How English emerged is an intriguing story that has a fantastic collection of characters, even though they’re actually groups of people and texts rather than individual characters. It pops up out of thin air and then stumbles into something else. Then, it gets caught by the wind and takes over the world in the form of the world’s first global language. The story has been told and retold by many authors and scholars. It appears that the majority of the people who have been telling the story for 100 years have been wrong.
The Celtic problem
We’ll start from a location that is long enough to see the bigger picture, which is the British Isles situation around 2,000 years in the past. There were around two million Britons living in the area and spread across hamlets and homesteads. They spoke a variety of Celtic languages and dialects. But, they have not been recorded. It is believed that the Celts crossed across the Continent with successive waves over the last few years, and brought a different version of their language each time. The hostile tribes , known as the Picts for instance which were driven into northern Scotland by the newly invaded Celts might have used an earlier version of Celtic. To distinguish them from Celtic on the Continent and the Celtic tongues spoken in Britain collectively are referred to as “Insular Celtic,” the “Brittonic”, or “British”.
Here’s an illustration of how these languages might look today and how it could look like if everyone were speaking 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.
It’s easy to recognize as Welsh. The language was restricted to the mountains of Wales since the seventh-century. It has been isolated since then. Some Welshmen claim that they can read text from Welsh texts as early as 1,000 years in the past. Not that this has made it more welcoming to English. Shakespeare employed the word to denote “it’s Greek” in Shakespeare’s day. Hotspur makes fun of Mortimer’s inability other than sexually, to talk to his wife who is not English-speaking. It is interesting that the stage direction don’t call for Welsh lines. We do however have a similar scene with laughter in Henry VIII 5.2. Shakespeare’s company could have employed a Welsh-speaking boy to play Lady Mortimer. It’s apparent from the stage directions, which state “The lady speaks Welsh,” five times before she enters the stage and performs the Welsh song. If she were to hurl an incomprehensible tongue at the spectators, Shakespeare deftly engages Mortimer in a simultaneous dialogue with Hotspur and Glyndwr while focusing on the English. Whatever Welsh was used and sang could be improvised for each occasion, or Shakespeare wrote the lines himself , before being translated. Whatever the case the Lady Mortimer did not have to speak Shakespeare’s words. Shakespeare. There could have been vulgar jokes or insults directed towards any Welshmen present in the audience. Queen Elizabeth, reportedly, could speak the language.
I make these points about Welsh to underscore the cultural gap in Britain between the western and northern Celtic-speaking regions as well as England itself. A division that dates back to prehistory and is in place today.
Let’s take a look back at AD 43 when the Romans took over Britannia. There are three methods to take over the territory. You can go all out and apply the “scorched Earth” strategy. You must destroy everything within your path and include the army of the enemy and human settlements, livestock, and anything else that could be useful, such as crops. You burn it all to the ground to keep those who were defeated from ever having the power to return and exact revenge, because they no longer exist (at least for a couple of generations). This was the tactic used in, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), costing some 8 million European lives, as well as the Taiping Civil War (1850-64), costing 10 times the number of Chinese lives. It was pre-modernity’s version of nuclear conflict, and the result was far more destructive than any nuclear war yet in our time. The only problem that comes with turning a hostile land into moonscapes is that you end up destroying yourself as well, as there’s no food and no means of growing quickly enough to avoid starving. Another problem with scorched-earth war is that it wasn’t really possible before the introduction of firearms, thereby ruling it out for the Romans and all subsequent invasions of Britain in the following a thousand years (Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel). Are there ways to incorporate this absurdity into my narrative? It’s actually one of the theories found in the most popular study of the history of English, as we’ll see in the next section.
Androcide is a less violent and more intelligent approach. It destroys any male foes, while leaving behind women and the agricultural sector (think Genghis Khan). This keeps the invading army content, as they have a ready supply of women to rape, and begin families with, in addition to beer and bread. It’s an injustice for the population and necessitates their enslavement in order to gain their obedience.
The third alternative is symbolic punishment and reconciliation. You give them a slap on the wrist, put a mere handful of tens of thousands of the captured troops to the sword, to communicate the message you intend to convey to them. business. The remainder of the population is spared if they pay tribute to conquerors. If you’re a technology expert it is possible to build upon the infrastructure that is already in place and transform it into something more efficient. This is what the Romans did. They taught the Britons how to run their own country and did such a good job that their beneficial and mutually beneficial partnership lasted for more than four centuries. The Romans are still visible through expressways that are a part of the extensive highway system they constructed that traversed the island, as well as hundreds of Roman coins which continue to be found all over Britain and elsewhere, a sign of a thriving economy that reached into every corner of the world.
