quote:

Originally posted by Steffan:
This is a bit of a sweeping statement isn't it? How can you, Francis P. Oppenheimer or anyone be certain that there was no Brythonic in Eastern England? Boudica is a name from a 'Celtic' language surely. Placenames such as Dover, London, Kent would seem to be Brythonic in origin. Now perhaps there were speakers of an ancestor language of English in those parts, but to say there was no Brythonic is going a bit too far for me.

I'm a little suspicious of using personal names to identify ethnic identity. Why would Boudicca be a Celtic name? I don't think we know enough to say what is Celtic and what is not. For example, the name William is so typically English but is the Anglicised version of Guillaume de Normandie's name. John, I believe, has Greek origins. Aelle, according to the AS Chronicle, is a good Saxon name but I remain cautious of reading too much into this. Dover, I believe, is the Roman Dubris and we are told it is from a Celtic name, as is the Kent of the Cantiacii but that is because we are led to believe that pre-Roman names must be Celtic. Similarly, there is an almost total absence of any Celtic name throughout England. Where we do have examples, such as Pen-y-ghent, a mountain in the Yorkshire Dales, then it is quite possible that Celtic speakers lived further to the east.

I am also quite happy with the catalogue of battles between the Britons and the Anglo- Saxons but why do we have to assume the Britons spoke a Celtic language? Why not English? If the enemies of the Anglo-Saxons were Welsh speakers, as in Y Gododdin then they could have quite easily travelled from a Welsh speaking area to fight away from their own territory. The problem with all of this is that we just don't know what the 'people' spoke. We know that the invading Anglo-Saxons spoke Anglo-Saxon because they wrote it down for us once they learnt how to write.

Neither am I sure about the idea of new peoples from the east entering a vacuum. You seem to be suggesting that everyone upped-sticks and moved to Brittany as the solution to our problem rather than ethnic cleansing or elite dominance of the natives. The genetics would tend to show a minority Germanic overlay on top of a predominantly native DNA, wherever this came from.

quote:

Originally posted by Duncan A:
I'm a little suspicious of using personal names to identify ethnic identity.

Quite right too. Something we should always bear in mind.

quote:

Why would Boudicca be a Celtic name? I don't think we know enough to say what is Celtic and what is not.

Why would it not be? What do you think it is? There are forms of the name in Modern Welsh, Irish and Breton. There was a Gaulish Goddess with the name. I don't see the point in just challenging everything without an alternative theory or a good reason for disbelieving it. Why do you say that we don't know enough? There is plenty of evidence, plenty of information available. Much of it is being continually reassessed and revised as we learn even more or take on knew theories and interpretations.

quote:

For example, the name William is so typically English but is the Anglicised version of Guillaume de Normandie's name. John, I believe, has Greek origins. Aelle, according to the AS Chronicle, is a good Saxon name but I remain cautious of reading too much into this.

Not the best of analogies probably. Personally, I have never thought of William as being typically English.

quote:

Dover, I believe, is the Roman Dubris and we are told it is from a Celtic name, as is the Kent of the Cantiacii but that is because we are led to believe that pre-Roman names must be Celtic. Similarly, there is an almost total absence of any Celtic name throughout England. Where we do have examples, such as Pen-y-ghent, a mountain in the Yorkshire Dales, then it is quite possible that Celtic speakers lived further to the east.

The work of Richard Coates seems to be challenging that and suggests that the Celtic roots of many English placenames have been overlooked.

quote:

I am also quite happy with the catalogue of battles between the Britons and the Anglo- Saxons but why do we have to assume the Britons spoke a Celtic language? Why not English? If the enemies of the Anglo-Saxons were Welsh speakers, as in Y Gododdin then they could have quite easily travelled from a Welsh speaking area to fight away from their own territory.

I'm not sure I quite follow you there, Duncan, but there are other interpretations of the poem coming up now. John Koch has stirred up a bit of a hornet's nest with his book on the Gododdin.

