The captivating tale of how English was established is full of fascinating characters. But, they’re individuals and groups of texts rather than individuals. It emerges out of the mists like a blip then flies around, changing into something else before finally catching wind and establishing itself as the first truly universal language. It’s also a story that’s been repeated and told by a variety of writers and academics. It appears that the majority of those who have been telling the story for 100 years have been wrong.
The Celtic problem
Let’s begin at a place that is far enough back to get a better understanding of the overall picture that is the British Isles situation around 2,000 years ago. Two or three million Britons resided in the country scattered across homesteads or hamlets the story goes, speaking different Celtic languages and dialects, of which there is a lot of in doubt since they weren’t written down. The Celts could have moved from the Continent in several waves over the course of time, and brought with them a new form of Celtic each time. For instance there was the Picts were a tribe that was hostile were driven into northern Scotland by newly arrived Celts. They could have spoken an earlier version of Celtic. To differentiate them from Celtic on The Continent and the Celtic tongues spoken in Britain collectively have been called “Insular Celtic,” the “Brittonic”, or “British”.
Here’s an illustration of how these languages would look today and what it might look like if everyone spoke the Celts”language If they had been successful in eliminating the Angles and Saxons of England.
Ein Tad yn y nefoedd, sancteiddier dy enw. Deled dy deyrnas; gwneler dy ewyllys, ar y ddaear fel yn y nef.
Dyro inni heddiw ein bara beunyddiol.
Maddau inni ein troseddau, fel yr ym ni wedi maddau i’r rhai a droseddodd yn ein herbyn.
A phaid a’n dwyn i brawf, ond gwared ni rhag yr un drwg.
This is Welsh. The language was isolated to the mountains of Wales since the seventh century. It has been isolated since then. Some Welshmen claim that they have the ability to read in Welsh texts as early as 1,000 years back. However, this hasn’t changed the language’s structure to make it more friendly to English. Shakespeare made use of the language to refer to “it’s Greek” in Shakespeare’s day. Hotspur makes fun of Mortimer’s inability other than sexually, to communicate with his wife, who’s not a native English speaker. The most striking thing is that even though the stage directions call for Welsh however, no lines are provided in Welsh are given (whereas there is a comparable scene of bawdy repartee that includes French texts in Henry V 5.2). Shakespeare’s troupe could have used an actor who spoke Welsh to play the role of Lady Mortimer. It’s evident from the stage directions which state “The lady speaks Welsh,” five times before she takes the spotlight and sings a Welsh song. Shakespeare is engaged by Mortimer in a conversation with Hotspur, Glyndwr and other English-speaking characters, bringing attention to English. The Welsh lines may be the work of Shakespeare prior to being translated. However it was the case that Lady Mortimer did not have to speak the words of Shakespeare. There may have been sexist jokes or insults directed at any Welshmen who were in the audience. Queen Elizabeth was said to speak Welsh.
I have made these observations regarding Welsh to highlight the cultural gap in Britain between the Celtic-speaking regions of northern and western regions and England itself. A gap which goes through prehistory and continues to be still evident today.
Let’s harken to AD 43, the year that the Romans took over Britannia. Now, there are three methods to gain control over a new territory. You can do it savagely, by “scorched earth” policy. You will need to destroy all that stands within your path and include the army of the enemy, human settlements, livestock, and anything else that may be beneficial, like crops. You burn it all to the ground to keep those who were defeated from ever having the capability to return to get revenge, since they are no longer in existence (at least for a generation or two). This was the strategy used in, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) that cost eight millions European lives, and the Taiping Civil War (1850-64), costing more than ten times as many Chinese lives. It was pre-modernity’s version of nuclear conflict, and the result was more destructive than any nuclear war that has occurred to date. The only issue when you turn a land of enemy into moonscapes is that it destroys you as well, as there’s no food to eat and no way to grow fast enough before you starve. The problem with scorched earth combat is that it was impossible prior to the advent of guns. This means it isn’t applicable to the Romans and subsequent invasions of Britain during the following thousand year (Jared Diamond and Guns Germs and Steel). So why do I introduce this implausibility into my narrative? As we’ll see, it’s among the theories that are part of the classic version of English history.
Androcide is a less brutal and more intelligent method. It wipes out the male adversaries while leaving behind women and the agricultural sector (think Genghis Khan). The invading army is happy since they’ve got plenty of women to rape and begin families. But it’s an injustice for the population and necessitates their enslavement to get their submission.
