quote:

Originally posted by PMB:
My point was the term "Anglo-Saxon" refers to a specific language spoken in a specific place at a specific time rather than being a vague generic term. I think we have to be very careful with terminology especially if (as here) we want to discuss the overturning of existing models.

I accept this. In this sense all that we can say is Anglo-Saxon was written in Britain from some time after the Anglo-Saxon conquest to the Norman conquest. It is probably safe to say that it was spoken by the Anglo-Saxon warrior bands/mercenaries who came to these shores during the period before and after the legions left in 410.

Nonetheless, much ink has been used trying to figure out how what we now know as English came to be spoken here. Current thinking is clearly along the lines of Anglo-Saxons speaking Old English came to a Celtic speaking country and somehow managed to persuade the population to start speaking their language. In no other part of the Roman Empire did such a linguistic shift occur.

I would suggest that to engage in any kind of assessment of the validity of current models we need to explore what Anglo-Saxon means. The current orthodox view is that the Anglo-Saxons came from northern Germany and southern Denmark speaking the forerunner of the language that we now speak. The Scutt-Oppenheimer-Harper view is that English was spoken here well before Hengest and Horsa did their first booze cruise.

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Originally posted by Vlad the Impala:
what language did the Germanic people used by the Roman military speak?

Probably a Germanic language. and Latin as the lingua franca, of course.

quote:

Originally posted by Duncan A:
In this sense all that we can say is Anglo-Saxon was written in Britain from some time after the Anglo-Saxon conquest to the Norman conquest. It is probably safe to say that it was spoken by the Anglo-Saxon warrior bands/mercenaries who came to these shores during the period before and after the legions left in 410.

Nonetheless, much ink has been used trying to figure out how what we now know as English came to be spoken here. Current thinking is clearly along the lines of Anglo-Saxons speaking Old English came to a Celtic speaking country and somehow managed to persuade the population to start speaking their language. In no other part of the Roman Empire did such a linguistic shift occur.

I would suggest that to engage in any kind of assessment of the validity of current models we need to explore what Anglo-Saxon means. The current orthodox view is that the Anglo-Saxons came from northern Germany and southern Denmark speaking the forerunner of the language that we now speak. The Scutt-Oppenheimer-Harper view is that English was spoken here well before Hengest and Horsa did their first booze cruise.

Am I being pedantic by thinking that we should put off the "Anglo-Saxon" label for quite a bit longer, though? It wasn't just in the Roman armies that there were separate ethnic groups called Angles and Saxons rather than one homogeneous group called Anglo-Saxons. The settlement / invasion / conquest of post-Roman Britain was by these separate groups too. There was not one conquering force, surely. Parts of Britain were settled by Angles, others by Saxons etc. Separate kingdoms in what was to become England existed for some time.

I'm not sure if I would put Harper in the same camp as Scutt and Oppenhimer, by the way. He says that the Anglo Saxons didn't bring English to Britain because it was already here. He refuses to accept that English is a product of Anglo-Saxon.

Separate tribes certainly but supposedly speaking Old English, the same language.

Harper certainly refuses to accept that English derives from Anglo-Saxon, or to be correct, the language spoken by the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians. Scutt and Oppenheimer must be of the same view by implication because if English was already spoken here how could modern English derive from Anglo-Saxon?

quote:

Scutt and Oppenheimer must be of the same view by implication because if English was already spoken here how could modern English derive from Anglo-Saxon?

Not sure of Scutt's view but I believe Oppenheimer merely shifts the Anglo-Saxon "invasion" in time -- suggesting the Anglo-Saxons were already here when the Romans came. If Anglo-Saxon is assumed apriori to be the root language of English then this appears a necessary implication of Oppeneimer's evidence.

On the other hand, it's simpler just to dismiss that linkage and assume English an independent language (in so far as any tongue is "independent"). That solves the problem most cleanly.

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Originally posted by 1shmael:
Not sure of Scutt's view but I believe Oppenheimer merely shifts the Anglo-Saxon "invasion" in time -- suggesting the Anglo-Saxons were already here when the Romans came. If Anglo-Saxon is assumed apriori to be the root language of English then this appears a necessary implication of Oppeneimer's evidence.

