I caught this reading Laura Spinney's Proto - she at least seems to think Old English acquired a Celtic lilt post-settlement, but she mentions it in a very brief, offhand way. I would be pretty interested in following this thread.
"Some British Celts fled north and west to escape them, implanting Welsh and Cornish where they found refuge, but the majority took up the immigrants’ language and, speaking German with a Celtic lilt, invented Old English."
- Laura Spinney, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, p175
McWhorter, if I recall correctly, also points to the grammatical structure of what we call present progressive verbs as influence from the Celtish languages. E.g., I am reading this book as opposed to I read this book, which McWhorter explains is how other Germanic languages phrase it. (In his book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue)
In this same thread, could the contemporary Scots Gaelic construction of "tha mi a' <verb>" be cognate with the slightly archaic "I am a-<verb>ing" in English?
I'm in the hebribes. I always assumed we were speaking Gaelic when the Norse arrived. But then I read we were still building our houses etc in a Pictish style. Maybe we had a gaelo-pictish thing going on. Anyway Gaelic ultimately asserted/ reasserted itself albeit with a lot of Norse loanwords
For the same process in a much more historically attested period, could look at Scotland from 1100: gaelic everywhere (just about) when David I invited (french speaking) Normans with their (largely northern Danelaw version) English speaking extended households to take up lands and establish Royal Burghs. The language of these incomers became the language of status, eventually going by the name Scots (rather than Inglis), and extending over most of the country. It incorporated almost no gaelic: status seems super important.
That transition between Gaelic-based language in the northern part of the island (Scotland) and the southern part of the island (England) seems important here: how far south did the Gaelic language go on the island? How was it replaced there? Were there multiple mutually-independent languages on the island? It's probably big enough that were separate influences on different parts.
Gaelic moved south only slowly. Unknown when it displaced Pictish north of the Forth-Clyde line: could have been happening anyway, but likely accelerated by the Vikings pushing the Gaels inland from Argyll and the Hebrides. In any case, by 900 or so we have the unified, Gaelic speaking, Kingdom of Alba north of the Forth-Clyde line. South of this in the west is the Brittonic/Cumbric speaking Kingdom of Strathclyde, and in the east, the northern parts of the English speaking Kingdom of Northumbria (though it's too been shattered by the Vikings). Alba advanced into Strathclyde and the Lothians over the next couple of centuries and it seems Gaelic replaced Cumbric pretty readily in the west. In the east too there was plenty of Gaelic (see placenames in and around Edinburgh for evidence) and there is even evidence of Gaelic making inroads into the Borders by 1100-ish. But this is the high water mark: Malcolm Canmore (King of Scots 1058-1093) married Margaret of Wessex (fleeing the Normans) who started Anglifying things, and their son David 1st (1124 to 1153) invited the Normans in. From then on Gaelic was in retreat
When I was young I had an interest in rock climbing. A relative gave me a copy of Alan Blackshaw’s “Mountaineering”, a mountaineering text from about 1965. As a source for climbing knowledge, it was quite obsolete (his “classic abseil” technique would give you classic rope burn, if it didn’t kill you). What delighted me about the book however, was he included in the appendix a glossary of Gaelic, Norse, and Welsh words in British place-names. It was a fascinating glimpse into another world.
I often wonder this. I've tried to learn Welsh, and it's so different from English that it seems bizarre that the languages exist side by side (obviously not always comfortably, I should add).
I was talking to an academic about Y- and mitochondrial haplogroups (it was to do with the Mutiny on the Bounty!). I mentioned my partner's Y-haplogroup, and they were excited because it's very rare in Britain and is associated with the Roman occupation.
But! My partner's father was American, from a tri-racial Appalachian group called the Melungeons. They're thought to have Mediterranean and north African ancestry.
So - unless the Y DNA got to Britain via a different route - there are some people walking around Britain today whose patrilineal ancestry goes back to the Mediterranean, courtesy of the Romans. *Cue a Roman looking a bit shifty as Jerry Springer reads out the DNA results.* It's not surprising in some respects, seeing as the Romans were here for centuries, and yet at school, we tend to learn that the Romans left nothing behind but some ruins. Not so! There's a little bit of Roman still here!
The reason for mentioning that here is because I'd be interested to know where in Britain that Y haplogroup is found (going back a few generations). Is it in the "Celtic fringes", which would back up the idea that the Romano-Britons ran for the hills, or is it in the other areas that saw more invasion from the continent, which would back up the idea that the Germanic arrivals were more gentle than previously advertised?
"Cwm" appears in placenames in the south-west as "-combe". There's a cider you can buy in Somerset called "Buttcombe", which makes me chuckle. I'm sure you know about the River Avon? "Afon" is "river" in Welsh. So it just says "River River". It's used as an example of how English just doesn't have any Celtic, but... Couldn't it mean that it shows clearly that it does, because whoever called it the Avon was calling it a river, after all? See also River Stour - there's several of them in England, to the point that it might be another Celtic survival that has something to do with rivers or water.
