quote:

Originally posted by Harry Amp:
I think MJ means the continental homelands of the angles and saxons, the Jutlandic names.

Well, not being telepathic, I can only go on what he wrote, and what he wrote is that we have no "villages" in the "Anglo-Saxon homelands". If he meant something else it would have been helpful if he'd written something else, don't you think?

MJ Harper asks

quote:

You think it’s special pleading that there are no written records of an unwritten language?

I am pointing out that your postulate that there were pre-Roman English speakers relies on the assumption (YOUR assumption) that they were all illiterate and never spoke a word to anyone who might have been capable of writing down anything in your *proto-English. My question is why? Why would being an English-speaker necessarily mean you were incapable of learning your ABC in a literate society and you were totally invisible to all around?

The point is that your proposal of the existence of an English-speaking population prior to the Anglo-Saxons finds no support in the not negligible amount of information we do possess of the languages spoken in the centuries in question which you can only explain away by the suggestion that - against all the odds - they “must have been” illiterate. Obviously the simpler answer is that they were simply not there in the first place.

If you are so fond of these things why not come up with a few in the thirteenth century? You can’t?… no, of course you can’t…English is still unwritten. What on earth are you on about? Layamon’s Brut, the Ancren Riwle and a whole host of thirteenth century texts in thirteenth century English (by some counted as early Middle English, others as transitional) exist, not only as manuscripts and printed texts with critical notes, but also in the internet, just a mouse click away. How on earth you expect us to treat such assertions seriously beats me. “English was unwritten in the thirteenth century” is just another one of your statements which is plain nonsense.

I’m not sure there are any geneticists that support von Daniken . That is not what he has said. There is as I recall a whole book of his on the topic. But of course that is as much an illusion as is yours that the DNA stuff we have to date in any way supports your ideas. But you’d have to refer to the discussions on another forum about the “epistemology” of how Oppenheimer, Capelli and all the rest reached their overreaching conclusions on the basis of poorly-selected sampling and false historical assumptions and a totally outdated notion of ethnicity. Of course the “Stormfront” crowd love the DNA stuff, as it gives “scientific” support for what they chose it to, but then in the way you do they too close their eyes to (or are maybe genuinely ignorant of) the problems of the sampling and modes of historical inference used.

quote:

I am a bit baffled by this statement.

It helps to read it carefully I guess. See above about the ABC. But of course as I have pointed out we are not lacking in contemporary evidence. What IS lacking among it is any which lends absolutely any support to your “what if” notion about *proto-English being spoken in pre-Roman Britain.

quote:

[PMB]<<Proto-English is/would have been a germanic language whether you like it (or accept it) or not. You are the one trying to play around with (dismiss) linguistic facts not me.>> [MJH] As I say, it’s not what I think or what anyone thinks who speaks from a modern position of knowing the links between German and English. It’s what a philologically untutored observer would think. I invite neutrals to listen to the two languages and decide for themselves.

and where will you get the samples of the two languages as they were spoken in 98AD in Tacitus’ day? In particular this *proto-English that only you believe existed then.

quote:

Sorry, don’t accept any of this. After years of dialogue with ‘linguistic researchers’ I think they’re a bunch of meretricious boobies. Especially on this very subject.

Well, I’ll leave it up to you to guess who I tend to pay more attention to: those who cite the evidence and give full references to what they say so it can be checked by the normal means of scientific criticism, or somebody who only admits to “passing the eleven plus” and cannot, but rants on about how everybody else is wrong and a “booby” (more name-calling). Guess who I think is making an utter “booby” of himself coming out with such pompous crowing while being unable to back up any of their arguments with more than “what ifs”... Nevertheless, whatever you believe, the effect of literacy on establishing a canonic form of language is well enough documented to allow us to totally disregard what you “think” about this. Unless you can produce evidence overturning this of course. Can you?

But I have no knowledge of the details you mention so I cannot really comment further but surely at the very basis of any epistemological study is to look into the whole history of development of the ideas in question. How can you look at, let alone attempt to revise, ideas about the development of the Germanic languages without being familiar with German literature on the subject? (!!) (For, like it or not, any attempt to redate the origins of English must affect the whole edifice of comparative linguistics of the Germanic languages.) To ignore it is simply amateurish.

quote:

How true. The present academic establishment is from the 1890’s (if not before). Me, I’m hyper modern

You obviously have not understand the point I was making, you presumably then are unfamiliar with the literature to which I refer – again odd in a self-proclaimed epistemologist. Far from being “hyper-modern” you actually are falling into the mode of thought of the 1940s Ahnenerbe, which is neither “modern” nor a particularly good model to follow. Or was that another feeble camel-joke?

