How English came into being is a fascinating tale with a fantastic collection of characters, even though they happen to be texts and groups of people rather than individual characters. It pops up out of thin air and then flops until it becomes something other. Finally, it catches the wind and takes over the world in the form of the world’s first global language. It’s also a story that’s been told and retold by many writers and academics. It appears that the majority of the people who’ve been telling the story for 100 years have been wrong.
The Celtic problem
We’ll start from a location that is far enough back to be able to comprehend the larger picture, which is the British Isles situation around 2,000 years back. There were two million Britons living in the region and spread across homessteads and hamlets. They spoke a variety of Celtic dialects and languages. However, they’ve not been recorded. The Celts may have migrated from the Continent through several waves throughout the centuries, bringing with them a different version every time. For instance there was the Picts are a hostile tribe were forced to move to northern Scotland by newly arrived Celts. They could have used an earlier form of Celtic. To differentiate them from Celtic on the Continent, the Celtic languages spoken in Britain collectively are referred to as “Insular Celtic,” the “Brittonic” or “British”.
Here’s an example of what one of these languages could look in the present and how it could look like if we all were speaking the Celts”language” if they had succeeded in removing the Angles and Saxons of England.
Ein Tad yn y nefoedd, sancteiddier dy enw. Deled dy deyrnas; gwneler dy ewyllys, ar y ddaear fel yn y nef.
Dyro inni heddiw ein bara beunyddiol.
Maddau inni ein troseddau, fel yr ym ni wedi maddau i’r rhai a droseddodd yn ein herbyn.
A phaid a’n dwyn i brawf, ond gwared ni rhag yr un drwg.
You’ll recognize it as Welsh. The language was restricted to the mountainous areas of Wales since the seventh century and then isolated, the language and thus has seen minimal structural changes to the present. Some people from Wales today claim to be able to understand Welsh text written 1,000 years ago without difficulty. It’s not like this has made it any friendlier to English. In Shakespeare’s day, the language was considered to be so foreign that the word was a sign of any language that was not understood, such as when we use the phrase “it’s Greek to me.” It’s featured in the scene set in Glyndwr’s castle in 1 Henry IV (3.1) where Hotspur pokes fun at Mortimer’s inability to communicate with his wife who is not English-speaking in other ways than sexually. It’s interesting that the stage directions do not call for Welsh lines. However, we see a similar scene of hilarious repartee in Henry VIII 5.2. Shakespeare’s troupe could have used a Welsh-speaking boy to play Lady Mortimer. This is evident from the stage directions which state that “The lady is speaking Welsh,” five times before she takes the spotlight and sings a Welsh song. In the event that she hurls an incomprehensible language at the spectators, Shakespeare deftly engages Mortimer in a simultaneous conversation with Hotspur and Glyndwr and focuses on English. Perhaps, the Welsh lines may be the work of Shakespeare before being translated. Whatever the case the Lady Mortimer was not required to speak Shakespeare’s words. Shakespeare. There could have been vulgar jokes or insults directed at any Welshmen who were in the audience. Queen Elizabeth was said to speak the language.
I bring up these issues regarding Welsh to highlight the cultural divide in Britain between the Celtic-speaking regions of northern and western regions and England itself. A gap that dates through prehistory and continues to be present today.
Let’s go back to AD 43, the time when the Romans attacked Britannia. Now, there are three ways to conquer a new territory. You can go all out and apply the “scorched Earth” strategy. You will need to destroy all that stands in your way and include the army of the enemy as well as human settlements livestock, as well as anything else that may be beneficial, like crops. It is burnt to the ground thereby keeping the defeated from being able to return to exact revenge. This was the strategy employed during the Thirty Years war (1618-48) that cost 8 millions European lives, as well as the Taiping Civil War (1850-64), costing more than ten times as many Chinese lives. It was premodernity’s version nuclear war, and the outcome was more devastating than any nuclear conflict currently. The only problem that comes with turning a hostile land into an ethereal moonscape is that you destroy yourself too, since there is no more food to eat and no way to grow quickly enough to avoid starving. Another problem with scorched-earth combat is that it was not really possible before the introduction of firearms, ruling it out for the Romans and subsequent invasions of Britain over the next thousand years (Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel). Is it possible to insert this absurdity into my narrative? It happens to be one of the theories found in the most popular study of the history of English, as we’ll see further down.
Androcide is a more gentle and more effective method. It wipes out all male enemies while leaving behind women and agricultural (think Genghis Khan). This keeps the invading army happy, now that they have a ready supply of women to rape and start families with, together with beer and bread. It’s a pity for the occupied people and forces them to be slaves in order to gain their obedience.