Is this theory original to John McWhorter? That’s where I first encountered it too, and it seems like his kind of thing (when you’re a creole specialist everything…looks like a nail?) but I wasn’t sure.
I imagine there was some real violent displacement in some places and some amicable mixing in other places. I imagine England as a patchwork quilt in this respect. And then the north and east gets double dipped in Danelaw.
I thought I read there was a big dip in population drop after the Romans left and prior to the English. Disease and the like. I wonder whether many of the natives didn't just embrace the new way whilst other headed west. It is curious tho.
And it is cool if Cornish influenced English in that way but it does sound like a much later thing
French uses "to do like you are describing. "Fait-il manger des pommes?" Literally, "does he to-eat of-the apples?"
Google translate automatically translate the French correctly to "does he eat apples?" But if you ask it to do the converse, it translates, "does he eat apples?" as "est-ce qu'ill mange des pommes?"
This becomes an issue of formality. "Est-ce que" (the formal way of making it a question), adds an "is-that what" at the beginning to show that it is a question. It is helpful if you want the listener to be ready for a question (or if you are an English speaker stalling, as you prepare to ask a question.)
But you can cut to the chase, and just ask "does he eat, "fait-il manger?"
It looks as though the Old English period high-status (rather than educated) speech was very germanic, while peasant speech may have been more various. After 1066, high status was French and Latin. Actually I'm curious just how much English was in use in the Welsh marches - barons speaking French, maybe a few Breton. This seemed to carry on through King John's reign. Some priests being English named but using French and Latin. Henry III on the other hand seemed to use English heritage politically - St Edward the Confessor at Westminster, his son Edward etc. While fighting Simon de Montfort, bringing up English as a counterbalance to the barons. In the circumstances, some lower class forms of speech and a wholly new system of spelling doesn't seem unlikely.
Extremely interesting! I call 'do' a proverb by analogy with pronoun. It seems to be disfavored by the grammarrhoids.
Normal English: Do you have a car? No, I don't have a car.
Grammarrhoid: Have you a car? No, I haven't a car.
I wondered how English acquired this unusual feature. Now I know!
I caught this reading Laura Spinney's Proto - she at least seems to think Old English acquired a Celtic lilt post-settlement, but she mentions it in a very brief, offhand way. I would be pretty interested in following this thread.
"Some British Celts fled north and west to escape them, implanting Welsh and Cornish where they found refuge, but the majority took up the immigrants’ language and, speaking German with a Celtic lilt, invented Old English."
- Laura Spinney, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, p175
McWhorter, if I recall correctly, also points to the grammatical structure of what we call present progressive verbs as influence from the Celtish languages. E.g., I am reading this book as opposed to I read this book, which McWhorter explains is how other Germanic languages phrase it. (In his book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue)
In this same thread, could the contemporary Scots Gaelic construction of "tha mi a' <verb>" be cognate with the slightly archaic "I am a-<verb>ing" in English?
That's how I translate it in my own head.
I'm in the hebribes. I always assumed we were speaking Gaelic when the Norse arrived. But then I read we were still building our houses etc in a Pictish style. Maybe we had a gaelo-pictish thing going on. Anyway Gaelic ultimately asserted/ reasserted itself albeit with a lot of Norse loanwords
For the same process in a much more historically attested period, could look at Scotland from 1100: gaelic everywhere (just about) when David I invited (french speaking) Normans with their (largely northern Danelaw version) English speaking extended households to take up lands and establish Royal Burghs. The language of these incomers became the language of status, eventually going by the name Scots (rather than Inglis), and extending over most of the country. It incorporated almost no gaelic: status seems super important.
I was thinking about the same thing. The evolution of Scots fascinates me.
That transition between Gaelic-based language in the northern part of the island (Scotland) and the southern part of the island (England) seems important here: how far south did the Gaelic language go on the island? How was it replaced there? Were there multiple mutually-independent languages on the island? It's probably big enough that were separate influences on different parts.