<<Layamon’s Brut, the Ancren Riwle and a whole host of thirteenth century texts in thirteenth century English (by some counted as early Middle English, others as transitional) exist, not only as manuscripts and printed texts with critical notes, but also in the internet, just a mouse click away. How on earth you expect us to treat such assertions seriously beats me. “English was unwritten in the thirteenth century” is just another one of your statements which is plain nonsense.>>

Well, I do go into all these sources in my book. However, we were, if you recall, discussing graffiti ie whether ordinary people were able to write things in their own language.

However now that you have raised the issue of native 'literature', let us move on. As you know, orthodoxy claims that Brut, Layamon and indeed the whole corpus of native literature from England in the thirteenth century is Middle English ie a halfway house between Anglo-Saxon and Modern English.

On general grounds this is clearly impossible. Since we already know that Chaucer in the fourteenth cnetury is Modern English bar the shouting, and the last Anglo-Saxon material comes from the twelfth century, it requires the entire language to metamorphose (that is virtually every word of vocabulary, a large chunk of grammar and some syntax) in scarcely two hundred years. And this time nobody can squawk about how unwritten language move dynamically because, as you so neatly observe, we are dealing here strictly with a literary language. Or two.

So here's the real story. And forgive any repetition but the tale bears repetition.
1. Up to 1066 the ruling elite in England spoke and wrote in Anglo-Saxon. The locals spoke English, an unwritten language. Some of the locals might have been trained in Anglo-Saxon, spoken and written. Literacy was a monopoly of the (Anglo-Saxon) Church.
2. In 1066 the Normans took over and Anglo-Saxon was no longer taught (the Normans were careful to take over all Church institutions). Now the ruling elite spoke French but wrote in Latin (Norman French was not a written language at this early date.)
3. By 1120 there were no longer any Anglo-Saxons alive who could write their language. One Annal, the Peterborough Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was continued by English-speakers in English using Anglo-Saxon writing conventions for a few years (you can see the abrupt change for yourselves) but otherwise the whole corpus of Anglo-Saxondom was now dead.
4. In the thirteenth century, Norman French (and also Isle de France French) became literary vehicles in England.
5. At the same time, and presumably from the same source of native literary development, efforts were made to write in the ordinary demotic, ie English.
6. But English was not, in practical terms, a literary language yet, so the works of Brut, Layamon et al are a difficult-to-decipher mix of English language, the Anglo-Saxon alphabet (the Latin alphabet is not very handy for English) and bits and pieces from French and Latin.
7. By the fourteenth century, and the writings of Piers Ploughman and then Chaucer, these difficuulties had been pretty much overcome (though in truth they are still not entirely overcome) and the demotic could be written entirely and clearly in the Latin alphabet, using digraphs and various vowel combinations to represent sounds not present in the Latin alphabet.
8. Exactly the same process can be viewed in all the major countries of Western Europe as people found that popular literature could be enjoyed in the demotic, by the demos.

quote:

...or somebody who only admits to “passing the eleven plus” and cannot, but rants on about how everybody else is wrong and a “booby” (more name-calling).

Really. You are coming across as an entirely humourless person.

And I must add that I was particularly impressed by how quickly you invoked analogy to the Nazis -- and nearly in the same breath in which you requested Harper show his identity papers.

quote:

Originally posted by M J Harper:
we were, if you recall, discussing graffiti

Well Ishmael is enjoying your little joke, but we were discussing whether or not English was being written in the thirteenth century.

quote:

On general grounds this is clearly impossible. Since we already know that Chaucer in the fourteenth cnetury is Modern English bar the shouting, and the last Anglo-Saxon material comes from the twelfth century, it requires the entire language to metamorphose (that is virtually every word of vocabulary, a large chunk of grammar and some syntax) in scarcely two hundred years

And the king James Bible was not read in churches and Chaucer and Shakespeare in schools when you were a kid? So archaic language forms can or cannot exist alongside more modern ones in literature for example (and is noit the ASC an example of JUST this)? One moment you are going on about English (unwritten) existing for centuries alongside other languages (Celtic, Latin, Anglo-Saxon and Norman French), now you are expecting us to believe that it was suddenly for some reason impossible for different languages to exist side by side - so one "must have metamorphosed" into the other? Your reasoning is simply faulty.

