How English arose is a captivating tale with a fantastic cast of characters, though they are actually texts and groups of people instead of individuals. It emerges out of the mists seemingly from nowhere then flies around, changing into something else before finally taking off and taking over the planet as the first truly global language. It’s also a story that has been told numerous times by scholars and authors. It appears that a majority of those who’ve been telling this story for the last 100 years have been incorrect.
Anglish – The Celtic problem
Let’s start at a position that’s sufficiently far back in time to see the bigger view, the situation of the British Isles some 2,000 years ago. A couple of million Britons resided in the country scattered across homesteads or hamlets according to the legend, they spoke different Celtic languages and dialects, about which there remains much confusion since they were not recorded. It is believed that the Celts came across from the Continent through successive waves during the last few centuries, bringing with them a new version of their language every time. For example, the Picts are a hostile tribe, were pushed into northern Scotland by the newly arrived Celts. They may have spoken an earlier version of Celtic. Collectively the Celtic languages spoken in Britain are referred to as “Insular Celtic,” “Brittonic,” or simply “British,” to distinguish them from the Celtic on the Continent.
Here’s an example of how these languages might look today and what it might look like if we all used the Celts”language” should they have been successful in eliminating 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.
It is Welsh. It was restricted to the mountainous regions of Wales since the seventh century The language was then isolated and thus has seen little structural change up to the present. Some Welshmen today claim to be able be able to read Welsh texts from over a thousand years ago without difficulty. It’s not like this has made it more welcoming to the English. In Shakespeare’s day it was thought to be such a foreign language that the word itself was a sign of any language that was not understood, such as when we use the phrase “it’s Greek to me.” It is mentioned in the scene set in Glyndwr’s castle 1 Henry IV (3.1) in which Hotspur pokes fun at Mortimer’s inability of communicating with his wife, who isn’t English speaking, other than sexually. It is interesting that the stage directions do not require Welsh lines. We do however see a similar scene of bawdy repartee in Henry VIII 5.2. Shakespeare’s troupe could have used a Welsh-speaking boy to play the role of Lady Mortimer. It’s evident from the stage directions, which state “The lady is speaking Welsh,” five times before she enters the stage and performs the Welsh song. Shakespeare is engaged by Mortimer in a conversation with Hotspur, Glyndwr and other English-speaking characters, drawing attention to English. Perhaps, the Welsh lines may be written by Shakespeare before being translated. In any case, Lady Mortimer was not required to speak the words of Shakespeare. There could have been vulgar jokes or insults directed towards anyone Welshmen present in the audience. Queen Elizabeth is believed to speak Welsh.
I have made these observations about Welsh to highlight the cultural divide in Britain between the northern and western Celtic-speaking regions and England itself, a gap that goes back to prehistory and is in place today.
Let’s go back to AD 43, the year that the Romans conquered Britannia. There are three options for acquiring an area. You can go all out and employ the “scorched Earth” strategy. It is necessary to eliminate everything within your path and include the army of the enemy as well as human settlements livestock, settlements, and everything else that might be beneficial, like crops. The forest is then destroyed to the ground, thereby keeping the defeated from returning to exact revenge. This strategy was used in the Thirty Years War (1618-48) that resulted in the loss of 8 million European lives. It was also used during the Taiping Civil War (1850-604), which cost 10 times as many Chinese lives. It was pre-modernity’s version of nuclear war, and its outcome was much more destructive than any nuclear war yet in our time. The transformation of a land that is hostile into a moonscape means that you also destroy yourself as there’s not enough food available or a way to increase your growth rate fast enough to avoid starvation. Another issue with scorched-earth war is that it wasn’t feasible prior to the advent of firearms, ruling it out for the Romans as well as all subsequent invasions of Britain in the following a thousand years (Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel). What is the reason I include this absurdity into my story? It’s one of the theories in the most popular historical account of English which we’ll explore below.
A somewhat less ruthless and more intelligent method is to use androcide: eliminate the entire male enemy population but leaving the women and agriculture intact (think Genghis Khan). The invading army is happy since they’ve got plenty of females to rape and begin families. It’s an injustice for the population and necessitates their enslavement to get their submission.
The third option is symbolic punishment , and reconciliation. To convey your message, give them a slap on the wrists and then put the tens of thousands or a few hundred of the captured armies under the sword. The rest of the population will be saved if they pay respect to the conquerors. If you’re equipped with superior technology, you can build on the existing infrastructure and expand it into something superior. This is exactly what Romans did. They taught Britons how to run their own country, and did such a good job that their beneficial and mutually beneficial partnership lasted for four centuries. In today’s world it is possible to see the Romans are visible on expressways that run through the entire island. Additionally, there are thousands of Roman coins scattered throughout Britain as proof of an ancient, vibrant economy.
The language situation during Roman occupation. The only way an invading army could succeed in replacing the current language by their own is to do so by a complete exile of the people who were conquered. It’s not easy to achieve without resorting to the scorched-earth method, which as we’ve seen eliminates your own chance of survival in the process. Invaders either have to stay within their own language bubble or they are outnumbered by the native population and end up speaking their native language. Romans created a Latin-speaking administrative group, and the class was bilingual and comprised of traders, merchants, and others who wanted to take advantage of the Roman presence.