Gaelic moved south only slowly. Unknown when it displaced Pictish north of the Forth-Clyde line: could have been happening anyway, but likely accelerated by the Vikings pushing the Gaels inland from Argyll and the Hebrides. In any case, by 900 or so we have the unified, Gaelic speaking, Kingdom of Alba north of the Forth-Clyde line. South of this in the west is the Brittonic/Cumbric speaking Kingdom of Strathclyde, and in the east, the northern parts of the English speaking Kingdom of Northumbria (though it's too been shattered by the Vikings). Alba advanced into Strathclyde and the Lothians over the next couple of centuries and it seems Gaelic replaced Cumbric pretty readily in the west. In the east too there was plenty of Gaelic (see placenames in and around Edinburgh for evidence) and there is even evidence of Gaelic making inroads into the Borders by 1100-ish. But this is the high water mark: Malcolm Canmore (King of Scots 1058-1093) married Margaret of Wessex (fleeing the Normans) who started Anglifying things, and their son David 1st (1124 to 1153) invited the Normans in. From then on Gaelic was in retreat
When I was young I had an interest in rock climbing. A relative gave me a copy of Alan Blackshaw’s “Mountaineering”, a mountaineering text from about 1965. As a source for climbing knowledge, it was quite obsolete (his “classic abseil” technique would give you classic rope burn, if it didn’t kill you). What delighted me about the book however, was he included in the appendix a glossary of Gaelic, Norse, and Welsh words in British place-names. It was a fascinating glimpse into another world.
I often wonder this. I've tried to learn Welsh, and it's so different from English that it seems bizarre that the languages exist side by side (obviously not always comfortably, I should add).
I was talking to an academic about Y- and mitochondrial haplogroups (it was to do with the Mutiny on the Bounty!). I mentioned my partner's Y-haplogroup, and they were excited because it's very rare in Britain and is associated with the Roman occupation.
But! My partner's father was American, from a tri-racial Appalachian group called the Melungeons. They're thought to have Mediterranean and north African ancestry.
So - unless the Y DNA got to Britain via a different route - there are some people walking around Britain today whose patrilineal ancestry goes back to the Mediterranean, courtesy of the Romans. *Cue a Roman looking a bit shifty as Jerry Springer reads out the DNA results.* It's not surprising in some respects, seeing as the Romans were here for centuries, and yet at school, we tend to learn that the Romans left nothing behind but some ruins. Not so! There's a little bit of Roman still here!
The reason for mentioning that here is because I'd be interested to know where in Britain that Y haplogroup is found (going back a few generations). Is it in the "Celtic fringes", which would back up the idea that the Romano-Britons ran for the hills, or is it in the other areas that saw more invasion from the continent, which would back up the idea that the Germanic arrivals were more gentle than previously advertised?
"Cwm" appears in placenames in the south-west as "-combe". There's a cider you can buy in Somerset called "Buttcombe", which makes me chuckle. I'm sure you know about the River Avon? "Afon" is "river" in Welsh. So it just says "River River". It's used as an example of how English just doesn't have any Celtic, but... Couldn't it mean that it shows clearly that it does, because whoever called it the Avon was calling it a river, after all? See also River Stour - there's several of them in England, to the point that it might be another Celtic survival that has something to do with rivers or water.
Know I now the origin of English do support?
I’d say so.
Know I now the origin of English do support?
I’d say so.
Is this theory original to John McWhorter? That’s where I first encountered it too, and it seems like his kind of thing (when you’re a creole specialist everything…looks like a nail?) but I wasn’t sure.
I imagine there was some real violent displacement in some places and some amicable mixing in other places. I imagine England as a patchwork quilt in this respect. And then the north and east gets double dipped in Danelaw.
I thought I read there was a big dip in population drop after the Romans left and prior to the English. Disease and the like. I wonder whether many of the natives didn't just embrace the new way whilst other headed west. It is curious tho.
And it is cool if Cornish influenced English in that way but it does sound like a much later thing
French uses "to do like you are describing. "Fait-il manger des pommes?" Literally, "does he to-eat of-the apples?"
Google translate automatically translate the French correctly to "does he eat apples?" But if you ask it to do the converse, it translates, "does he eat apples?" as "est-ce qu'ill mange des pommes?"
This becomes an issue of formality. "Est-ce que" (the formal way of making it a question), adds an "is-that what" at the beginning to show that it is a question. It is helpful if you want the listener to be ready for a question (or if you are an English speaker stalling, as you prepare to ask a question.)
But you can cut to the chase, and just ask "does he eat, "fait-il manger?"
Does "wan" count as a loan word? English = 'pale', Welsh = 'weak'. It looks as if it should be one.
And still, Gallo-Romam which later gave French is mostly latin. There are not so many Celtic words in French.
But it seems that Romano-Briton stayed mostly Briton. The distance maybe...
It looks as though the Old English period high-status (rather than educated) speech was very germanic, while peasant speech may have been more various. After 1066, high status was French and Latin. Actually I'm curious just how much English was in use in the Welsh marches - barons speaking French, maybe a few Breton. This seemed to carry on through King John's reign. Some priests being English named but using French and Latin. Henry III on the other hand seemed to use English heritage politically - St Edward the Confessor at Westminster, his son Edward etc. While fighting Simon de Montfort, bringing up English as a counterbalance to the barons. In the circumstances, some lower class forms of speech and a wholly new system of spelling doesn't seem unlikely.