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Why You Joined, Why You Left
In the course of the ongoing conversation over on my blog, the Druid organization Ar nDraiocht Fein (ADF) came up for discussion. Quite a few people mentioned that they had been members of ADF but left the organization, most of them recently -- and one of my longtime readers and students mentioned that he's long been interested in the religious dimension of Druidry and is looking to set up an organization for people who share that interest. That got a lively response from the former ADF members, and the questions that came up immediately were: Why did each person join ADF in the first place?
Why did they leave?
That's what this post is for: a frank discussion of what attracted people to ADF and what convinced them to quit. Full disclosure here: I'm also a former ADF member, though I left quite a while ago, and I'll be adding my own reflections to the conversation.
I'm well aware that this is a topic about which some people -- notably those who are still members of ADF -- may have strong feelings, and may not express those with the courtesy and thoughtfulness I expect from my commentariat. For that reason, any attempt at trolling, concern trolling, derailing, flamebaiting, or other bits of online gamesmanship will be deleted. This post is a place for those of us who have had experiences with a troubled Druid organization to talk about those experiences, so that a different organization can learn from them. Those who don't want to participate in that conversation are welcome to go somewhere else -- and those who might want to interfere with that conversation are welcome to go shinny up a stump. 'Nuf said.
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(Anonymous) 2020-06-24 02:57 pm (UTC)(link)Thus, to provide an example for Colloquial North American English, t and d have merged when between vowels (The conditioning factor is a little more complex, but for the purposes of a comment, this will have to do!). Thus, latter and ladder are pronounced the same, while in many other dialects of English, including those dominant here until around the middle of the last century. This change is universal, applying to all cases where the conditions are met.
The evidence for widespread interactions between languages, and the borrowing of all kinds of features from one language to another makes actually knowing anything about the grammar of PIE very, very, very difficult, if not outright impossible, but we can be quite confident the language existed, since there are too many words which have regular correspondences with each other for it to be a coincidence; and the only known way to get these shared correspondences is a shared ancestral language, from which the words derived.
Language can also borrow words, but core vocabulary tends not to be borrowed, and so these kinds of correspondences in core vocabulary is much more useful than in other parts of the language. For example, despite the massive amount of words borrowed from Romance or Latin, all of our pronouns, numerals, and most of the other basic vocabulary are all Germanic.
This method can be applied to languages which we know are related, for example French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese, and will happily reveal they are related, although reconstructing Latin grammar on the basis of these languages is impossible. Additionally, it will reveal that Basque and English are not Romance languages, despite both having borrowed much of the vocabulary from them; there is a core of vocabulary which is not Romance.
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