<<All evidence suggests that the St Petersburg. Bede is an early and accurate copy of Bede >>

Oh well then, I can practically rest my case. The whole thing stinks of rotten fish. Take this from Wikipedia:

<<Although not heavily illuminated, it is famous for containing the earliest historiated initial (one containing a picture) in European illumination.>>

Yeah right, at the turn of the nineteenth century the Russkies are hoovering up "antiquarian" goodies from all over the European market. Naturally they don't get the really good stuff but they do get stuff "worth buying". And blow me down, they come away with "the earliest historiated initial in European illumination". What are the chances of that happening, as Harry Hill so often asks us.

Let me see if I've got the situation right. The earliest illuminated historiated initial gets done in Jarrow in the eighth century. It then disappears for eleven hundred years and turns up in St Petersburg c 1800. Blimey, did Tsar Pete buy the Brooklyn Bridge by any chance?

And please don't be fooled by all these palaeaographer chappies -- none of them has actually tested the piece. They're going strictly by style -- whether language or lettering. And here's why. Let's send our own crack team of ink-analysts and carbon-daters along to the Hermitage and see what happens:
Us: Please Sir, can we test the Petersburg Bede for dating purposes?
Hermitage Director: And if it is genuine?
Us: Well, nothing, it's strictly an academic exercise.
HD: And if it fails...?
Us: um...you lose the central exhibit which really pulls in all the British and American high-rollers...
HD: Let me get back to you on that one.

Poor Mr Harper - You are simply proving my point. Your instinct to dispose of evidence that doesn't suit you is all too clearly displayed in these desperate tactics. Evidence of any kind is a nuisance to you. I see that. You want to make it go away.

Once again we see you pouring scorn on an entire discipline because it isn't telling you what you want to hear. When you thought (erroneously) that palaeographers were helpfully disposing of this annoying evidence for you, you were eager to clasp them to your bosom.

I felt sure that it wouldn't be long before you were trying to prove the St Peterburg Bede a fake! It's all very entertaining, but it's not science or scholarship. Attacking one early text will get you nowhere.

<<Attacking one early text will get you nowhere.>>

Ah, but what about all texts? Things under glass cases are as much objects of reverence to us as saints' bones in their reliquaries were to our medieval forebears. And the suspicion is that they come from the same place.

Remember, in the sixteenth century, with the advent of the Reformation and then the Council of Trent, the whole relics industry was stopped in its tracks. But neither the demand nor the supply was dead. Everybody switched over to the production of antiquities.

Now you think I am questioning the Petersburg Bede just to get out of a tight spot (which I certainly am) but I have not plucked this belief out the blue yonder. Applied Epistemologists have for years been trying to get orthodoxy to take seriously the fact, and I believe it to be a fact, that great proportions of their evidential base is false. Once you have the nose for the job, two minutes on Wiki provides a prime facie case.

Take Beowulf. Since this is the only surviving piece of Anglo-Saxon literature of any length, Beowulf is a huge part of Anglo-Saxon studies. Because of the link with English, Beowulf is compulsorily studied in all the major Eng Lit departments. And Beowulf is a forgery. It never occurs to anyone close to the masterpiece that masterpieces do not turn up five hundred years later unheralded, unannounced and unprecedented.

I am not saying Bede is spurious. I would not even say the the Five Languages passage is not of Bede's making. But I would say that the chances are that the Petersburg Bede is a forgery. And so are a lot of other Bedes.

So it's a matter for you, Jean. You can either do what academics do and study Bede over and over again, in greater and greater detail, learning more and more about less and less. Or you can switch over to the expanding torrent of Applied Epistemology and use Bede as a catalyst to a whole new way of inspecting history.

Well now I didn't think that I would tempt you out of the Garden of Eden with my apple of knowledge. Not when you are having so much fun and frolic.

The questionable nature of evidence is a given. Barry Cunliffe is fond of saying that there is no such thing as a fact in archaeology. I could say much the same of history. Our vision of the past is a construct. The question is how best to build it.