However, we know about the Gododdin from other sources, we know that they came from Mannau Gododdin and were the Votadini of Latin sources. Of course, their location is hinted at by the verses being known as "Scotland's Oldest Poem". They did travel from their own area to fight the Saxons at Catraeth (almost certainly Catterick).

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The problem with all of this is that we just don't know what the 'people' spoke. We know that the invading Anglo-Saxons spoke Anglo-Saxon because they wrote it down for us once they learnt how to write.

As we said before, there were Angles and there were Saxons. They probably spoke very similar languages. No, we don't know precisely what the peoples spoke, but can't we get an indication through personal and place name studies? You mentioned Francis Pryor before; remember his points about 'Celtic' influences on English syntax and grammar?

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Neither am I sure about the idea of new peoples from the east entering a vacuum. You seem to be suggesting that everyone upped-sticks and moved to Brittany as the solution to our problem rather than ethnic cleansing or elite dominance of the natives.

No, I was talking about a power vacuum. I did not say that everyone left! The Roman Empire was in a state of turmoil and Britain, which had been part of the whole set up for over four hundred years one way or another, was suddenly out in the cold. My point was that the populace might have put up with a new set of foreign masters rather than have the chaos of none at all.

quote:

The genetics would tend to show a minority Germanic overlay on top of a predominantly native DNA, wherever this came from.

And of course, once again we come to the point that DNA does not dictate what language you speak. The trouble is, we seem to have a few different ideas going on here. The suggestion that English is actually descended from a language spoken by pre-Roman British inhabitants. The proposal that there was no 'Anglo-Saxon' mass invasion, let alone a culling of the previous occupants. The idea that the people of Iron Age Britain were not part of a pan-European people called the Celts. Now all this is being picked up by geneticists looking into the origins of the inhabitants of the British Isles. It is all becoming a bit of a muddle, I think (I mean generally, not on this forum) and perhaps we need to slow it all down a bit and take it step by step. It is all fascinating stuff though.

quote:

Originally posted by Steffan:
Why would it not be? What do you think it is? There are forms of the name in Modern Welsh, Irish and Breton. There was a Gaulish Goddess with the name. I don't see the point in just challenging everything without an alternative theory or a good reason for disbelieving it. Why do you say that we don't know enough? There is plenty of evidence, plenty of information available. Much of it is being continually reassessed and revised as we learn even more or take on knew theories and interpretations./QUOTE]
Modern forms of the names are no proof that the name is 'Celtic', perhaps people use it now because they associate it with a supposed 'Celtic' heroine. Alternatively, there could have been a 'Celtic' elite who did speak a 'Celtic' language and 'lorded it' over the native English speakers. My purpose is not to criticise established ways of thinking but to try to discover what may have happened. I am proposing alternative theories every step of the way.

[QUOTE] However, we know about the Gododdin from other sources, we know that they came from Mannau Gododdin and were the Votadini of Latin sources. Of course, their location is hinted at by the verses being known as "Scotland's Oldest Poem". They did travel from their own area to fight the Saxons at Catraeth (almost certainly Catterick).

Yes, I would agree with this to an extent. Rheged, later Cumbria, was almost certainly Welsh speaking. The Battle of Catraeth was probably fought between North Welsh and Anglian warrior elites. There is still no evidence as to what the non-elite population was speaking though. I would say English in the east, Welsh in the west.

quote:

As we said before, there were Angles and there were Saxons. They probably spoke very similar languages. No, we don't know precisely what the peoples spoke, but can't we get an indication through personal and place name studies? You mentioned Francis Pryor before; remember his points about 'Celtic' influences on English syntax and grammar?

Place names are just the problem. In the east they are all English so we must assume that the people spoke English. This is Winn Scutt's point about the Roman Road crossing the old lake in the Cotswolds. The English name pre-dates the Roman Road! With regard to Pryor's discussion of Celtic influences on English syntax and grammar: maybe but even if there were only 1.5 million 'Celtic' speakers in Britannia why would they have such a small influence on the English language when their competition is from perhaps 30,000 immigrating Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians? It just doesn't make sense. Even if we go with Harke's extreme figure of 200,000 immigrants over a century it is still too few. By rights we should all be speaking Welsh with perhaps some influence from English syntax and grammar.

quote:

The Roman Empire was in a state of turmoil and Britain, which had been part of the whole set up for over four hundred years one way or another, was suddenly out in the cold. My point was that the populace might have put up with a new set of foreign masters rather than have the chaos of none at all.