The third approach is wisest: symbolic punishment and reconciliation. Give them a slap across the wrist, and then you put a few tens of thousands from the captured troops to the sword to communicate the message you intend to convey to them. business. The rest of the population are protected if they pay tribute to conquerors. If you’re a technology expert it is possible to build upon the existing infrastructure and develop it into something more efficient. This is exactly what the Romans did. They taught the Britons how to run their own country and did such a great job of it that the beneficial and mutually beneficial partnership lasted for more than four centuries. In the present today, the Romans can be seen on expressways that traverse the entire island. Additionally, there are a lot of Roman coins scattered across Britain to show evidence of a thriving, ancient economy.
More complicated was the issue of language during the Roman occupation. The only way an invading army can succeed in replacing the language of their predecessor with their own is by complete displacement of the conquered population. This is difficult to achieve without using the scorched earth treatment which as we’ve observed, severely limits your chances to survive. Invaders are either forced to remain in their area of language or are outnumbered by native population , and are forced to speak their native language. Romans have created an administrative group, and the class was bilingual and comprised of traders, merchants and others who wanted to take advantage of Roman presence.
Over the centuries, Latin Anglish vocabulary trickled down to the people, and the local language was further enriched by a number of Latin loanwords. Bilingualism was possible if the Britons were able to get along with their neighbors, and Latin was a popular language with enough value that it was able to expand. The local language could eventually be modified to look a little like Latin and still maintain its original grammar. But since Latin was used by scribes well enough and the language of the local area were not recorded We don’t have much information about them (the Romans never referred to the Britons as “Celts,” a term they reserved for the inhabitants of France). We can deduce their general families. It was Goidelic Celtic (Gaelic, perhaps Pictish) and Brythonic Celtic (Welsh and Cornish respectively) at the extremes of west and north. respectively; while in the east and southern it was distinct Germanic languages (not Celtic, as is often assumed in standard histories of the past).
The Romans quit Britain in AD 410 to confront serious barbarian attacks close to home. The British might have been able of controlling the country independently However, infighting made them vulnerable to maritime piracy. According to the standard narrative, in 449, four tribal groups from adjacent areas along the North Sea coast of the Continent created beachheads on the island. Frisians, Saxons, and Jutes from north Denmark attacked Britain’s southern coastline. Angles, from the northern Elbe to southern Denmark were able to attack Britain’s east coast. It is believed that all four tribes were closely related and mutually understandable languages of the West Germanic (English, Dutch, German) and North Germanic (Scandinavian) families. They may have coordinated their attacks to share in the benefits. They were collectively called the “Anglo-Saxons”, a phrase I will use as a pro forma by 19th century Philologists.
There are two conflicting versions of what happened in the next four centuries. One theory states that the Anglo-Saxons devastated Britain by combining androcide battles and scorched-earth strategies, burning and killing here and plundering in other areas. The result was the elimination of the British population, i.e. the Celtics. So ferocious was the genocide that by the sixth century , a lot of Celts were forced to flee from the island to the present-day Brittany in France (where the Breton Nation today speak as a descendent of British Celtic). It wasn’t a quick process and the battle lasted for about 200 years, but the end result was the obliteration of an entire culture. This explanation serves a reason. It conveniently explains why Celts survived only in areas in the north and west of British Isles, to which they were evicted. The evidence of genocide or ethnocide is evident in the dearth of Celtic loanwords that are preserved in English and the lesser number of Celtic coins, inscriptions and place names in the east than in the north and west.
The alternative version of history starts from the assumption that the Britons far outnumbered Anglo-Saxons. Up to four million people lived in Roman rule. This included Romans who stayed put when the garrisons left. What is the reason they would want to go away, after having lived for a long time? The Anglo-Saxons invading the area, by contrast, could not have been more than a few hundred of thousands, at least in the beginning (the invaders’ Norman forces in 1066 are estimated to be as little as one or two thousand and they defeated England much faster than the Anglo-Saxons). It’s hard to comprehend the way these early bands of Vikings could defeat a population of a lot larger, and one that was well-versed in Roman military practices and then wipe out their language and people in the space of a few generations. One source from several years after the time suggests that Britons were cowardly however the reality is that it wasn’t a cakewalk for the Anglo-Saxons. Many surviving records and artifacts from battles between Celts and Anglo-Saxons demonstrate that they fought back. The battles are difficult, as are many other things. A lot of violence was likely to have been inflicted by the Anglo-Saxons to consolidate control over the island, however they were unable to conduct a mass slaughter and were killed by their fellow soldiers in different locations.