The abandonment of all evidence simply leaves us with the null hypothesis. We know nothing. So scholars endeavour to make the best sense of the evidence. The end result is a shifting picture. It will never be complete. It will be constantly tested and readjusted.

A burning desire to understand is what drives scholarship. Scholars accept the discipline of science, for it is more important to them to understand, than to win an argument or defend a theory. Odd that objectivity should be underpinned by desire, but so I believe it is.

quote:

Originally posted by M J Harper:
Yeah right, at the turn of the nineteenth century the Russkies are hoovering up "antiquarian" goodies from all over the European market

The revisionist historian Harper denied earlier here any nationalistic motivation in making his claims for the extraordinary status of the English language among European languages. So what are we to make of this latest display of prejudice?

By the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Russian empire was extremely powerful and wealthy. This was the context of the creation of the huge imperial collection of art, including an exceptional and representative collection of western European art which makes the Hermitage one of the top five 'universal' museums in the world today. The Bede manuscript is just one of thousands of exceptional items Catherine the Great and her successors acquired.

I really do not understand the style of argument that if "the Russkies" have it, it must be fake . When Stalin sold off some paintings from the old imperial collections they were bought by the banker and industrialist Andrew W. Mellon and most formed the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.. Maybe Harper should tell them he's got "good reason to believe" they're exhibiting "fakes" too.

Yeah right,
- any work of art in the Russian imperial collection was a fake (and only M.J. Harper "knows" about it)
- a "lot of other Bedes too" were (and only M.J. Harper "knows" about it)
- Beowulf is a fake [so the poem Judith bound in with it and by the same hand would be too] (and only M.J. Harper "knows" about it)
- the "relic industry" took to faking museum-loads of fake antiquities which were accepted by gullible and uncritical scholars of the Reformation and later (and only M.J. Harper "knows" about it),
- the entire archaeological and historical record is hopelessly wrong (and only M.J. Harper "knows" about it),
- and any scholarship which does not produce the same results as Harper's uncontrolled pseudo-musings must also be false (and only devotees of M.J. Harper tiny revisionist historical group - many of whom are now taking part in this thread - "know" about it).

We are asked to believe that only one man has special privileged access to "the shocking truth" which only he and his little revisionist group can now "reveal" to a sceptical academic world, which is now persecuting him for "revealing" what so many factors conspire to keep a "secret history". Yeah right.

Actually, there is a much simpler alternative resolution of this apparent "paradox". It is the basic paradigm that there is only one thing here that is false and based on the wrong premises.

<<A burning desire to understand is what drives scholarship>>

Yes, but this is also the point at which things can go entirely in the wrong direction. Take Beowulf because, unlike Bede, this rests ultimately on a single copy alleged to have survived from Anglo-Saxon times.

It is the case that there was no chance until the twentieth century of exposing fakes, so for several hundred years we have the situation of numberless scholars with a burning desire to understand Beowulf. And there is now a veritable mountain of scholarship. It is this mountain that gives the appearance of a 'solid body of evidence'.

And one decent carbon test (of an admittedly now burnt artefact) will blow the mountain away with a puff. Applied Epistemologists operate at this level. Because we can range over the whole of academia we constantly come across situations where the mountain is not only built on a molehill but the molehill is itself spurious. Needless to say, the Academy rarely (I think never would be a more accurate estimate) agrees with us.

PMB himself provides a good example. He has written what looks to be the standard one volume English language treatment of the origin of the Slavs. I can blow it out of the water with one mighty blow of the Applied Epistemological axe. How do I know this? Simply because I have read the standard one volume English language accounts of the origins of the various Slav peoples, and I know they have made the exact same error as their Western European counterparts.

Am I right in this contention? PMB will say not. Maybe he's right. I'll just be moving on to something else in any case. I've "done" national creation myths.

Well, I guess one can't expect much from somebody who admits he found out about a key passage in Bede about what languages were spoken in Britain in the eighth century AFTER he'd published a book about (among other things) what languages were spoken in Britain in the eighth century...

quote:

Originally posted by M J Harper:
PMB himself provides a good example. He has written what looks to be the standard one volume English language treatment of the origin of the Slavs. I can blow it out of the water with one mighty blow of the Applied Epistemological axe. How do I know this? Simply because I have read the standard one volume English language accounts of the origins of the various Slav peoples, and I know they have made the exact same error as their Western European counterparts. Am I right in this contention? PMB will say not.