This makes sense to me too. The populace was indeed used to putting up with changing sets of foreign masters whether they be 'Celts', Romans or Anglo-Saxons. As we know, in the future they would face Danes and Normans. Apart from a few borrowings here and there, the language of the populace remains unchanged.

quote:

And of course, once again we come to the point that DNA does not dictate what language you speak.

No, it doesn't but what it does is to map out the likely origins of the population of this country. We know that there is a roughly east west split in terms of the extent of continental overlay. In other words eastern England is heavily influenced by Y Chromosomes from the low countries. Both Oppenheimer and Sykes are explicit on this and earlier work by Capelli et al and Weale et al confirms this. The dispute is over the extent of the non-Germanic DNA and where it came from. So far the consensus seems to be, as you pointed out in the start to this thread Steffan, that it is from the Iberian coastal area, and has been in thes islands since after the last Ice Age. It makes up perhaps three-quarters of our genetic input and is clearly non-Germanic. I think we can then safely say that the descendants of those people would not speak a Germanic language whereas the descendants of those in the east would. Clearly there would be some interplay culturally, linguistically and genetically but it is certainly fascinating how even now we can discern two distinct sources of our population and two distinct linguistic groups. Regards.

Still haven't been given the permissions to amend the still shaky mastery of the 'tools' on this forum. Why is there no 'preview' button?

quote:

Originally posted by Duncan A:
Still haven't been given the permissions to amend the still shaky mastery of the 'tools' on this forum. Why is there no 'preview' button?

The short answer to that is because this forum and it's software is rubbish I'm afraid, Duncan.

I doubt it's going to improve much in the near future either. Oh and posts dissapear with no logical reason too

Personally I think the meditations of the late Professor JRR Tolkein on these points are worth taking into account. The Rohirrim translate everything. While there is evidence that some Early English speakers knew Welsh, from charters and the like, they seem to have translated or transmogrified almost everything so that the Welsh disappeared (we would think that York was named after a dairy farm with pigs if there were no latin sources showing that the name existed before and the Early English version was a sound-alike which however contained within itself no sign of Welsh origin.

The genetics - Caesar speaks of belgae - and there were certainly earlier contacts acrossthe straits of Dover. Plus one could assume that 'heroic' Anglo-saxons acted like homeric heroes - killing the men and enslaving the women. This practice might have effects on x and y chromosome balances not too far removed from the observations.

quote:

Originally posted by paulbiv:
Personally I think the meditations of the late Professor JRR Tolkein on these points are worth taking into account.

Hi Paul, could you enlighten me some more on where I would find Tolkein's thoughts?

quote:

Plus one could assume that 'heroic' Anglo-saxons acted like homeric heroes - killing the men and enslaving the women. This practice might have effects on x and y chromosome balances not too far removed from the observations.

Yes, this is quite possible but would probably only be short-lived because there really is no point in conquering a land if you have no slaves (the Anglo-Saxon word was wealh from where we get the word Welsh) to do the work for you. They are a prime resource. This could account for the change in the genetics with a nice influx of Germanic Y Chromosomes and if the immigrants brought their WAGs then some Germanic MtDNA too. Nonetheless the language spoken by the slaves would still not be Anglo-Saxon. Any children born to our slave women would learn the language of their mothers, because the men would be in the fields, the mead halls or simply being heroic conquering more British territory. Cheers.

Good day to you all. I am new to this forum having only just discovered it. I find the issue of what language our forefathers used at the village well (or mead shop) to be quite fascinating. I am no scholar and cannot quote any of the detailed research mentioned on these pages. In fact, it was only when I stumbled across Oppenheimer’s book in a local book shop (it was on the floor) that I realized the discussion was ongoing. These forum pages are a delight. Could I share my thoughts based on my own observations and attempted logic?

