Clare, you write of language being apparently more important than race & give the example of Irishmen & Germans speaking mutually unintelligible languages, despite their racial similarity &c. This was not always the case. In ancient times, immediately after the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel, the Indo-European peoples all spoke the same language, called Proto-Indo-European by philologers. It was only over the course of centuries that dialects of this original language diverged into the main indo-european language families that we know today, Romanic, Germanic, Balto-Slavonic & Hellenic. One can still see many similarities even today. Compare the words sister, Schwester (German) & sestra (Russian), or the Latin domus (house) & the Russian dom. There are many more such examples. The Germanic languages for instance, over time changed the initial p in many proto-indo-european words to an f, thus we have Vater (German), vader (Dutch) & father, whereas in Latin it is Pater, from which derive padre, pere & so forth. It could be argued that God separated the people at Babel in such a way that those who were genetically similar were given the same language, & that in this manner the various races developed. The indo-european languages for example are classified as flexional or fusional depending on which book one is reading, whereas the languages of most asiatic peoples, Turks, Koreans, Japanese, Filipinos, Malays &c. are agglutinative in structure, no indo-european languages are agglutinative. Hungarian & Finnish which are spoken in Europe are, but that is because these are not Indo-European languages. The ancestors of the Hungarians came originally from the steppes of Central Asia, which explains why the grammatical structure of Hungarian is more similar to Turkish than to Polish or German. Anyhow I suppose most find this sort of thing to be quite boring, but I've always found it interesting. Anyone who is interested can find it better explained than I'm able to do in most books on philology, the history of languages &c.