The third approach is most effective: symbolic punishment and reconciliation. To communicate your message, you offer them a slap on their wrist and put just a few tens or thousands of the captured armies to the sword. The remainder of the populace is protected if they pay tribute to the conquerors. The latest technology is able to improve the infrastructure. This is what the Romans did. They could instruct the Britons how to run their country, and they performed admirably. The relationship was mutually beneficial for 4 centuries. Today today, the Romans are visible in the expressways that travel through the entire island. Additionally, there are a lot of Roman coins scattered across Britain as evidence of a long-running, vibrant economy.
The issue of language during the Roman occupation. The only way an invading army can succeed in replacing the existing language by their own is to do so by a complete exile of the conquered population. This is difficult to achieve without resorting to the scorched earth method that has been witnessed, can destroy your chance of survival. In every instance of invasion and occupation, the invaders are left in their language bubble or in the opposite case, ultimately, outnumbered by the local people, they eventually end up speaking the language of their own. Romans have created an administrative group, and they created a bilingual group comprised of merchants, traders, and other locals who wanted to take advantage of Roman presence.
Over the centuries, Latin vocabulary trickled down throughout the populace, and the local language was enriched with many Latin loanwords. To the extent that Britons were able to live with their occupiers and Britons got along with their occupiers , and Latin was of sufficient value to be considered a prestige word the spread of bilingualism could have gotten to the point that the local language was modified to look somewhat like Latin but still retained its basic grammatical structure. In other words, a creole (more specifically it is the complex language that kids of pidgin-speaking parents adopt as their mother tongue however, the term is often stretched metaphorically in the manner I’m doing here, to describe analogous language cross-talk across a larger population or community). We don’t know much about the Britons, as Latin was extensively used by scribes, while the language of the region (or languages) were never documented. The Romans did not refer to Britons as “Celts” the term was reserved only for those who spoke French. We can determine the general families of their ancestors. In the northern and western extremes the language was Goidelic Celtic (Gaelic and perhaps Pictish) and Brythonic Celtic (Welsh, Cornish, etc.) and in the southern and eastern regions, it was various Germanic languages (not Celtic, as is commonly assumed in the standard accounts of history).
The Romans left Britain in AD 410 to confront serious barbarians in the area. The British might have been able of controlling the country by themselves, but infighting left them at risk of pirates from the sea. According to the standard narrative, in 449, four tribal groups from nearby regions along the North Sea coast of the Continent established beachheads in the island. Frisians of (modern) northeast Holland, Saxons from south of the Elbe in Germany as well as Jutes from northern Denmark were able to attack Britain’s southern coast, while Angles from the north of the Elbe to the southern part of Denmark attacked the eastern coast of Britain. It is believed that the four tribes spoke closely related and shared languages that were mutually understood by the West Germanic (English, Dutch, German) and North Germanic (Scandinavian) families. It is possible that they coordinated their actions in order to share spoils. Collectively, they were known as the “Anglo-Saxons” by nineteenth-century philologists, a term I’ll use provisionally.
There are two conflicting versions of what happened over the next four or five centuries. One version states that the Anglo-Saxons devastated Britain using a combination of androcide campaigns and scorched-earth tactics, burning and killing here and plundering in other areas. The result was the elimination of the British population, i.e. the Celtics. The genocide was so violent that by the sixth century , a lot of Celts were forced to flee from the island to modern-day Brittany in France (where the Breton Nation today speak as a descendent of British Celtic). While the conquer was not immediate however, it took about 200 years for the whole civilization to be destroyed. This interpretation serves a useful function. It explains the reason Celts survived only in regions in the extreme north and west of British Isles, to which they had been pushed. There is evidence of the genocide, also known as ethnocide in the lack of surviving Celtic loanwords in English as well as the lesser number of Celtic places names, inscriptions and coins in the east as compared to the west and north of England.
The alternative version of the historical record begins with the assumption that the Britons significantly outnumbered the Anglo-Saxons. It is estimated that around four million lived under the Roman occupation, which included Romans, many of whom probably remained in the area when the garrisons left. After having lived there for many generations, why would they decide to leave? However, the Anglo-Saxons could have invaded England in a couple of thousands or tens at the most. The Norman invasion force of 1066 was thought to be only 10 or 20 thousand. They also took on England quicker than the Anglo-Saxons. It’s difficult to comprehend how early Viking bands were able to conquer an entire population, which was proficient in Roman military procedure, in a matter of only two generations. Although one source claims that the Britons were apathetic, this isn’t the case. The Anglo-Saxons would have to fight for their lives many centuries later. The Celts are believed to have fought a spirited opposition, and have a wealth of documents and artifacts that testify to battles won on both sides. It was a tense affair , as always when there are invasions. The Anglo-Saxons certainly resorted to violence to establish their authority over the island. However, they simply didn’t have the means to kill the entire population. They were executed in their own areas.
