Государственное образовательное учреждение
высшего профессионального образования
Самарский государственный университет
Кафедра английской филологии
Portfolio
on the subject
“British Civilization”
студента IV курса дневного отделения
исторического факультета, 24401 группы
М.Я.Мединца
САМАРА
2010
Contents
Lake District……………………………………………………3
Regional Languages in Great Britain…………………………..5
Building the Empire……………………………………………7
Edward VIII’s Abdication……………………………………...8
William Wordsworth…………………………………………..10
British Law in Brief……………………………………………11
List of sources for the reports………………………………….14
Lake District
The Lake District is a mountainous area in the north-west of England, in the county of Cumbria, and it has some of England’s most beautiful scenery. Some admiring visitors called it “A paradise of mountain scenery and magical light”. Picturesque lakes lie in deep hollows dug out by the glacier which covered Britain during the Ice Age. Green hills, herds of sheep, and solitary farms scattered here and there are typical of this remote and admirably beautiful part of England. It’s not surprising that the Lake District is England’s largest National Park.
The Lake District is approximately 34 miles (55 km) across. Its features are a result of periods of glaciations, the most recent of which ended some 10,000 years ago. These include the ice-carved wide U-shaped valleys, many of which are now filled with the lakes that give the park its name. The upper regions contain a number of glacial cirques, which are typically filled with tarns. The higher fells are rocky, with lower fells being open moorland, notable for its wide bracken and heather coverage. Below the tree line, native oak woodlands sit alongside nineteenth century pine plantations. Much of the land is often boggy, due to the high rainfall. The Lake District is one of the most highly populated national parks. Its total area is near 885 square miles (2,292 km2). The mountains of the Lake District are frequently named on maps as the "Cumbrian Mountains", although this designation is widely forgotten and the area simply referred to as "the Lake District".
Scenic highlights of the Lake District can be discovered again and again. You can find the highest peaks of England here, but the residents of Cumbria call them not ‘mountains’ but ‘fells’. The lakes, being England’s longest and deepest, are also called not lakes, but ‘waters’ and ‘meres’ (e.g., Windermere, Grasmere, Rydal Water). Small lakes are called ‘tarns’. Wild forests are inhabited with rare animals, like ospreys, red squirrels and red deer; they also provide shelter for rare and beautiful mosses and lichens. At last, you can see tremendous waterfalls amid the lakes and forests.
The Lake District, with its steep ridges and deep valleys, smooth slopes and deep lakes, ravines, waterfalls and green meadows, has always attracted poets and writers. Thomas Gray was the first to bring the region to attention, when he wrote a journal of his Grand Tour in 1769, but it was William Wordsworth whose poems were most famous and influential. Wordsworth's poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", inspired by the sight of daffodils on the shores of Ullswater, remains one of the most famous in the English language. Out of his long life of eighty years, sixty were spent amid its lakes and mountains. Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey became known as the Lake Poets. In addition to these residents or natives of the Lake District, a variety of other poets and writers made visits to the Lake District or were bound by ties of friendship with those already mentioned above. The most famous of them are Sir Walter Scott, Persy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Alfred Tennyson, and the children’s author Beatrix Potter.
The Lake District has been one of the most popular travelling routes in Great Britain since the 19th century, ever since Wordsworth wrote his “Guide to the Lakes”, having been drawn many tourists to this area. So, special care has to be taken to make sure that the beauty of the countryside is not spoiled. The people who are responsible for preserving the Lake District’s natural beauty are members of the National Trust. It is a non-governmental organization, set up in 1895 by three well-off custodians of English and Welsh country landscapes. The National Trust members, who are people of various social positions now, keep an eye on famous gardens, lakes and hills, windmills and watermills, prehistoric and Roman antiquities, abbeys, farms and whole villages. In the Lake District, many pristine pieces of land and some lakes were bought out by The Trust, as it is the most reliable way to protect them.
Windermere Lake One of the charming waterfalls
A panoramic view of Keswick, a town within the Lake District
Regional Languages in Great Britain
English is the official language of the United Kingdom and the main language spoken in the UK today. But there are languages different from English in the British Isles now. Celtic speech still survives in the British Isles, mainly in the remote parts of the country. Besides, there are one Germanic (Scots) and one Romance (Norman) regional language.
In Wales (the Welsh name of which is Cymru), Welsh is spoken today. It is estimated that a quarter of the population of Wales speaks Welsh as naturally as they do English – and there may be a few thousand people who speak Welsh only. (Compared with the percentage of the other Celtic language speakers, it is not as bad as can be seen at first sight. Almost 200,000 people speak with each other in Welsh). It is a lyrical-sounding language, but very tongue-twisting for outsiders.
In the past twenty years there have been serious measures to boost the usage of this language. Plaid Cymru, a separatist party, has been always backing them. Welsh language study has become compulsory in Welsh schools. Today both Welsh and English are official languages in Wales; it means that Welsh has equal validity with English and can be used for all official purposes, e.g. in law courts; public documents and notices are in Welsh and English. There is a TV channel broadcasting in Welsh only. Owing to those measures, the number of Welsh speakers has increased! In a few words, Welsh language is thriving today.
Unfortunately, it cannot be said about Scottish Gaelic, the native language of the Scottish people. The Scottish national identity had been persecuted in Britain for centuries. The Education (Scotland) Act 1872, which completely ignored Gaelic, and led to generations of Gaels being forbidden to speak their native language in the classroom, is now recognized as having dealt a major blow to the language. People still living can recall being beaten for speaking Gaelic in school! The state of affairs has been changed recently, after the devolution and restoring the Scottish Parliament. Gaelic-medium secondary schools are being opened now, newspapers and TV programmes are launched, but the number of speakers is still plunging. There are virtually no people in Lowlands who knew it.
Another Scottish language, which is called Scots, is getting on better. That language is close to English, many prominent writers including Robert Burns used it. It has no official status, although being used in colloquial speech and folk festivals.
Manx, the Celtic language formerly spoken in the Isle of Man, is still spoken by about a hundred people and is used in addition to English on official occasions. Cornish, also a Celtic language, was spoken in Cornwall up to the 17th century and even had its own literature, died out completely in the 18th century but is now revived (less than 1 per cent of Cornwall residents know it).
Norman is a dialect of French spoken in the Channel Islands off the French coast.
A road sign in English and Welsh Burns Supper celebration
The Cornish banner An English – Scottish Gaelic road sign