Oppenheimer thinks the Anglo-Saxons were simply 'early' Vikings. He suggests a much earlier source for the English language with Germanic immigration across the land bridge when Britain was still connected to the continent. This immigration could be contemporaneous with Iberian immigration from the west, perhaps between 17,000-10,000 years BP. He also suggests that English is a much older split from the Germanic family of languages.

I thought that I would breathe a little life back into this thread because many of the points that we are exploring in the threads on population genetics and The Face of Britain are looking at this most interesting of questions, namely the arrival of English speaking people in these islands.

Oh dear. People did not arrive in these islands speaking English. Angles and Saxons and Jutes and Danes and Norse and Normans arrived here at various times and the ultimate result was the glorious English language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_English_language

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Originally posted by Jean Manco:
Oh dear. People did not arrive in these islands speaking English. Angles and Saxons and Jutes and Danes and Norse and Normans arrived here at various times and the ultimate result was the glorious English language.

Don't 'oh dear' me. Wikipedia is not the be-all and end-all of speculation on the past. For God's sake man.

There is a new view that is emerging. New, as in interesting because it challenges what we think. Now it may turn out to be wrong but at least people should be aware of what several of our best and brightest are now thinking.

Here is a list of those who are entertaining the possibility that English was being spoken in England before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons:

1. Geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer
2. Geneticist Peter Forster
3. Archaeologist Winn Scutt
4. Epistemologist Mick Harper.

Now that's clearly not an 'oh dear'. That's an 'oh really?'

Here is a link to Winn Scutt's website. Try this for starters:
http://www.archaeology.ws/

Let us be clear in our terminology. "English" = the language we speak today in Britain and in other English-speaking countries i.e. Modern English. That language developed after 1066.

I have not read Stephen Oppenheimer's book yet, though I have ordered it. However I would be astonished to learn that he claims that people entered these islands before the Roman conquest speaking English. That is simply a linguistic impossibility. What does he actually say?

Doesn't he talk about the possibility of people from northern Europe arriving on these shores speaking a Germanic language before the Roman conquest? That would be a perfectly respectable theory, though unproven and not supported by other evidence.

By the way - I linked to Wikipedia because the current standard published texts e.g. the Oxford and Cambridge histories of the English language are not available online. Wikipedia is far from perfect. But in this case it is following current academic thought (at the time I linked to it anyway.)

quote:

Originally posted by Jean Manco:
I have not read Stephen Oppenheimer's book yet, though I have ordered it. However I would be astonished to learn that he claims that people entered these islands before the Roman conquest speaking English. That is simply a linguistic impossibility. What does he actually say?
Doesn't he talk about the possibility of people from northern Europe arriving on these shores speaking a Germanic language before the Roman conquest? That would be a perfectly respectable theory, though unproven and not supported by other evidence.

Oppenheimer bases his analysis on the work of Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster. Forster specialises in the genetics of ancient languages. His view is that English actually split from the germanic language group much earlier than is conventionally accepted. Oppenheimer's genetic mapping of germanic genes in eastern Britain also suggests a much earlier immigration than post 449, perhaps as early as 2500 BC.

Now whilst the germanic immigrants clearly wouldn't have been speaking English in the modern sense of the term, in the analysis developed by Oppenheimer and Forster English evolved here and was spoken here well before the Romans arrived. Winn Scutt has also found extensive place name evidence that this was the case too.

This is clearly controversial and there will be massive resistance to the implications of these findings throughout the History and Archaeology professions, not to mention Linguistics. Nonetheless, I think it is crucial to listen to legitimate evidence from such distinguished academics. Perhaps the evidence will be shown to be wrong in the full course of time but this new perspective does answer that most mystifying of riddles: how did a germanic language come to spoken in England if a) the population was 'celtic' and b) the Anglo-Saxon invaders were numbered in only their thousands.

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the Anglo-Saxon invaders were numbered in only their thousands.

That is the currently fashionable theory, which I have never accepted. And now it looks as though the genetic evidence is against it.