1) I live in East Cheshire and since the 50’s have travelled regularly into North Wales even working there for six weeks. I have long noticed how the local people converse together in Welsh. In fact, we used to be quite annoyed because we thought they were doing it to cut us English out. I now realise, of course, that was unjust. Welsh is the proper language for that area (this was well before the campaign to save Welsh became popular.) Of course most were completely fluent in English but why should they speak it if they did not want to – how many English speakers are fluent in French even when living in France but speak English over the dining table? But how long has English been the official language of Wales – 600 years? Yet the language of the ordinary people, their living places, landmarks, etc., remains Welsh. True the important places became English – Conway English but Penmaenmawr still Welsh; Snowdon English but Crib Goch Welsh, and so on. So 600 years of English has not made that much difference in reality. Yet look at my East Cheshire. We are told that the Ancient Brits spoke Welsh – OK then Celtic – and yet we are to believe that from the time of the Roman departure to the time of the Doomsday Book (600 years?) those Celtic speakers lost just about all of their language. According to my old copy of the Historical Atlas of Cheshire (the old Cheshire not the present one) there are only about 20 Celtic place names with an equal number of Scandinavian ones. The “Anglican” names are too numerous to count so those invading Anglo-Saxons must have completely annihilated the resident Celts even to removing their countryside names. Either that or forced them out – into an already populated Wales??. Those Ancient Brits must have been here for thousands of years and yet a few thousand invading Angles destroyed completely their heritage? To me it just does not gel. I do lean to the idea that the resident language must have been a Germanic one later added to and called “Anglican” by an influx of Angles/Saxons/Danes/Normans/etc,etc.

2) What about Scotland? I do not have the same personal knowledge of the language spoken by the ordinary Scots but I believe it to be predominantly English. And yet, how long has English been the official administrative language? Only about 400 years at a guess. So how did English become so dominant in such a short time? Scotland (in all its various names) has successfully thwarted southern British dominance from the Romans onwards – and yet they speak English! Don’t tell me those few thousand invading Anglo-Saxons drove out the Scottish Celts as well! Only in the extreme West does the Scottish Celtic survive in ordinary use (landmark names as an example) in fact those areas, if I remember correctly, where Oppenheimer places the ancient Celtic people. So again, could it be argued that the Germanic language held sway there from ancient times?
In all of this, I am thinking of the language of the ordinary working people. The ones who named their living places, their work places, their landmarks, etc and handed those words down over generations until they were finally written and thus cemented.

Sorry it’s so long. I now wait to be corrected in my thinking.
Dave B

quote:

Originally posted by Dave g B:
Those Ancient Brits must have been here for thousands of years and yet a few thousand invading Angles destroyed completely their heritage? To me it just does not gel. I do lean to the idea that the resident language must have been a Germanic one later added to and called “Anglican” by an influx of Angles/Saxons/Danes/Normans/etc,etc.

Welcome to the forum Dave. It seems like we share a fascination and the same conclusions. How, indeed could a few thousand change the language of several million?

You mention Scotland and there the situation is even more persuasive. We know the Angles pushed as far north as Edinburgh, and an Anglian army under King Edwin was decisively defeated by the Picts at a place called Nechtanesmere. Presumably the Angles went running back into Northumbria with their tails between their legs. The puzzling thing is that the Scots speak English right up into Fife and along the north east coast. Their dialect is called 'Doric' and is supposedly an ancient tongue. All of the place names are English too. It's only when we move into the Highland zone that we start to get Gaelic sounding names, as you point out. The problem is, the Anglo-Saxons never colonised those English speaking parts of Scotland.