The situation regarding language during Roman occupation was more difficult. Armed forces that invaded could not replace the language of conquered people. This is not easy to accomplish without the scorched-earth treatment that, as we’ve witnessed, eliminates your own chance of survival. Invaders are either required to remain within their language bubble or they are outnumbered by the native population and end up speaking their native language. The Romans created a Latin-speaking administrative class, while a class of traders who were bilingual merchants, locals, and others looking to profit from the Roman presence grew to bridge the gap between the Romans and the Britons.
Latin vocabulary was gradually integrated into the local language through the years. Bilingualism was possible if the Britons were in a position to be able to coexist with their occupants and Latin was of sufficient prestige for it to be able to expand. The language of the local area would eventually be modified to resemble Latin while maintaining its core structure of grammatical. However, since Latin served scribes’ purposes effectively, and the language of the local area weren’t recorded and we have no information about them (the Romans never referred to the Britons as “Celts,” a term they reserved for the inhabitants of France). We can determine the general families of their ancestors. In the northern and western extremes the language was Goidelic Celtic (Gaelic and perhaps Pictish) and Brythonic Celtic (Welsh, Cornish, etc.) respectively. In the south and east it was various Germanic languages (not Celtic as is commonly believed in the traditional histories).
The Romans quit Britain in AD 410 in order to fight barbarian attacks near home. The British might have been able of running the country on their own However, infighting made the country vulnerable to pirates on the seas. According to the traditional report, around 449 onwards, four tribal groups from contiguous regions along the Continent’s North Sea coast established beachheads on the island. Frisians, Saxons, and Jutes from north Denmark, attacked Britain’s southern coast. Angles, from the northern Elbe to south Denmark also attacked Britain’s eastern coast. It is assumed that all four tribes spoke close-knit languagesthat were easy to understand by West Germanic (English), Dutch, German, and Scandinavian families. They could have coordinated their attacks to share in the profits. They were collectively known as the “Anglo-Saxons” A term that I will use in a provisional manner by 19th-century Philologists.
Two contradictory accounts of events that occurred in the following four centuries exist. The other version claims that the Anglo-Saxons destroyed Britain by combining androcide and scorched earth tactics that involved burning and killing here, and plundering in other areas. The result was the elimination of the British population, i.e. the Celtics. The genocide was so horrific that many Celts left to Brittany, France by the close of the sixth century. (The Breton Nation speaks as a descendent of British Celtic). The process didn’t take place immediately; the conquest took about 200 years, but the outcome was the obliteration of an entire culture. This theory serves a great function. It explains the reason Celts were only able to survive in small pockets in the far north and west of the British Isles, to which they had been pushed. It is evident of the genocide or ethnocide, through the plethora of remaining Celtic loanwords in English and also the smaller number of Celtic places names, inscriptions, and coinage in the east as compared to the west and north of England.
An alternative history begins with the assumption that the Anglo-Saxons were outnumbered by the Britons. It’s estimated that up to four million people lived during the Roman occupation, which included Romans, many of whom were likely to remain in the area after the garrisons departed. After having lived there for many generations, what made them be able to leave? The Anglo-Saxons who invaded, by contrast, could not have been much more than a few hundred of thousands, at least at the start (the invaders’ Norman force of 1066 is estimated to be at least ten or twenty thousand and they defeated England more quickly than the Anglo-Saxons). It’s hard to comprehend how early Viking groups were able to conquer an entire population, which was well-versed in Roman military procedure, within just several generations. A few years after the time claims that the Britons were cowardly but it wasn’t an easy task for the Anglo-Saxons. The Celts are said to have fought a spirited resistance, with many surviving documents and artifacts proving the battles that were fought on both sides. It was a tense affair as invasions always are. Much violence was surely attributable to the Anglo-Saxons’ attempts to consolidate dominance over the island, but they were unable to conduct a mass slaughter, and were slaughtered at their own pace in various locations.
However massive cooperation and assimilation either way could have been the rule. As long as it was believed to be, the Celts were not exiled from the eastern and southern areas of the island. Nor was the Celtic language ever displaced from the areas. It could have developed into many creoles depending upon the Germanic tribes that the Celts had contact with via trade, intermarriage and other methods. We also have evidence of Celts’ exerting a civilizing influence over the Anglo-Saxons, instilling literacy and introducing Christianity via Latin as well as Roman missionaries, and also of important figures from both peoples interspersed with each other (the Caedmon of the famous seventh-century Anglo-Saxon song, for instance was one of the Celt).