Wether it was a few thousand or a mass migration by the Anglo Saxons, Oppenheimer, Scutt, Forster and Harper at least open up an interesting debate on the mystery (for me, at any rate) of the apparant obliteration of British language and culture within two hundred years of their arrival in England. (Incidentally, I chipped into this debate in the 'Books' thread without realising it'd been going on for sometime elsewhere. Amateur.)
Harper writes scathingly (and amusingly) of the hostile and patronising attitude of the historical and archaeological establishment when faced with any deviation from the orthodox view of the developement of the English language. I assumed he was overstating for effect. I'm not so sure now.

Yes I rather gathered that those fools in academia had failed to recognise the genius of Mr Harper.

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Originally posted by Duncan A:
Don't 'oh dear' me. Wikipedia is not the be-all and end-all of speculation on the past. For God's sake man.

POI, Mr Chairman. Jean isn't a man.

quote:

Originally posted by Duncan A:
Here is a list of those who are entertaining the possibility that English was being spoken in England before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons:

1. Geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer
2. Geneticist Peter Forster
3. Archaeologist Winn Scutt
4. Epistemologist Mick Harper.

I'm glad to see that you describe the above as "entertaining the possibility". I am all for entertaining possibilities. What strikes me, however, is that there is not a philologist or linguist in sight.

quote:

Originally posted by Duncan A:
Oppenheimer bases his analysis on the work of Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster. Forster specialises in the genetics of ancient languages.

I don't want to be picky, but what the heck is the genetics of ancient languages? How can languages have genes?

Foster's work was slated to some extent by the late Larry Trask. I'm not saying that it was deservedly so, I forget the ins and outs of it, but it is out there on the WWW somewhere - I'll try and find it.

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Originally posted by Steffan:
I don't want to be picky, but what the heck is the genetics of ancient languages? How can languages have genes?

This is from the the Cambridge University website: http://www.newhall.cam.ac.uk/people/forster/

quote:

Dr Forster's research interests range from bioinformatics, horse prehistory and reconstruction of proto-languages to the effect of natural radioactivity on human DNA. He specialises in mitochondrial DNA analysis, developing phylogenetic techniques to reconstruct ancestral genotypes from living genotypes. Dr Forster's research on molecular genetic dating of ancestral nodes to determine prehistoric demography and migration was brought to the public eye on the BBC programme Motherland: A Genetic Journey. This showed how, using mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome DNA from cheek cells, the African ancestry of African-Caribbeans living in Britain may be traced.

Forster also has his own website: http://www.mcdonald.cam.ac.uk/genetics/

quote:

Originally posted by Steffan:
Did anyone here see Newsnight last week when it featured an item on whether English (or a Teutonic predecessor) was spoken in Britain in Iron Age Britain.

When all is said and done (theories, books, TV programmes etc).
We will never actually know the answer to this one.

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Originally posted by PMT:
When all is said and done (theories, books, TV programmes etc).
We will never actually know the answer to this one.

What? If all Historians and Archaeologists just sat down and accepted this view then we really might as well give up. Luckily they don't and neither should we. As long as we're here then new evidence can be found and new interpretations can be created upon the basis of that evidence.

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Originally posted by Duncan A:

quote:

Originally posted by Steffan:
I don't want to be picky, but what the heck is the genetics of ancient languages? How can languages have genes?

This is from the the Cambridge University website: http://www.newhall.cam.ac.uk/people/forster/

Thanks, Duncan. I know who he is and what he does. However, I still see no explanation of this genetics of ancient languages concept. It seems to me that people are crossing into different disciplines from their primary expertise and I just wonder how qualified they are in each of them. Oppenheimer doesn't seem overly convinced with this approach of Foster either (page 259 of Origin) and there is little that convinces me of its validity. I should follow it up with a more detailed account, I suppose, but I am feeling increasingly out of my depth myself.

quote:

Originally posted by Steffan:
Foster's work was slated to some extent by the late Larry Trask. I'm not saying that it was deservedly so, I forget the ins and outs of it, but it is out there on the WWW somewhere - I'll try and find it.

This is the URL for Trask's critique from the Linguist List, 7/7/03. linguistlist

This is a link to the original article by Forster and Alfred Toth, as appeared in the PNAS in an on-line version.
PNAS 1/7/03

These can also be accessed via Keith Briggs site where he has a concise review of Forster and Toth which is worth a look.