What intrigues me is the possibility that our history books may, indeed, have got things wrong. What if it was the Celts who entered an English speaking island from the west? Oppenheimer shows the movement of people coming along the Atlantic coast and surely it's not that far fetched to see migration along the coast from Celtiberia to Brittany and then into Ireland, Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria and Western Scotland, all clearly Celtic speaking areas? That's certainly the joy of Oppenheimer's book for me. It suddenly opens up such liberating intellectual possibilities. Now I wait to be corrected.

Nothing to correct from me Dave. Cheers.

quote:

Originally posted by Brythonfa:
Generally : What part of Eastern England did there not be any Brythonic spoken ? Was is Dover (Dwrfre - Town by the water), Catterick (Caertraeth - Fort near the beach), or maybe Canterbury (from Cantie - of Kent), or maybe London (Llundain in the Welsh). All of these places are named in Romanised brythonic references by the Romans.

I'm sorry Brythonfa, I totally overlooked your posting in my response to Steffan. Interesting stuff indeed. I wasn't aware that Dover meant town near the water. Catraeth, though, is nowhere near the beach! The Cantiacii are certainly mentioned by the Romans, but are you sure it is Brythonic Celtic? We have the Brigantes and the Parisii in the North, according to Roman records. Tacitus also talks of the Anglii and the Frisii in Germania. Still doesn't tell us what they spoke even though we can assume the latter spoke a Germanic language.

Alternatively if we see the Celts as a trading people then we can explain both the existence of the odd Brythonic Celtic place name and La Tene style artefacts throughout Britain. Aberdeen sounds like a Welsh place name, 'the mouth of the Dee', but nobody has ever suggested that the Brythonic Celts lived there en masse. North east Scotland, we are told, was Pictish territory.

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And for Northumbria, this was most certainly a Celtic kingdom at the point of Roman departure, the Bamburgh site was built upon a Celtic fort with many Celtic artefacts. Suffolk excavations has found substancial actifacts of celtic pottery, and three distict cultural periods in the acheaelogical sediment : Celtic then Roman then Saxon.

The problem with artefacts is that they are traded. Artefacts are no indicator of ethnicity or language. I think it is Simon James who said that just because many Brits drive BMWs it doesn't make them German. It's rather like archaelogists finding me buried with a pair of Gucci glasses (I hope my wife reads this) a thousand years from now and assuming that I was Italian. I'm not sure that we can say a fort was Celtic. Iron Age certainly but that is just an archaeological period.

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Many Celtic abbeys of 450 to 600 AD contain substantial evidence of massacres. The motive, which is well documented as the schism between new Roman and Celtic Christianity, the establishment of Canterbury by envoy from Rome, and the theological works from Strata Florida and later Hywel Dda.

The schism between Roman and Celtic Christianity is certainly interesting. I think it's obvious that much of Britannia fell into paganism again at this point. Anglo-Saxon invaders, as a new warrior elite, would certainly deal with any indigenous power base, and probably at the point of the sword if necessary. Perhaps it was akin to the situation when the next Scandinavian warrior elite, the Danes, arrived: the destruction of monasteries and the revival of paganism in the conquered territories. However, a few massacres are not evidence of ethnic cleansing.

I note that in Wales England is referred to as Lloegr, the lost lands, and this could certainly hint at a linguistic and ethnic cline further to the east in the past. I think this could fit the evidence, but I think we must dispense with the idea of all Britain once speaking Celtic languages when the Romans arrived. Much more likely to have been English in the east, Brythonic Celtic in Wales, Cornwall and Cumbria (which in the past went all the way up to the Clyde) and Gaelic in Ireland. Pictish, of course, remains a mystery.

Re my Tolkien reference - one of his works I don't have is a lecture on 'English and Welsh'.

However, what I do have is a set of essays by his colleagues and friends in memoriam, discussing all aspects of his work. One of these 'Creation from philology in the Lord of the Rings' points out that the language and society of the Riders of Rohan resemble in detail that depicted in anglo-saxon literature (of which Tolkein was a professor). The king list is a list of the words used for king in anglo-saxon poetry for example (with the exception of the first, who wasn't yet a king). Therefore, the way in which characters knew languages other than their own, but renamed everything in their own language, and names of minor features in the previous languages had been forgotten except from some stray remarks by wizards, elves etc, all likely reflects his view on how the english language had so completely submerged any celtic.