Well, funnily enough... PMB would say that's quite an astounding statement to make about a book you've not read, but assuming it says only what other authors have written. Actually in writing it I looked a little beyond the "standard one-volume accounts" and CERTAINLY did not restrict my attention to works written in English (!!!) There is a 37 page critical apparatus and bibliography...

Anyway, my point above was about the nationalist bias your ill-informed comment about "the Russkies" betrays. I see you are disinclined to address it. What kind of "Revisionist historian" are you in fact?

quote:

Originally posted by M J Harper:
I'll just be moving on to something else in any case. I've "done" national creation myths.

Hmm. All you have "done" is attempted to replace the pictures presented as a result of careful scholarship with an entirely mythical mystical and nationalistic one of your own making. The only reason you are claiming to have "completed your task" is because its slowly dawning on you that the cover of your little revisionist group has been blown.

My disagreement with you arises solely out of your statement, in your blurb, that the Slavs expanded from the Ukraine in the early medieval period. This is just not tenable. The difference between, let's say, Polish and Russian cannot conceivably have arisen in such a short period of time.

This is not your fault, you are just taking linguists' view about the the rate of language morphology at face value. They are constructing their rates-of-change from national histories. These are based on ceation myths. The whole merry-go-round is a mare's nest.

You will note that this is exactly the same scenario as I wrote about in The History of Britain Revealed. And my lack of Bediean knowledge (actually I mis-stated...I knew the quote but misinterpreted what he said, it is not unambiguous) nowithstanding, I can claim to be more of an expert on this narrow question than you. Much good that will do me.

I wish you'd stop belly-aching about some hidden nationalist agenda of mine. I am perfectly entitled to say that the nouveau Russians were a bunch of patsies when they first came up against the European art market which had been 'catering' for the Grand Tour and its antecedents for centuries. Perhaps I ought to accuse you in turn of being an undue Slavophile. But I wouldn't dream of it. I am sure you're just a geezer trying to make sense of technical questions the same as me.

quote:

Originally posted by M J Harper:
The difference between, let's say, Polish and Russian cannot conceivably have arisen in such a short period of time..

You know, I really dont care what you "think" is conceivable. I know perfectly well what the differences are, and I bet you don't. I know how the various explanations were arrived at (and it was not as you suggest, your applied pistemology fails you there). You are speaking yet again from a position of ignorance.

Actually my book is not based primarily on the accounts of linguists, it addresses the problem from the point of view of the social and cultural change the linguistic processes REFLECT. And of course the social and cultural changes leave a trail in the archaeologhical evidence and historical records, so for the chronology I am quite independent of any modern myth making. The book's whole last chapter recounts how modern ideologies have conditioned the way various ideas have developed in the past, which rather suggests that I am of course only too well aware of the issues and have taken them into account in presenting my own conclusions.

quote:

I can claim to be more of an expert on this narrow question than you

. Really? Well, you can "claim" what you like (what's new?) but I would not be so sure of that in your place. Seen my CV?

quote:

I am perfectly entitled to say that the nouveau Russians were a bunch of patsies when they first came up against the European art market

well, as we have seen you make free use of your right to say whatever comes into your head. That does not make you right. The fact that a manuscript ended up being in one of the richest and most representative collections of Western European art does NOT entitle you to immediately pronounce it "probably a fake", just because its not in a English collection.

quote:

I wish you'd stop belly-aching about some hidden nationalist agenda of mine

No, I don't think we should. Just as you accuse others of having been misled by their ideological setting, then I think (especially since you dont provide a critical apparatus to show where your influences come) we are entitled to ask about the ideological context of your own weird ideas about the special place of the language of the English in the development of European culture. You attempt to hide behind the label of "Applied Epistemology" but in fact nothing you have said here has any relation to real epistemology, you are merely misusing the term. So what is it you are trying to hide behind it?

