UKulture

England. Wales. Scotland. Ireland.


Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Vikings attacked. Only the Queen, master of all four nations, could stop them. But when the world needed her most, she vanished.


A hundred years passed and my brother and I discovered the new Queen, an American named Sam. And although his English language skills are great, he has a lot to learn before he's ready to unite anyone. But I believe Sam can save the world.


--


I am SO grateful for the opportunity to study at the BYU London Centre this year! My real-life experience with London is really quite small; I've spent two hours of my life there, on a layover during my flight over to Helsinki to serve my LDS mission. I'll attach the single picture that I have of me in England:



Not the greatest. However, in my defense, I had been awake for about twenty-four hours and still had another flight ahead of me, so I wasn't too stoked to be awake.


I've been assigned to a) create this blog and b) update it periodically, hence why it exists. Amongst my commandments in regards to this blog, today I've been told to read a "culturegram" about the United Kingdom and respond to my thoughts on it. Honestly, not much of it really jogged the ol' brain cells, but a couple things of note I'd like to address:

-


Uno: The UK speaks way more than just English.


When I was a missionary in Finland, I met a lady who was from Wales. Her first language was English, but she also knew Welsh. Welsh is not a language made up of whale calls, although I definitely seized the opportunity to act like it was (luckily, she didn't beat me up, although if she had I would've deserved it).


In fact, one of the first languages the Book of Mormon was translated into (after English, of course, and Danish, the celestial language) was Welsh. Here's the title page of the edition used by Dan Jones to convert thousands of people during his many missions to Wales:







As you can probably see, it hasn't been updated for a while (this is also the current edition). And the text definitely could resemble a whale call. (don't kill me sister jones)


Scottish Gaelic, Scots, and Irish Gaelic are also spoken within the UK, albeit sparingly. Scots is a language I hadn't heard of before serving my mission, but I was told that the Christmas song Auld Lang Syne is actually written in Scots.

-


Two: The attitude of the public appears to be more reserved than America, but not as much as Finland.


So I'm not that worried about adjusting to cultural norms, since I doubt that anywhere is colder and more reserved than Finland. Especially with the younger generation being described as much less reserved, fitting in shouldn't be a problem for me.

-


That's all for now. I've no idea how often I've got to update this blog, but it will be done.


Moikka!