freckles and are tall.

3rd line: These are Scots. They most commonly have red, blonde or brown hair, green or blue eyes, square heads and are short.

4th line. These are English. They most commonly have blonde or brown hair, green or blue eyes, pointy faces (like the Welsh), freckles and are tall.

With the UK and British Empire existing or lasting for centuries a lot of people throughout the British Isles and Ireland are a mix of some or even all four.

post-147989-0-42175400-1400931429_thumb.

Edited by RabidMongoose
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No you can't tell them apart except their accents.

Not all Scots and Irish are 100% Celtic, there are Germanic and Scandinavian admixtures too amongst them.

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When I was living down in Vancouver 25 years ago, there was the WISE club. That being; Welsh, Irish, Scottish, English Club. I've also been to the islands twice since 1977.

Darker hair? No. You can't tell them apart, unless they want you to.

eta: I was in a pub in Wales and was listening to two drunk guys speaking Welsh and an English speaking Welshman assured me that they didn't understand what the hell they were talking about either.

Are you kidding about the WISE club? If not, I'd like a membership. Both my dad and my mom are/were of WISE descent. Of course, there are other ethnicities in the mix.

I always heard and read that there were more brunettes in the western regions of the Isles while there were more blondes in the eastern regions of the Isles. Your experience showed that might be overstated. I also read that people, in some parts of Wales, had darker features than people from other countries in the Isles. Evidently, brown eyes are more common there.

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The only ones i can think is redheads, Irish or Scotish

There are more redheads there, but I think that brown to dark brown is the most common hair color in the "Gaelic" regions of those countries. There are plenty of English and Welsh redheads too.

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Yes you can tell them apart.

1st line: These are Welsh. They most commonly have dark hair, dark eyes, pointy faces and are short.

2nd line: These are Irish. They most commonly have red or brown hair, green or blue eyes, even more pointy faces, freckles and are tall.

3rd line: These are Scots. They most commonly have red, blonde or brown hair, green or blue eyes, square heads and are short.

4th line. These are English. They most commonly have blonde or brown hair, green or blue eyes, pointy faces (like the Welsh), freckles and are tall.

With the UK and British Empire existing or lasting for centuries a lot of people throughout the British Isles and Ireland are a mix of some or even all four.

Catherine Zeta Jones is half Irish. Matt Damon is more Swedish than Irish. John Wayne was Scots-Irish, and he was huge, as was his great-nephew, Tommy Morrison (Scottish surname). Beckham is half Jewish. :)

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My experience is that there are some definite Irish racial "types" which are common throughout Ireland but extremely rare in the rest of the UK. Fergil Sharkey fits a particular Irish type which I refer to as the sunken face. Then there is a particular heavy set farmer type which is quite widespread over here. Also there is the "Galway girl" look. Most of the more specific Irish types are to be found out to the west which was culturally isolated for the longest. I think there are also Welsh types.

Genetically many populations in Ireland have locally specific genes which date back thousands of years - so it is not unreasonable to make the assertion that there are specific Irish phenotypes. The Uk has a much more mixed population due to its cultural history so i would not expect to find many localized phenotypes.

Br Cornelius

I noticed the same thing. There was less mixing in the western fringes, which kept the original inhabitants' genes more true to their forebears. Maybe that accounts for the Galway girl you mention. Barry Fitzgerald and Brendan Gleason come to mind when I think about unique rural Irish types.

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No you can't tell them apart except their accents.

Not all Scots and Irish are 100% Celtic, there are Germanic and Scandinavian admixtures too amongst them.

The "Celts" aren't really "Celtic". That has more to do with culture and language than ethnicity. The "real Celts" lived in central Europe, as well as Gaul. Most Isles people can trace back to the groups that arrived there before the time of Caesar's campaigns.

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Well France should liberate Brittany and Corsica; Spain should liberate Catalonia; China should liberate Xinjiang and Tibet and Taiwan (officially), the States should liberate Puerto Rico, Indonesia should be divided into about a dozen states, as should Russia and India, and even Bavaria would be better off independent. I have no idea what might be done with the Basques.

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Not sure how you can tell with any degree of accuracy. The Phonetians carried their dna throughout the Mediterranean and traveled to South Wales to trade copper and gold. They left their east Mediterranean mark throughout the area. You can see some similarities even today.

I'm Welsh and have traced my fathers side back to the 16th century. My mother was Welsh and that goes back several generations until you reach ancestors in Wiltshire. I have traced this line back to before the invasion by William of Normandy and I had links to French settlers in Worcestershire before 1000. ad Now heres the interesting bit. Two of my children were born in Plymouth, a Welsh father and a mother half Indian and half Czech and Jewish. My youngest son is half welsh his mother is Irish but she is descended from parents born in the Republic of Ireland, one in Donegal and one in Dublin but they were all Protestant obviously descended from English settlers some time over several centuries ago.

Lot of ginger hair in Northern Ireland but also a lot of Scots immigration as well as English and some Welsh. Welsh names, Morgan captains England cricket teams born in Dublin, Johnny Evans plays for NI born in Belfast, Aaron Hughes born in Cookstown.

So if we could stop the interbeeding and the moving around we might get a fix on where we all come from and what we look like.

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Languages are one thing, dna is another. Cultures sometimes change their language but not the dna. Celtic is the name of a family of languages, a subdivision of the Indo-European family. It was widely spoken in Gaul until the Romans came and the population switched to Latin, another Indo-European family language that in the middle ages evolved into French, with a little Frankish (a Germanic language) influence. The basic population stayed pretty much the same all the time.

