New Song rapidly accumulated a nucleus of talent, and its best-known group was Els Setze Jutges, The Sixteen Judges, whose odd-sounding name came from a phrase used as a password by Catalan patriot troops during the rising against and occupation army in 1640 during the Reapers' War: "Setze jutges d'un jutjat menjen fetge d'un penjat" ("Sixteen judges on a tribunal eat the liver of a hanged man"). No lisping Castilian, it was believed, could pronounce this barrage of fricatives.
robert hughesThere, however, the medieval or early modern state assimilated most of them, although a significant number of distinctive ancient cultures persisted through such processes of integration Irish, Catalan. Norwegian and others (in Eastern Europe, the Greeks perhaps form an analogy).