Can we ignore Mr Harper's intemperance for a moment and return to the argument? If the rigorous objectivity of the facts is of overarching importance, can we not ignore any supposed or actual ideologies and focus on the assertions themselves?

Jean M said

"I gave you a piece of evidence - Bede's list of the languages spoken in his day... They were English, British, Irish, Pictish and Latin.

Please excuse my ignorance, but can anyone explain how this in any way contradicts the view that English was the language of the populace at large in England certainly before the Anglo-Saxons and could even be the aboriginal language of the British Isles?

quote:

Please excuse my ignorance, but can anyone explain how this in any way contradicts the view that English was the language of the populace at large in England certainly before the Anglo-Saxons and could even be the aboriginal language of the British Isles?

It doesn't Innocent. You're quite correct to point that out.

All this 'I am more qualified than you' and interpretations of 'evidence' is just subjective. The disagreement is one of the rate of language change. MJ argues that language change is rather slow, mainstream thinking is that it is rather fast. That's the bottom line.

Mainstream thinking can show that language does change rather quickly but MJ claims that this a circular argument. MJ really ought to show examples, perhaps even one, where a language has not changed over a long period of time, to strengthen his argument.

He needs a fossil.

best

Harry A

Dear Harry
As I pointed out we don't have any fossils. Unwritten languages leave no evidence so we can't dig them up and examine them. They do leave place names of course but every time I dig them up and say, "Look, English... Welsh... French... Polish... Russian..." everybody jumps on my case.

The best we can do is examine the oldest languages for which we do have a record and see how much they change. Here are the ones I know ( I haven't checked the exact dates). Perhaps others may know of others.
Classical Greek -- virtually unchanged from seventh century BC until it disappears as a spoken language in the Dark Ages
Latin -- virtually unchanged from the fourth century BC until it disappears as a spoken language in the Dark Ages
Irish -- virtually unchanged from the eighth century until the present
Welsh -- virtually unchanged from the ninth century to the present
French -- virtually unchanged from the tenth century to the present
Provencal (Occitan) -- virtually unchanged from the eleventh century onwards
Fourteenth century onwards -- Italian, English, Castillian, Catalan, Portugueses, German etc etc -- all virtually unchanged until the present.

I can't help thinking there's a pattern there if only we could discern it.

That appears to be the whole thing in a nutshell.

And with room to spare, since it's not a particularly convoluted or demanding argument so much as a straightforward observation.

Compare: the smooth evolution, at whatever rate, from Anglo-Saxon to English has not been observed.

You can say "look: these were the steps" if you like, but those are just the steps you must identify in order to answer "what if English evolved from Anglo-Saxon?"

quote:

Welsh -- virtually unchanged from the ninth century to the present

Now this depends where one starts counting the changes from MJ. Take welsh for example. You start with old welsh (9th/10th cents). Why not start with the early welsh in the 6th cent?

There is also a tendency to think of language changing at a constant rate, this too may not be true. The rate may be quite variable.

best

Harry A

quote:

You start with old welsh (9th/10th cents). Why not start with the early welsh in the 6th cent?

Be fair Harry: he did say "I haven't checked the exact dates".

You wish to reinforce the point with another few centuries of Welsh on record?

[What is early about "early Welsh"?]

quote:

There is also a tendency to think of language changing at a constant rate, this too may not be true. The rate may be quite variable.

How are we to tell?

If several centuries in several languages is not enough to say "well, it just chugs along slowly", what else can we do? Appeal to the rate of change of unwritten languages that we by definition know nothing about?

Linguists will tell you that we know the rate can be variable, but the Anglo-Saxon = Old English equation is the underpinning for all of this.

Let me try to guess the next step: the Great Vowel Shift was a widespread and systematic change in pronunciation... and it is on record.

It's just a shame we can't explain it.

But since all we have on record is a change in the way things were spelled, how can we tell that pronunciation also changed?

quote:

can anyone explain how this in any way contradicts the view that English was the language of the populace at large in England certainly before the Anglo-Saxons and could even be the aboriginal language of the British Isles?