The chilterns of course were a late celtic survival - there are early english documents recording river-names in welsh in forms which show knowledge of welsh grammatical forms - so a living language close to the time of the documents.

My own view is that spoken welsh might have existed in patches across much of england until viking times (there are comparatively few earlier documents that record place-names) and that the extent of the total war effort under Alfred and successors up to and including Athelstan (first king of England) erased the social distinctions that could have allowed welsh to continue as the language of the slaves or serfs.

quote:

Originally posted by paulbiv:
The chilterns of course were a late celtic survival - there are early english documents recording river-names in welsh in forms which show knowledge of welsh grammatical forms - so a living language close to the time of the documents.

Interesting stuff Paul. I'm keen to find any documentary evidence which can shed light on this most perplexing of subjects. Can you give me the sources please so that I can take a closer look?

I just saw a progamme on the History Channel called "Celtic Myths".

In it was a bit about St Brigid's Wells, which are found in Ireland, and Wales And Scotland - AND on the Isle of Sheppey!, in England.

Brigid was the old Celtic god of fertility. Her representatin was found down the well in Sheppey.

Roman Bath was built on a Celtic holy site.

I imagine there must be plenty more examples like this in England.

In case the followers of this thread have not spotted it .... this is from the TV porgrammes thread....


SATURDAY 14th
Channel 4 8.00pm
Face of Britain.
First in a new series of three programmes.
Archaeologist Neil Oliver sets out to discover if modern people in certain parts of the country have genes that can be traced directly back to the Vikings, Anglo-Saxons and Celts.
Tonight Neil travels to southwest England and Wales to examine clues left by the Celts, the flame-haired descendants of hunters who arrived in Britain after the last Ice Age. In conjunction with a landmark DNA study, led by geneticist Sir Walter Bodmer, Neil meets local people, and West Country-born MP Ann Widdecombe, to help create a genetic map of Britain.

The post Roman inhabitants of Briton are not the only people who have lost their language over several hundred years to much smaller groups of interlopers. A classic example is Mexico where, while those of pure European extraction today only number about 5%, the vast mass of the population today speaks Spanish. Closer to home we have Ireland (leaving apart Ulster) where again a small elite, accompanied by relatively small bands of settler soldiers and merchants, all but eliminated the Gaelic language.

Despite earlier references made above to the language of the females predominating in any household it certainly never held true in Mexico, Ireland, or even in Iceland where a large portion of the original settlers were females from ‘Celtic’ Scotland and Ireland.

What puzzles me, especially referring to The Face of Britain series, is that it is taken as accepted fact that the various peoples on the coastal fringe of the North Sea were not genetically related prior to the so called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ invasions. We can accept genetic links between the British Isles and say the Basque speakers of northern Spain; we can accept sea born links between Britain and the Phoenicians, the Greeks, Gaul and Ireland but can’t conceive of pre Roman sea born links around the lands of the North Sea.

The oddity, in pre Roman times, would be if the peoples of the east coast of England and Scotland were not genetically related to their neighbours across the sea. If they were not then just where did these east coast Britons come from?

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Duncan A:
There was certainly strong Irish settlement into Dyfed and the Lleyn peninsula in post-Roman times, but they didn't change the language from Welsh to Irish so it probably wasn't en masse immigration.

The Romans also recorded that when they arrived on the Lleyn they found a people called the Gangani (Concani). The Gangani also appear as a tribe in Ireland. Whether this Irish contingent were a Brythonic speaking people who had moved to Ireland or the Welsh contingent had moved from Ireland isn’t clear.

