This is probably not really a thing, but have you ever found that you’ve taken to something from your ethnic background like a fish takes to water? For example, in spring of 2010 my husband and I took a lovely trip to Germany, Denmark, and Austria. And I found German, as a language, really easy to pick up, to the point where I could carry on basic conversations on a number of topics despite never having learned or spoken any German before in my life.
(And then we came home and I forgot it all.)
It may be that because English and German are directly related that German is, in general, an easy language for English-speakers to pick up. I am certainly not naturally attuned to pick up other languages–I took six years of Spanish in middle and high school and still failed the AP Spanish test the first time I took it.
Sometimes, when I feel the need to make my head hurt, I sit around and ponder things like nationality and ethnicity. Like, how long do you have to live in a country before you become a whatever-ian? Why do we in America insist on labels like Irish-American or Japanese-American instead of just “American”? How much of ethnic diversity is real as opposed to imagined?
(That last one could probably be answered by someone who understands genetics, but biology has never really been a strong subject for me.)
I, like many of us, I suspect, am a conglomeration of many different ethnicities. Starting from highest percentage, I am Scottish, German, English, Dutch, and Danish. (And possibly a little Irish. That branch of the family were horse thieves and didn’t leave clear genealogical records.) And sometimes I feel like I should be better in touch with my…ethnicity, I guess? Like I should better understand the cultures that I came from.
(This is also where I get bogged down in the above questions. For example, a subset of my Scottish ancestors came across with William the Conqueror from Normandy, which was settled by Vikings at some point before that, so do those ancestors truly count as Scottish if their ancestors came from Scandinavia?)
And we talked about mythology a lot here, Squiders, but I feel bad because I’ve never spent a lot of time delving into Celtic or Anglo-Saxon mythology (aside from, say, Arthurian mythology which probably counts to some degree, though it gets commandeered later by–RIGHT, staying on topic). And shouldn’t I, at some point? Shouldn’t I know what my ancestors believed in, especially since I’ve spent so much time researching other mythologies?
It may be because I’m a fantasy author and I like such things, but it almost seems like those mythologies are my birthright.