Certainly. MJ Harper's contention is that at the time of Bede there were two distinct Germanic languages spoken in Britain: Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and another English which he conceives of as earlier and yet more similar to Modern English. Bede lists one English.

quote:

What is early about "early Welsh"?

It's the earliest language that is distinctly 'welsh'. Before that, brythonic may be a single language or group of 'P' celtic languages. It's a sort of step between the claimed language spoken during the time of the romans and the language what we now call welsh.

quote:

How are we to tell?

That's the problem, we can't. Personally, I don't hold with the constant rate of change theories and, if correct, back projections which rely on it are probably wrong. It's like assuming population models with a constant birth rate. In reality, the rate goes up and down.

Assuming a slow rate is just as valid as assuming a fast rate. Most people go for the fast rate because it is supported by scholarship. If one discounts that scholarship, then the slow rate hypothesis again becomes a working model. But, don't expect those who rely on the results of scholarship to regard it as a valid hypothesis. They see it as cheating as it were. If you can't produce evidence for slow change, you have to question the validity of the scholarship itself. Which is what MJ is doing and he does have the support of some academics.

quote:

But since all we have on record is a change in the way things were spelled, how can we tell that pronunciation also changed?

I'm not an advocate of the theory that the written language accurately reflects the spoken language.

best

Harry A

I should have added that Bede does not list a language which we cannot otherwise identify, which could be Mr Harper's English. It should be born in mind that for Bede - English (Anglish) was the language of his people the Angles. So we know that he is talking about Old English. Mr Harper's proposed language would have another name, if it existed.

quote:

Bede lists one English.

I see what you mean.

How easy is it to establish unequivocally which people or languages he was referring to and whether spoken or written?

I don't suppose the inclusion of Latin implies anyone was learning Latin at their mother's knee. If the definition/derivation of "British" is problematic, do we know what Bede meant by it? Did he have a better idea of who the Picts were than we do? What if Irish, the language of people in Ireland, is English...?

The answer may be too long for this thread, but I suspect you can see that even such a basic reading of the source materials can be coloured by, but most likely consistent with, the reader's assumptions.

What other direct evidence is there that can not be reduced to a re-presentation of the "Anglo-Saxon = Old English" paradigm?

[I'm not trying to dodge the evidence. I've heard others accept or deny what suits them from Bede and I think we should be allowed to be circumspect.]

Further evidence of the use of the OE equivalent of "English" to describe the language Old English comes in the preface to Alfred's translation from Latin to OE of Gregory's Pastoral Care, where he refers a number of time to translation from Latin to English. I'm sure there must be lots more references, but that's what I have immediately to hand.

quote:

[Early Welsh] is the earliest language that is distinctly 'welsh'. Before that, brythonic may be...

But the idea that languages go through rapid transitions when we happen to have no evidence of them and then slam the anchors on and stay remarkably unchanged for the course of recorded history... and any 'calibrations' the historical linguists do to put absolute dates on things... stems from "Anglo-Saxon = Old English".

Just to be charitable, let's say "distinctly Welsh" means "half way between Brythonic and modern Welsh". That's 50% from the 6th century to the 21st, so the 2 must have become differentiated circa the 9th century BC. I don't think that's what they say.

quote:

Assuming a slow rate is just as valid as assuming a fast rate.

How are we to decide that then? Surely, the only rational thing to do is look at the evidence of written languages and how languages are actually acquired by our children.

quote:

Most people go for the fast rate because it is supported by scholarship.

Speaking of which, I have never understood why all those pesky details like case endings are supposed to have been dropped as part of a natural simplification... and yet, after untold centuries or millennia of development before coming to England, the Anglo-Saxons still had their complex grammar.

This whole of idea of 'early' and 'old' and 'proto' is part of the picture of languages starting up and going through recognisable changes... whereas, of course, no natural language has a beginning.

quote:

I'm not an advocate of the theory that the written language accurately reflects the spoken language.

I suppose you might point out that the average of several numbers is not necessarily (unlikely to be, I suppose) any one of those numbers. And yet the average is a reflection of the numbers; and as a calculation (throw in the standard deviation if you like), it