The Lleyn has several prominent names derived from Gaelic chief amongst them being the town of Nefyn (Nevin) which is the nane of a Gaelic goddess. The name “Lleyn” may well be derived from the Irish “Laighin”. Other sources say that the area was bi-lingual (Wesh/Gaelic) until around the 11thC.

http://www.answers.com/topic/ll-n-peninsula

http://www.rootsweb.com/~irlkik/ihm/ire150.htm

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Originally posted by Howell W.:
The post Roman inhabitants of Briton are not the only people who have lost their language over several hundred years to much smaller groups of interlopers.

We can take none of this as given. The post-Roman inhabitants of Btitain didn't lose their languages. The Welsh still speak Welsh, the Cornish still speak Cornish (after a revival) and the English still speak English. The size of the 'interlopers' really is the question. The numerical extent of Anglo-Saxon immigration may be important but if English was already being spoken in the east of the country, as I suspect, then they are simply another warrior elite dominating the land just like the Romans beforte them and the Danes and Normans after them.

Latin America is interesting and I will look into this. From what I know of the genetics we have a usual conquest pattern. This simply involves the substantial relacement of the male gene pool with the conquerors' Y-Chromosomes. The mDNA of the women remains intact because the conquerors take them as wives.

quote:

Closer to home we have Ireland (leaving apart Ulster) where again a small elite, accompanied by relatively small bands of settler soldiers and merchants, all but eliminated the Gaelic language.

This is a much poorer example simply because the immigration into Ulster from Scotland was large scale. Even now the Ulster Protestant community significantly outnumbers the Catholic community who would be your Gaelic speakers.

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Iceland where a large portion of the original settlers were females from ‘Celtic’ Scotland and Ireland.

The genetics of Iceland, as discussed by Brian Sykes, are in the ratio of 3:2 Norese on the male side and 2:3 on the female side. He suspects the non-Norse males were slaves and the bulk of the women. The Norse mDNA shows that many of the colonists also brought their families with them.

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What puzzles me, especially referring to The Face of Britain series, is that it is taken as accepted fact that the various peoples on the coastal fringe of the North Sea were not genetically related prior to the so called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ invasions.

On this we are agreed. They must have been genetically related. Stephen Oppenheimer is fascinating on this. He proposes immigration into eastern Britain from northern Europe after the last ice age, whilst the land bridge was still intact. These people would have spoken a Germanic language very similar to, if not the same, as English. This explains in one fell swoop why the genetics of the east are so different to the west and why the language is so similar to those in northern Europe. Oppenheimer also talks of a contemporaneous immigration to the west of Britain from Iberia. What we have seen ever since is a shifting language cline between a Germanic east and a non-Germanic west. Later immigration from Germany and Denmark augmented but never changed this basic pattern.

quote:

Originally posted by Howell W.:
A classic example is Mexico where, while those of pure European extraction today only number about 5%, the vast mass of the population today speaks Spanish.

Figures from the CIA give the white European population at 10%, with Mestizos, mixed European and Indian people being the majority. Pure Indian peoples are a small minority.

Now whilst the parallel with Britain may superficially look the same there are crucial differences. The view of a small Anglo-Saxon elite somehow converting the 'Celtic' Britons to English through some kind of apartheid has been recently proposed by Mark Thomas but it's pretty far fetched.

In Mexico the process of 'hispanisation' was really delivered at the hands of the Catholic Church. There were many different native languages and no commercial common denominator. Indian children were converted to Christianity and forced to learn Spanish. Spanish became the common language. The parallel we have is probably similar to the spread of English in Ireland and Wales but with the much more potent power of the Catholic Church to do the indoctrinating.

The Anglo-Saxons never had this kind of unity. The conquest didn't take place over a few years like it did in Mexico. It took far longer for Anglo-Saxon rule to reach the 'Celtic' west. The Angles and Saxons were disparate groups of immigrant farmers without any obvious concerted leadership on the scale of Cortez and Pizarro. Anglo-Saxon paganism didn't have the clout of the Catholic Church. I simply don't think we can imagine rows of Welsh slaves being taught Anglo-Saxon at the point of the sword. They weren't that systematic and their religion not that evangelical.

http://www.babylon-idiomas.com/eng/htm/resources-histor...in-latin-america.htm