Literacy was not only "in the hands of the Anglo-Saxon Church", quite apart from the existence of royal scriptoria in which official documents such as royal land grants and diplomatic correspondence were written, there was also a British church. And I can assure you that had there been an English speaking population in the 590s, Augustine would have been required by Pope Gregory the Great to conduct missionary work among them too. The fact that he did not rather suggests something does it not?

quote:

The locals spoke English, an unwritten language [...] the works of Brut, Layamon et al are a difficult-to-decipher mix of English language, the Anglo-Saxon alphabet (the Latin alphabet is not very handy for English) and bits and pieces from French and Latin

Brut is the subject not author. But here we have the difficulty with your thesis. When this was being written down we find this "English" that had existed (according to the Harper theory) yonks was filled with French words, Scandinavian-type pronouns, had the continuous tense (-ing) and so on. So this "English" that was - it is postulated by Harper - spoken for all those previous centuries had not these features (?). So what makes it "English"? If you take away the features used to define "Middle English" which would most reasonably be seen as later introductions (for where would French words come from in PRE-Roman Britain?), what is left? And how does what is left relate to the development of the other germanic languages?

Ishmael, what kind of an archaeologist would I be if I walked by some attempt to pass off some nonsense as 'real (the "only real") history' without reaction? Surely on meeting pseudo-history it behoves me to point out where what is being presented simply goes against what is known both in terms of facts (and non-facts) offered as well as method. You may be looking for entertainment here, so you can enjoy Harper's camel-jokes. Those who come to the Time Team Forum to discuss the archaeology etc might reflect over why Harper tries to gloss over certain elements of the above which show his postulate is less than tenable. I am not in the entertainment business, so you will forgive me if I don't try to make you laugh.

I did not "evoke analogy to the Nazis" but pointed out that this "new" theory duplicated those produced earlier, which our "applied epistemologists" admits ignorance of.

To support Paul on this..

the entire premise for English being spoken before the Romans arrive in Britian is based on 'might' 'if this is were true ...then.. x must be true'

I may as well say People spoke Mayan in Pre Roman britian, but they never wrote it down... and er.. if they never talked to anyone who could, and er... the word "te" sounds a bit like "tree" in modern english so therefore everone spoke a dialect of Yucatan Mayan.

However.. as Paul points out... this is where archaeolgoy comes in.. and the physical culture - the solid evidence based archaeology does not show that... so it is a theory that can be discounted as highly unlikely - though of course not impossible.

The Written evidence, the archaeolgoical evidence and all other evidence points to people speaking a form of language loosely termed 'Celtic'.

Its not hard, to show that, while to show that english was spoken involves discounting obvious evidence to the contrary. A good theory can provide supporting evidence and is suitable to be applied to the entire country ... - this does not, lack of any fir evidence in this case does not prove any point other than there is NO evidence for English being spoken prior to Roman Britian. It also shows a lack of research outwith applied epistimology that if carried out would show jsut how full of holes the theory is...

Ignorance is bliss, especialy if it gets in the way of a leaky theory.

quote:

Well, not being telepathic, I can only go on what he wrote, and what he wrote is that we have no "villages" in the "Anglo-Saxon homelands". If he meant something else it would have been helpful if he'd written something else, don't you think?

Yes he could have worded it better but generally we are more forgiving. This is a Channel 4 public forum and not an academic list.

I would be interested to hear your views on the lack of 'büttel', 'stede' and 'rode' names however.

best

Harry A

So how were the Anglo-Saxons so successful in replacing whatever the natives were speaking with their own language in such a short space of time? Are there other examples of this kind of thing happening elsewhere?

I asked a question earlier in this thread that nobody has attempted to answer.I will ask it again as it relates to archaeological fact.

The mesolithic hunter gatherers who lived at Howick on the Northumberland coast(7800 BC) on a permanent site for 200 years ( 8- 10 generations) came from somewhere. Where?

And by implication what type of language did they speak?

Tommy

I expect somewhere similar to those in Dunbar, Scotland, from the same period...

however they will have come from somewhere more hospitable .. ie south... As the Icae Sheets retreat so man comes back...

We have very very very little skeletal remains of Mesolithic people.. so therefore where they come from genetically does not have a broad enough sample to allow statistical data to be corellated ..

as to what they spoke... sad to say... we will never know... yup... its true... words and language when not recorded or written, will leave no archaeological imprint.. not a sausage.. So teh truth is... the fact is... we will never ever know the language they spoke.

Still .... we know where they lived!

quote:

For, like it or not, any attempt to redate the origins of English must affect the whole edifice of comparative linguistics of the Germanic languages. To ignore it is simply amateurish.

MJ's ideas differ from those of Fõrster. Oppenheimer and Scutt in so far as he is claiming that english is not a germanic language whereas they all accept it is. However, they too all 'attempt to redate' the origins of english.