Ireland is more difficult; whether there was a Celtic invasion displacing earlier peoples or the earlier peoples adopted Celtic for other reasons (similar to the reasons they adopted Latin in Gaul) is not known, but there does not seem to have been any major racial change.

The switch in England to Anglo-Saxon was more a racial replacement, with the then Latin-speaking Britons being largely displaced or killed, although no doubt some survived by adopting the new tongue.

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There is lots of Scandinavian influence in England, I carry the Scandinavian look despite my mothers Irish/Scottish ancestry and this comes from my father ancestors who were part of the Viking invasions which controlled much of Northern England for centuries. I would still say that there are distinctly English characteristics - but they are much harder to tease out of the interbred mix.

Br Cornelius

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Not sure how you can tell with any degree of accuracy. The Phonetians carried their dna throughout the Mediterranean and traveled to South Wales to trade copper and gold. They left their east Mediterranean mark throughout the area. You can see some similarities even today.

I'm Welsh and have traced my fathers side back to the 16th century. My mother was Welsh and that goes back several generations until you reach ancestors in Wiltshire. I have traced this line back to before the invasion by William of Normandy and I had links to French settlers in Worcestershire before 1000. ad Now heres the interesting bit. Two of my children were born in Plymouth, a Welsh father and a mother half Indian and half Czech and Jewish. My youngest son is half welsh his mother is Irish but she is descended from parents born in the Republic of Ireland, one in Donegal and one in Dublin but they were all Protestant obviously descended from English settlers some time over several centuries ago.

Lot of ginger hair in Northern Ireland but also a lot of Scots immigration as well as English and some Welsh. Welsh names, Morgan captains England cricket teams born in Dublin, Johnny Evans plays for NI born in Belfast, Aaron Hughes born in Cookstown.

So if we could stop the interbeeding and the moving around we might get a fix on where we all come from and what we look like.

Do you think that the Phoenicians impacted the genotypes and phenotypes of the Welsh as much as the Scandinavians impacted those of the Yorkshiremen? The Phoenicians acquired tin from Wales, but I'm not sure how much genetic influence they had. They likely had some impact. Some of my Welsh ancestors were E3b, which could have originated in various areas. Phoenicia was one of them. Some people speculated that it came from Jews or Roman soldiers. By the way, I found two of your Welsh surnames in my own lines. All four of my grandparents had Welsh ancestors. It's likely that there are many more Americans of Welsh descent than the census would show, especially in the Midwest and Upper South. Many Welsh Quakers, like Daniel Boone's mom, lived in those regions.

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Languages are one thing, dna is another. Cultures sometimes change their language but not the dna. Celtic is the name of a family of languages, a subdivision of the Indo-European family. It was widely spoken in Gaul until the Romans came and the population switched to Latin, another Indo-European family language that in the middle ages evolved into French, with a little Frankish (a Germanic language) influence. The basic population stayed pretty much the same all the time.

Ireland is more difficult; whether there was a Celtic invasion displacing earlier peoples or the earlier peoples adopted Celtic for other reasons (similar to the reasons they adopted Latin in Gaul) is not known, but there does not seem to have been any major racial change.

The switch in England to Anglo-Saxon was more a racial replacement, with the then Latin-speaking Britons being largely displaced or killed, although no doubt some survived by adopting the new tongue.

You're quite right, Frank. I use "Celt" and "Celtic" as shorthand because most people do. They understand what I mean when I use those terms. They make communicating easier, and they have a life of their own. There probably weren't a lot of Gauls in Ireland, but there were shared cultural and linguistic components. The Gaels spoke Q Celtic while the Britons spoke P Celtic, but they shared a common ethnicity. It was a bit different than that of the Gauls. Some Germanic tribes were close to them too in that all three groups were in the R1b family.

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There is lots of Scandinavian influence in England, I carry the Scandinavian look despite my mothers Irish/Scottish ancestry and this comes from my father ancestors who were part of the Viking invasions which controlled much of Northern England for centuries. I would still say that there are distinctly English characteristics - but they are much harder to tease out of the interbred mix.

Br Cornelius

I wrongly guessed that you were fully Irish. I likely have some Viking blood too since I can trace back to Norfolk and Yorkshire, as well as other parts of the Isles in which Vikings settled. The Scandinavian invaders were quite related to the earlier Germanic invaders so they were hard to distinguish by just physical appearance. Northern Germans look more like Swedes than Bavarians.

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Its interesting stuff all this. Recent genetic studies have shown that in large parts of the UK and Ireland genetic tracers can be very localized and go back for thousands of years. We only really left the Feudal period in the 1800's and that meant that most rural populations were effectively indentured to a landlord. This meant social mobility was extremely limited and families could exist in a location for thousands of years. In light of this it is not surprising that there are distinct local traits even in the highly socially mobile UK of today.

I think the only people who cannot see this are people who live in the major cities where the concept of belonging to place was swept away over a hundred years ago and the very notion of regionality in its true sense is alien.

Br Cornelius

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Catherine Zeta Jones is half Irish. Matt Damon is more Swedish than Irish. John Wayne was Scots-Irish, and he was huge, as was his great-nephew, Tommy Morrison (Scottish surname). Beckham is half Jewish. :)

Catherine Zeta Jones is not half Irish her mother is. David Beckham is not half Jewish he has one Jewish Grandad. Your comments on Matt Demon aren't correct either, he is one quarter Swedish. In the photos I posted that show what people from each country look like even though some of them aren't 100% English, 100% Irish, etc, their appearance is correct.

The British are not one race. Angle-Saxon-Jutes, Celts, Vikings, orginal Britons, all look different from each other.

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