idk how wales is at all still part of the UK. with the way the UK has historically treated them, I am just... it's so awful in such a personal, and universally heartbreaking way. like the welsh town that lost most of its children and a lot of its residents to the landslide brought on by English mining
the Aberfan was....real bad too. because the (English) coal board didn't want to pay compensation for, you know, the LITERAL 116 CHILDREN KILLED they made grieving parents go to tribunals to see how "close" they were to their children
and it came out not too long ago that the surviours (what few there were) were subjected to pretty awful medical tests to see how "traumatised" they were to see if THEY deserved compensation
.............and because this is how my brain works, I can't stop noticing the irony that (as far as I can tell from what I'm reading) the Welsh form of "Tryweryn" is apparently "Dryweryn"...
(I thought it might be, but I wasn't sure if it could be a grammatical thing in Welsh, too, since the main thing I know about Welsh from a linguistic standpoint is "Welsh Does Things Its Own Way")
...I mean from a national political standpoint, a big part of the problem is how accurate it is to equate England with the UK, but I can't imagine that makes it any less aggravating.
A friend of mine actually learned some Gaelic and I think a little bit of Welsh, but I taught myself just enough Gaelic to realize how bad it would mess with my head and left well enough alone XD
I think in undergrad I was still being taught that Columbus was, whatever his other faults, an insightful navigator who knew something others didn't. >_>
(I also regularly got confused about England vs UK until watching a very good history video that broke it down... and I still have some confusion about where "Britain"/"Great Britain" fits into it)
Britain just means Land of the Britons, via the Romans. To my understanding, it's more a geographical term referring to the island? And the Kingdom of Great Britain came into being when the union between England (and Wales) and Scotland began, iirc
Wiki tells me the Great was to differentiate it from Brittany which had a similar name in French, which is very probably true but it's not a piece of trivia I think I've encountered
when there is a whole wiki article on the terminology of the British Isles, I think we should be somewhat forgiven for being unsure which we are supposed to call it exactly
yeah it took me ages to separate out England as a country from the UK as a whole, i think some other UK-non-English people had to just patiently beat it into my head lmao
...yeah I suspect a lot of that is that "empire" acquired a pretty bad reputation by the mid-20th century, but the UK wasn't powerful enough to be confident not caring what anyone else thought anymore
form a unified country despite the landmass between you! sort of like Alaska and the USIt does sound as if, on all sides, there may have been insensitivities and very poor behaviouryou fucking COW