Your thrust so far has been that MJ is not qualified whereas you are and that you are supported by several generations of scholarly work which has led to a consensus.

There are however dissenters amongst your peers and even MJ raises valid points:

The Brigantes. The Atrebates. The Iceni. Now, I'm sorry, but nobody is ever going to persuade me that these are Celtic names or English names or anything-else names."

None of the tribal names above contain any root which requires a celtic etymology, the Brigantes for example may be explained by a PIE etymology and yet we often see arguments that Britain must have been celtic speaking because we have names such as these. Academia is as much a victim of circular argument as is MJH.

best

Harry A

quote:

The mesolithic hunter gatherers who lived at Howick on the Northumberland coast(7800 BC) on a permanent site for 200 years ( 8- 10 generations) came from somewhere. Where?

I think you can take it that nobody knows. They possibly arrived in Britain much earlier and moved north as the climate improved as suggested by BAJR or they came more directly from the Dogger Hills to escape the flooding. I suppose there is even the possibilty that they migrated from continental europe. You'd have to compare the archaeology with other archaeology to see if there is a pattern but, even then, it might be so broad that it would be impossible to tell.

As BAJR states, we have no clue as to their language.

best

Harry A

Howick

Thanks BARJ for your reply.
Your assertion that these people can from the south is the point I'm trying to make.
Mesolithic finds in Nortumberland have only been found in coastal locations and river valleys. This implies these people migrated along the coast from their ice-age refuge .Which points south east along the northern edge of the North sea land bridge and not overland to the proto-celtic speaking peoples of south west europe.

Tommy

Howick

In answer to Harry, these people were living here at least 2000 years before the land bridge dissappeared.The bridge existed for approimately 4000 years during favourable climatic conditions.So there appearance was not a case of a quick dash to avoid the incoming tide. Assuming 7800 BC is there earliest appearance it still allows 2000 years for following land based migrations.

Tommy

Tommy

eh???

We are talking 10-12 thousand years ago here

and as Harry points out the route is south (ish) up vallys, around coasts peopel still living on the plains of Doggar etc... to make your point work, you would have to be sure that around 12,000 BCE the people in the south west of Europe were speaking 'proto-Celtic' .... ah.... thats where the theory fails, just as I have no idea what teh meso people of northeast Britian were speaking, neither do you have any clue about what people were speaking in south west Europe... unless you have
a) a Time Machine
b) a copy of Icae Age monthly (Sept 8769 BCE)
c) a theory which can't be proved... I can say with quiet confidence... I don't know, and will never know.... all I can say is what is possible based on the evidence.

ps... we also have meso occupation inland... so does that prove? disprove? theories about movement. we know that peopel can use the paths of least resistance and also high food content... so coasts and river valleys suit quite well... as do lakes.... I take it you have looked carefully at the landscape of 12000 year old Europe.... or have you just guessed that it is coverd in trees and people were unable to walk through them?

Do you know teh locations of rivers and vallies from sw Europe to Howick? do you know what the climate was? the topography? the species and density of trees? the location and type of settlment and the pattern? the location of finds from the Meso corrolated with the reason these places were found (- was there a research agenda or are they chance finds within development control - thus creating a biased search pattern) etc....

This Ice Age refuge you talk of... where is it?

I am not trying to be rude, but I am trying to make it clear that to make assumptions based on half (or less) of the known facts, is to leave a theory in tatters before it even starts.

quote:

In answer to Harry, these people were living here at least 2000 years before the land bridge dissappeared.The bridge existed for approimately 4000 years during favourable climatic conditions.So there appearance was not a case of a quick dash to avoid the incoming tide. Assuming 7800 BC is there earliest appearance it still allows 2000 years for following land based migrations.

Tommy,

The 'land bridge' was not a strip of land. It was a huge area. It neither disappeared quickly nor evenly. There must have been instances where people simply moved a few yards up the hill as it were. It depends on what they were feeding on. Some people would follow the herds whilst others may have relied more on fishing.

best

harry A

One point you Ice-Age freaks ought to bear in mind is that glaciation destroys all evidence. A coupla thousand feet of ice will do that.

So when you speak of people coming and going as the ice sheet waxes and wanes, you should also remember that the ice-sheet is progressively wiping out the evidence of people that used to be there. No orthodox authority has ever taken this on board.

Nor has any orthodox authourity wondered why it is such a remarkable coincidence that after endless waxings'n'wanings, the last one happened to be the greatest in extent. In other words it wiped out ALL the evidence of ALL human occupation to the north of the edge of this particular Ice Sheet.

