User talk:NovaTabula

Bund für deutsche Schrift und Sprache
A tag has been placed on Bund für deutsche Schrift und Sprache, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a very short article providing little or no context to the reader. Please see Wikipedia:Stub for our minimum information standards for short articles. Also please note that articles must be on notable subjects and should provide references to reliable sources that verify their content.

Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself. If you plan to expand the article, you can request that administrators wait a while for you to add contextual material. To do this, affix the template   to the article and state your intention on the article's talk page. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. Monkeytheboy (talk) 21:54, 29 February 2008 (UTC) on the User Talk page of the author.

English people
Please don't make racialist edits in the article, as you did here. There's clearly no precedent to use the word "race" when discussing ethnic or national identity. The term "race" is misleading and confusing. We need to express ethnicity and nationhood in normal anthropological terms, ie identity and the perception of common origins through creation myths. Also what is the evidence that recent immigrants to England have "lost connections to foreign ancestry"? What does it mean? We're talking about identity and not ancestry, there are many people in England that identify as English who are perfectly aware of their non-English roots. If you want to make controversial edits to this article then I suggest you discuss them on the talk page initially in order to estimate the level of support from editors of the article. Thanks. Alun (talk) 16:12, 13 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Actually I didn't say it was racism, I said it was racialism, there is a difference. The concept of "race" is confusing, it means different things to different people. For example to a biologist "race" may be considered a valid taxonomic unit equivalent to subspecies, but anthropologists and biologists agree that human populations are far too similar for this taxon to be applied to any human group. On the other hand folk concepts of "race" tend to vary significantly from group to group, and do not conform to any well defined population category. Besides the dictionary definition you give contradicts your edit, the definition you give is "a group of persons related by common descent or heredity", but this clearly doesn't apply to English people, and the article makes no such claim. The article states explicitly in the lead that English people have many and varied origins "Brythons (including Romano-Britons), Anglo-Saxons, Danish Vikings, Bretons[7], and Normans. More recent migrations to England include peoples from a variety of different regions of Great Britain and Ireland and many other countries, mostly from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Commonwealth countries", and that many of the people who identify as English have ancestry from distant parts of the world, for example India, Pakistan, Africa, the West Indies, the Near East, the Far East etc. Even the section you changed the name for states that English people have many and varied origins. The closest one could argue for a "racial" myth  is the so called "Anglo-Saxon" migration. If this were a "true" event then it would imply that English people are all descended from a specific endogamous group that migrated en mass to the island of Great Britain sometime during late antiquity. Although this myth is important for English collective identity, it is, like all such creation myths for ethnic groups or nations, just that, a myth, and the English people article gives a great deal of evidence to show that this is mythology. I really do think we need to avoid the discredited and dubious language of "race" when we discuss ethnicity. Reliable anthropologists tell us that ethnic groups are social constructs, they are not biological groups, and we all need to be aware of this when we edit these articles. Indeed anthropology shows us that any all "racial" concepts are dubious and are socially constructed. Alun (talk) 11:44, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

File copyright problem with File:586px-Knowledge English EU map.png
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