However massive cooperation and assimilation either way could have been the norm. The Celts were never pushed out of the eastern and southern regions of the island as long supposed. Nor was the Celtic language forced to leave the areas. Rather, it may have evolved into various creoles, depending on which Germanic tribes were the Celts met through trade, intermarriage and so on. There is evidence of the Celts having a positive civilizing influence over Anglo-Saxons, teaching them literacy and introducing Christianity via Latin as well as Roman missionaries, as well as of significant figures from both populations intermingling (the Caedmon of the famous seventh-century Anglo-Saxon song, for instance, was one of the Celt).
Each textbook on the history of the language required to adopt a different perspective on the “Celtic issue,” whether on the one hand to settle for an easy explanation of mass destruction and conquest and on the other hand to try to explain the complexity of the issue, including the intermixing of peoples and the gradual blending of one culture by another. In terms of linguistics, the situation was the same: Anglo-Saxon was replaced by Celtic. Both interpretations are possible to justify the dominant model of the beginning of the history and progress of English during the early 20th century. This paradigm considers Anglo-Saxon as the direct ancestor English. This means that it extends English’ history all the way back to AD 449, which marks the beginning of the Roman withdrawal. This seems to be a natural beginning point, since it is the beginning of the English arrival into Britain. Early 20th-century scholarship therefore rallied around the seductive notion of a lineage originating from Modern English going almost as long to Roman Britain. An academic consensus was reached that the word “Anglo-Saxon”, which is neutral in its linguistics, was replaced by the nationalist-driven “Old English”. An English department subindustry was set up that focuses on classes and textbooks that are based upon the 1,500-year-old history. The 449 date has been taken for granted for so long, it has not occurred to anyone in modern times that there was any other possible beginning point prior to or after that date.
Recent research in the burgeoning field of phylogenetics it is causing a lot of confusion in the traditional historical accounts of British history and could transform the old model into a non-existent one. Because of this, the results are usually overlooked or ignored by historians of the language if they know of any. Genetic mapping collects DNA samples across a broad temporal and geographical range as well as from living individuals and human bones that date back to the prehistoric era and analyzes the data to identify lineages and migration patterns throughout time. One of the most important findings in this essay is that British Isles were populated as in the Mesolithic period, which occurred shortly after the last ice age receded. It was originally from the Basque region of Spain. Since then, Britain was not colonized through waves but rather a continuous flow of people from Spain via the Atlantic Ocean and from the Balkans in Eastern Europe as well by the Mediterranean and overland (modern France). Then, the Balkan migrations were brought to Britain via a northern route from the Baltic Sea and Scandinavia. Even more interesting is the fact that the British population’s genetic foundation was shaped by Neolithic and Mesolithic migrations. The subsequent invasions of comparatively recent times, over the last two millennia, have contributed only a small amount to the British people’s blood in the present. Each major war brought a mere 5 percent (Oppenheimer).
New research offers a new perspective on the relative positions of the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic languages in the early millennium of Britain. These findings are easy and striking, even though they have been right in front of us since the beginning of time. The so-called Celtic problem was never there at all; the Celts weren’t pushed out into the northern and western regions of Britain since they were always in the area. That is where their communities have been for millennia. The Saxons and the Angles have also been residing in their respective territories from Neolithic times. Everyone was present in England prior to the Iberians. However the largest numbers of people were discovered at the geographically most logical crossing points. The Celts originated not from Central Europe (Germany and the Alps) according to what is often claimed rather from Spain and then they travelled to the western shores of Britain naturally from the Atlantic and the Atlantic, while the Germanic peoples (Saxons and Frisians) crossed the Atlantic at the closest point, towards southern England and the Scandinavians to the eastern part of England.
The answer to the puzzle of how the Anglo-Saxons were able to make the Britons within England to accept their language and culture in such a short time after 449 is likewise quite simple: the indigenous Britons in southern and eastern England were not Celts at all but were ethnically related to invaders and spoke a related language. “Anglo-Saxon,” as we will see, is not an appropriate word for this language because it refers to languages spoken by the invaders. It is possible to be described as “English” but it is completely distinct from and foreign the English we speak in the present. Recent research in computational computing by Forster and Renfrew suggests that this ancient English (which I call “Anglish”) was able to separate from Common Germanic during earlier waves several hundred thousand years ago. Today, it has its own distinct branch in the Germanic tree. According to the conventional view, English is a descendant of the West Germanic language family (Frisian Dutch, German). The new view suggests that English is more closely related to the eastern branch (Danish, Swedish) of North Germanic. If we consider the situation of linguistics in this light, the terms are reversed. The Anglo-Saxons weren’t the ones who assimilate to the Anglo-Saxons. It was the Anglo-Saxons who did so, just as all other invaders to Britain throughout recorded history, including the Vikings, Romans and Normans–just like we’d think they would do, because of the reasons above.