Howick

BARG
I'm not an academic and I ask the question in order to increase my understanding and place it some context .
My knowledge is based on general texts from people like Higham,Pryor,Oppenhiemer and older works from historical geographers like Mitchell and Darby.I only claim to know a little about my own locality and look for a greater understanding.
As regards what the vegetation of the locality was during this time, it comes from pollen analyis.It indicates Northumberland was colonised successively by Juniper scrub, then birch woodland and finnally desiduous woodland of oak,elm,pine and hazel.The pollen record shows only 10% non tree pollen indicating blanket cover up to 760m (Pennington 1970). Meaning only the Cheviots and the high Pennines poked above the woodland.All this happened before Howick was occupied(incidentally dated using hazelnuts.)
As regards the river system between Howick and the rest of europe my understanding comes from the oil and gas surveys of the now submerged land bridge ,which have identified the gravel beds of the drowned rivers. This indicates that the Thames and rivers of East Anglia flowed into the Atlantic via the Channel(as did the Siene and Rhine) while the rivers of northern England flowed into the North sea.Therefore there was a water shed in the now submerged land bridge.The geologists also tell us this land bridge is relatively lower today due to it slowly sinking as a consequence of iso-static rebound because of the melting of the ice sheet over Scandinavia.This is why it remained dry for thousands of years after the ice had melted.

As regards where the ice age refuge the Howick people came from is, I don't know. Thats why I asked the original question. Oppenhiemer offers 3 possibilities Iberia , Romania or Ukraine but it could just as easily be be further afield. As you say, we don't know, it was a long time ago.
As regards half baked theories ,my understanding of scientific research is that a theory is always based on incomplete data otherwise it is fact. We will never increase our understanding if we are frightened to speak for fear of appearing foolish . I speak from the safety of not having to sell a book or obtain a grant based on peer reviewed paper.
All I'm saying is if you turn around and look at your foot prints, it gives you an good idea of where you came from.

PS For MJH ,we are talking about events after the last ice age.

Tommy

quote:

Originally posted by M J Harper:
No orthodox authority has ever taken this on board

Rubbish.

As for the rest, I think you are confusing the Anglian and Devensian ice sheets. Look it up.

Look up Cromer Forest beds too while you are at it.

But actually above they were talking about the onset of the holocene anyway.

quote:

In other words it wiped out ALL the evidence of ALL human occupation to the north of the edge of this particular Ice Sheet.

Now MJ you are being particularly mischievous. We are afterall only referring to events and the archaeology since the last ice age.

One thing did occur to me though. You claim english is not connected to the germanic group of languages and admit that you 'have no fossil'. You also point out that we have no fossil of proto german, proto celtic etc. But reconstructions have been attempted. Do you have any reconstruction of a proto english?

Or will you have no truck with any of this proto stuff anyway?

quote:

I’m not sure there are any geneticists that support von Daniken.

No but Brian Sykes claims to have met a bloke in a pub in Wales who knew the last two Neanderthals living in Britian. Apparantly they died in the 1980s.

Now, either Brian Sykes is pulling our leg or he thinks there is something in it, something which would have been laughed at a few years ago.


best

harry A

best

Harry A

quote:

It indicates Northumberland was colonised successively by Juniper scrub, then birch woodland and finnally desiduous woodland of oak,elm,pine and hazel.The pollen record shows only 10% non tree pollen indicating blanket cover up to 760m (Pennington 1970). Meaning only the Cheviots and the high Pennines poked above the woodland.

This is consistent with the picture on Saddleworth and Marsden Moors, an area not as high as you state, but one which was above the tree line. Two hills, March Hill and Pule Hill have produced a lot of mesolithic flint finds.

The picture seems to be that mesolithic man waited in these areas, preparing their flint, until the animals left the wooded valleys for grazing on the tops. The flint is mostly found where there is both shelter and good views.

The interesting part is that there is no flint local to the area. It had to be imported 50 or 60 miles.

quote:

The geologists also tell us this land bridge is relatively lower today due to it slowly sinking as a consequence of iso-static rebound because of the melting of the ice sheet over Scandinavia.

It's a complicated picture because you have post glacial rebound and rising sea levels. One part of Northumbria initially experienced a fast rebound, it depends on the rock and depth of ice, but rising sea levels overtook the rise in land once the rebound had stopped. As far as the Doggerland is concerned, you may like to look at Bryony Coles' work:

http://www.sogaer.ex.ac.uk/archaeology/research/rdoggerland.shtml

Note, the map on that page is only a suggestion and only at one moment in time. The problem with variations in land and sea levels is that rivers too change their courses.

best

harry A