In reality massive cooperation and assimilation either way could be the norm. The Celts were never pushed from the eastern or southern areas of the island, as long supposed. The Celtic language was not eliminated from these regions. It could have evolved into various creoles, based upon the Germanic tribes the Celts had contact with via trade, intermarriage and other means. We also have evidence of Celts being able to exert a civilizing influence on the Anglo-Saxons, teaching them literacy and introduction to Christianity via Latin and Roman missionaries, and also of notable figures from both cultures intermingling (the Caedmon of the famous seventh-century Anglo-Saxon hymn, for example, was a Celt).
Every textbook about the development of the language had to take a different position astride “Celtic problem”. It is possible either to accept the simple explanation of conquest and destruction in mass scale or to explain complexity, intermixing peoples and gradual assimilation. In terms of linguistics, the final result was the same one: the replacement of Celtic by the Anglo-Saxon. The reason both interpretations can be considered compatible is in providing a rationale for the twentieth century’s dominant model of the early history of the language. This paradigm considers Anglo-Saxon the direct ancestor English. It thereby extends English’s time line back to AD 449, which marks the beginning of the Roman withdrawal. This seems to be a natural starting point because it marks the first entry into Britain. Early twentieth-century scholarship thus rallied around the enticing notion of a lineage that traces its roots to Modern English going almost as many years back to Roman Britain. A consensus in the academic community emerged and the scholars of the language renamed the neutral language word “Anglo-Saxon” by the nationalist-driven “Old English.” An English departmental subindustry of books and courses that are based on the 1500-year-old history of the Anglish language has followed. The date of 449 has been taken for granted for so long that it is not even thought of today that there could be any alternative starting point prior to or after this date.
The latest research in the rapidly growing field of phylogenetics this is challenging the conventional histories of the British Empire, and may render the old paradigm obsolete. The findings are often overlooked or ignored by people who study the history of the language because they don’t know about them. Genetic mapping is a technique that collects DNA samples from a wide variety of people, including thousands of living people. It also uses bones that date back to prehistoric times to collect the data and trace the patterns of migration and lineages through time. The most significant finding in this essay is that the British Isles were populated as far back to the Mesolithic period, which was shortly after the last glacial period was gone, mostly from the Basque area of Spain. Since then, Britain was not populated by waves , but by a constant flow of people from Spain through the Atlantic Ocean and from the Balkans in Eastern Europe as well by the Mediterranean and overland (modern France). Then, the Balkan migrants arrived in Britain via the northern route that connected the Baltic Sea and Scandinavia. Even more interesting is the fact that the British population’s genetic foundation was formed by the Neolithic and Mesolithic migrations. The subsequent invasions of recent times, in the last two millennia, have contributed just a tiny amount to the British people’s blood in the present. Each major invasion provided only 5 percent (Oppenheimer).
New research gives a new perspective on the positions of the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic languages in the early millennium of Britain. These conclusions are simple and surprising, even though they have been right in front of us for a long time. The so-called Celtic issue never existed at all; the Celts weren’t forced into the western or northern regions of Britain since they were always present. It’s where their populations have been concentrated for many millennia. The Angles and the Saxons have been occupying their respective regions all along all the way back to Neolithic times. From the time of the Iberians in the early 1700s, people were already all over England however the largest concentrations were found in the most geographically sensible crossing points. The Celts came not from Central Europe (Germany and the Alps) according to what is often claimed, but from Spain and they came to the western shores of Britain naturally from the Atlantic as the Germanic peoples (Saxons and Frisians) crossed over at the closest point, to southern England, and the Scandinavians to eastern England.
It is also shockingly easy to solve the mystery of how Anglo-Saxons were able to help Britons in England accept their culture and language in such a short time after 449. “Anglo-Saxon,” as we will find out, is not quite the right term for this language, because it refers to invaders’ tongues. While it is known as “English” however, it is distinct from and foreign to the English we speak currently. According to the latest research on computational computing (Forster and Renfrew) This archaic English, which I call “Anglish,” broke off from Common Germanic during earlier waves of immigration towards England hundreds or even thousands of years prior to the Anglo-Saxon invasion of 449 and has its own branch of the Germanic tree. According to the conventional view, English is a descendant of the West Germanic language family (Frisian Dutch, German). In the updated perspective, English is more closely linked to the eastern part of North Germanic (Danish and Swedish). If we consider the situation of linguistics from this perspective, the terms are reversed. The Anglo-Saxons were not people who assimilated to the Anglo-Saxons. It was the Anglo-Saxons who did this, just like all other invaders to Britain throughout recorded history, including the Vikings, Romans and Normans–just like we’d think they would do, because of the reasons above.