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Britain/Ireland - genetic vs cultural | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6735 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 17 of 19 16 October 2013 at 4:38pm | IP Logged |
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I have not had time to research the differing statements in the sources mentioned in this thread, but I would like to address a few points based on things I have read earlier. The Normands of Gullaume le Batard descended from Nordic vikings (probably mainly from Norway), but it is a sign of their conversion to a Romance language and life style that the rulers had to send their sons back to Scandinavia to hear the old language of their kin - it was stone dead in Normandy at the time of Guillaume. And this is not the only case where a ruling Germanic class failed to impose their own language - the Normans also possessed Sicily for a fairly long time, but people still speak Italian there, not Normannic French. And further back their distant cousins the Visigoths under Theoderic the Great ruled Italy, but apart from some partly spoiled mosaics at Ravenna it is hard to find any evidence of that.
On the contrary the Romans seemed to be quite succesful in imposing their language on newly conquered populations through a consistent carrot and stick tactic -with one important exception: they never succeeded in or even tried to eradicate Greek. In Great Britain we have at least three, maybe four significant invasions: the Roman one, the Saxon one, the short-lived and partial Viking take-over and finally William the Bastard's invasion in 1066. Williams certainly was a hard man who ruled the Anglosaxon speaking population with an iron fist, but apparently he didn't force it to switch its language. Instead it absorbed a lot of words and lost a lot of its morphology in the confusion, but still ended out as a successor to Anglosaxon and not to Normannic French. The Vikings left some words in some English dialects (and in Scots), but apparently their language and that of the local Anglosaxons were close enough to coexist. So why did the Anglosaxon invasion the the 400s result in a nearly complete disappearance of the Celtic language which supposedly was spoken in all of Great Britain (possibly except the Pictish language in Scotland)? I can understand why the heretical idea might occur that the local population (or at least part of it) already was speaking a Germanic language in Eastern and Southern Great Britain before the advent of Hengest and Horsa on the behest of the ill-advised king Vortigern. The problem is that I can't see the evidence, and the bloodtype evidence suggests that the Britons basically have been there from before the Romans without beeing overwhelmed or even less exterminated by any mass invasion from Saxony or Scandinavia. As far as I can see the article from the Royal Society by John Pattison suggessts that there had been a steady trickle of Germanic people into Britain already before Hengest and Horsa, but also - and maybe more importantly - that the new Saxon rulers used a carrot and stick tactic to convince the Celts to adapt to the new power balance. Well yes, but if it had been a totally peaceful, egalitarian and voluntary process then Anglosaxon ought to have had distinctly more Celtic elements in it in the later days of the Anglosaxon kingdoms. So no, there must have been a fairly heavy-handed repression to force the linguistic conversion of the Britons, and here the methods used by the Romans in Gaul or Dacia might be an inspiration even though the Saxons hardly can have known much about them. Pattison quotes some sources to suggest that Anglosaxon actually had more Celtic elements than normally claimed, but I have personally read Old Saxon, Old Frisian and Old Saxon texts from the 700-800s and I can't see that the Anglosaxon texts are fundamentally different from the others (i.e. half Celtic, half Germanic). So for me the scant evidence points towards a fairly brisk language switch, but no mass extermination, and in spite of a period with a mixture of Celtic and Germanic royal houses it is clear that the Germanic side must have had the upper hand. And a fairly heavy hand it must have been to have such tremendous effect. Let's consider a few similar examples: Pictish disappeared fairly suddenly when confronted with the Celtic kingdoms in Scotland in the 10. century. Why? Nobody really knows why. But it did. Later on Germanic Lowland Scots supplanted the Celtic highlander Gaelic in large parts of Scotland (and ultimely in almost all parts of Scotland, as we all know). One factor here is wellknown, namely that the Celtic speaking clan leaders lost a decisive power struggle to the Scots speaking king in Edinburra, and speaking Galic then became a sign of possible subversionism. So people who wanted to acquire a higher status in society were well adviced to switch to Scots. So yes, it is possible to kill a language, but you need a certain amount of contact between the invaders and the original population AND a firm decision of the invaders to reward the conversion, plus some blood and gore to scare the subjugated losers. The only problem is that we know too little about the process that actually took place after the the Hengest and Horsa incident to see why their invasion language-wise was so much more efficient than the parallel invasion by the Normans under the Bastard 600 years later. Edited by Iversen on 17 October 2013 at 9:51am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4860 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 18 of 19 16 October 2013 at 7:24pm | IP Logged |
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Phew! Thanks very much for that substantial contribution Iversen, which I will have to
re-read a few times to fully absorb. I also haven't read the linked article yet, but I will do. I will just mention that I have now finished "Blood of the Isles" by Bryan Sykes, the name that started this particular line of enquiry for me. It starts well, but rather fizzles out. He has quite a lot to say about Picts vs Gaels in Scotland, but I can't remember a lot of the detail. However, just like the Britons in England, the Picts in Scotland didn't just disappear, and so weren't all exterminated. Basically, their descendants are still there. The language may have disappeared, but the genes, and therefore the people, didn't. I have yet to read Stephen Oppenheimer's book "the Origins of the British". (It was out on loan from the library, and I've been too mean to buy it so far). That's the book that the "proto-English" people seem to have depended on so much, so I am intrigued to see it. I just wonder why they apparently didn't look at Sykes' book as well. I have not had any form of reply from the "proto-English" people. I've borrowed some books from the library about the Celts, including another one by Barry Cunliffe (an archaeologist). I'm also just reading a book edited by Bryan Sykes called "The Human Inheritance: Genes, Language and Evolution". He has contributed an essay to it, but it also contains works by historical linguists, archeologists, biologists, paleontologists, and others". It's from 1999, i.e. a bit earlier than the other Sykes book, and the Oppenheimer books (around 2006/2007), so may be slightly dated with regard to the data it might depend on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4860 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 19 of 19 16 October 2013 at 7:49pm | IP Logged |
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@Iversen:
On invasions, I guess you also have to take into account the arrival (whether it was an invasion or not, I don't know) of the "Belgic" tribes in England, who came over from Gaul, at some time in the 1st Millennium BC, or rather over a period of time during that millennium, well before the 1st of Julius Caesar's invasions. These tribes, such as the Atrebates, Belgae, and Catuvallauni may have been Celtic, Germanic, or a mixture, or culturally one, and linguistically another (or a mixture). If they at least partly spoke Germanic languages, then that could be one source of a proto-English language in south-east England before the Romans got here, and before the "Anglo Saxons" got here much later. However, I think the people at Proto-English.org have other reasons for believing in a pre-Roman Proto-English, such as their proposed - Scandi-Proto-English in the north-east, predating the Viking invasion. They are not professional linguists, philologists, or from any related discipline, so far as I can establish. Simply keen amateurs. I have no problem with that, but of course their research needs to be able to stand up to scrutiny. They seem to have made some attempt to publish papers, for what that's worth. But I imagine they are not held in high regard by the traditional professionals in this field, which again in itself, does not put me off them. I'm more interested in how well-founded the material is than by whom it is propagated. Edited by montmorency on 16 October 2013 at 7:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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