Each textbook on the language’s history has had to adopt its own posture astride the “Celtic problem,” whether on the one hand to go with the easy explanation of wholesale conquest and destruction and on the other hand in order to make sense of complexity, the intermixing peoples and the gradual blending of one culture by another. In terms of linguistics, the final result was the same that was the substitution of Celtic by the Anglo-Saxon. One of the reasons both interpretations work is that they provide a justification for the dominant view of the early development of the language. This paradigm regards Anglo-Saxon as the first ancestor to English and thereby extends the story of English back to the onset of this era, AD 449, a logical enough starting point, as it is the time of the first invasion of Britain following the Roman withdrawal. The early 20th century’s scholarship gathered around the seductive notion of a lineage from Modern English going almost as long as Roman Britain. There was a consensus among academics, and historians of the language swapped the linguistically neutral word “Anglo-Saxon” with the nationalist-driven “Old English.” An English department subindustry of textbooks and courses that are based on the 1500-year-old history of the language has followed. For so long the date 449 has been viewed as a given. Modern times have scarcely discovered any evidence of a different starting point.
But, the latest research in the rapidly expanding field of phylogenetics is making historical accounts more complicated , and could render the old model obsolete. The results are frequently ignored or dismissed by the people who study the history of the language because they aren’t aware of them. Genetic mapping is a method that collects DNA samples from a vast variety of people, including thousands of living people. The method also makes use of bones that date back to prehistoric times to collect the data and trace lines of migration and patterns over time. One of the most significant conclusions of this article is that British Isles were populated as earlier as the Mesolithic period, which occurred shortly after the last ice age diminished. This was originally from the Basque region of Spain. From that time Britain was not colonized by waves , but by a constant stream of people arriving from Spain through the Atlantic Ocean and from the Balkans in Eastern Europe as well by the Mediterranean and overland (modern France). Then the Balkan migrations arrived in Britain via northern routes via the Baltic Sea and Scandinavia. The most interesting thing is that Mesolithic and Neolithic migrations formed the bedrock of the genetic structure of the British population. The subsequent invasions that have occurred in recent times — the past two millennia–have contributed overall only tiny percentage of the British people’s “blood” to this day, with each major invading force supplying only five percent or less (Oppenheimer).
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New research offers a new view of the position of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic languages in first-millennium Britain. The findings are straightforward and surprising, even though they were all around us for a long time. The Celtic issue was never ever there. The Celts weren’t forced into the northern and western regions of Britain as they were always there. That is where their communities have been for millennia. The Saxons and the Angles have also occupied their respective regions from Neolithic times. Beginning with the Iberians, everyone was already all across England However, the highest concentrations were found in the most geographically sensible entry points. The Celts were not originally from Central Europe (Germany or the Alps) however, they came originated from Spain. They approached Britain’s western coast naturally from the Atlantic. As the Germanic peoples (Saxons, Frisians, and Frisians) crossed at the nearest location to the south of England The Scandinavians went to eastern England, the Celts originated from Central Europe.
The answer to the riddle of how the Anglo-Saxons were able to effectively force Britons in England to assimilate to their culture and language so rapidly after 449 is also shockingly simple: the indigenous Britons in eastern and southern England were not Celts at all but were ethnically related to invaders and had a similar language. This language is called “Anglo-Saxon” because it is specifically referring to the language of the invaders. While it is known as “English” however, it is distinctly different from and distinct from to the English we speak currently. Recent research in computational computing done by Forster and Renfrew has revealed that this archaic English (which I refer to as “Anglish”) broke away from Common Germanic during earlier waves, hundreds of thousands of years ago. It now has its own distinct branch in the Germanic tree. According to the traditional theory, English is a descendant of the West Germanic language family (Frisian Dutch, German). According to the new perspective, English is more closely connected to the eastern part of North Germanic (Danish and Swedish). The two terms could be reversed when we consider the situation of linguistics from this perspective. It was not the English who assimilated to Anglo-Saxons, but rather the Anglo-Saxons that assimilated to English and the other invaders to Britain in recorded history–the Romans, Vikings, and Normans–just as we would have anticipated them to do, for the reasons outlined in the previous paragraphs.