Through time, Latin vocabulary trickled down throughout the populace, and the local language was further enriched by a number of Latin loanwords. Bilingualism was possible when the Britons were in a position to be able to coexist with their neighbors and Latin had enough prestige value for it to be able to spread. The language of the local area would later be modified to look more like Latin and still maintain its original grammar. However, since Latin served the purposes of scribes well enough and the language of the local area weren’t recorded and we have no information about the language (the Romans never referred to the Britons as “Celts,” a term they reserved for the inhabitants of France). We can determine their families’ general 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 south and east it was different Germanic languages (not Celtic as is commonly assumed in the standard historical accounts).
In AD 410 the Romans abandoned Britain to fight barbarian attacks closer to home. Even though the British could probably manage the country on their own but their infighting made them more susceptible to maritime piratery. According to the standard narrative, in 449, four tribal groups from nearby areas along the North Sea coast of the Continent created beachheads on the island. Frisians, Saxons, and Jutes, from north Denmark were the first to attack Britain’s southern coast. Angles, from the northern Elbe to southern Denmark, attacked Britain’s east coast. It’s believed that the four tribes were closely related and mutually understandable languages of the West Germanic (English, Dutch, German) and North Germanic (Scandinavian) families. They could have coordinated their fights to share the spoils. They were collectively called the “Anglo-Saxons” which is a term I will employ as a pro forma by 19th century Philologists.
Two contradictory accounts of events that occurred in the following four centuries are available. According to one account Anglo-Saxons destroyed Britain with a mix of androcide and scorched earth campaigns, burning and killing there, plundering and raping there, and essentially completely eradicating the British, i.e., Celtic population. So ferocious was the genocide that by the 6th century, many Celts were forced to flee from the island to the modern day Brittany in France (where the Breton Nation today speak an ancestor variety of British Celtic). The process didn’t take place immediately The conquest took around 200 years, but the end result was the obliteration of an entire culture. This explanation serves a valuable purpose. This interpretation explains, conveniently how Celts only survived in pockets to the north and west of the British Isles. They had been exiled there. The evidence for genocide or ethnocide can be observed in the absence of Celtic loanwords that survive in English and the lower concentration of Celtic coins, inscriptions, and names of places in the east, compared to the west and north.
A new history is based on the assumption that the Anglo-Saxons had been outnumbered by the Britons. Around four million people lived under Roman rule. This includes Romans who remained in the area until the garrisons dispersed. Why would they choose to leave, having lived there for so many generations? The Anglo-Saxons could have invaded England in just a couple of thousands or tens at the most. The Norman invasion force in 1066 was estimated to be only about ten or twenty thousand. They also took on England faster than the Anglo-Saxons. It’s difficult to fathom how these early groups of Vikings could take on a population that was so bigger, with a background in Roman military practices and then wipe out their people and language in just a couple of generations. Although one source claims that the Britons were apathetic, this isn’t true. The Anglo-Saxons were forced to fight for their survival many centuries later. The Celts are believed to have faced a strong opposition, and have a wealth of documents and artifacts that testify to fights won by both sides, a messy affair , as always when there are invasions. A lot of violence was likely to have been inflicted by the Anglo-Saxons to consolidate control over the island, however they lacked the resources to slaughter a large number of people, and were slaughtered by their fellow soldiers in different locations.
It is however possible that the widespread co-operation and integration were commonplace. The Celts weren’t forced from the eastern or southern areas of the island, as long supposed. The Celtic language forced to leave these areas. It could have developed into many creoles depending on the Germanic tribes that the Celts had contact with via trade, intermarriage and other methods. We also have evidence of the Celts’ exerting a civilizing influence on Anglo-Saxons, giving them literacy instruction and introduction to Christianity through Latin and Roman missionaries, and also of important figures from both peoples interspersed with each other (the Caedmon of the famous seventh-century Anglo-Saxon song, for instance, was an Anglo-Saxon Celt).
Every book on the history of the language has had to take an entirely different view of the “Celtic Problem”. It was either to accept the simple explanation of conquest and mass destruction or to explain complexity, intermixing peoples and gradual assimilation. The end result was similar that was the substitution of Celtic by the Anglo-Saxon. Both interpretations are possible in order to support the predominant paradigm for the beginning of the history and growth of English during the early 20th century. This paradigm regards Anglo-Saxon as the primary ancestor of English and thus extends the history of English back to the onset of the modern era AD 449 which is a logical enough starting point, as it is the time of the first invasion of Britain following the Roman withdrawal. Early twentieth-century scholarship thus rallied around the enticing notion of a lineage originating from Modern English going almost as far back to Roman Britain. An academic consensus was reached, and the term “Anglo-Saxon” which is neutral in its linguistics, was replaced by the more nationalist-oriented “Old English”. An English department subindustry has been set up that focuses on classes and textbooks built around the 1500 years-old history. The date of 449 has been taken for granted for so long that it has not occurred to anyone in the present that there might be other possible beginning point prior to or after the date.
The latest research in the rapidly growing field of phylogenetics, however it is causing a lot of confusion in the traditional accounts of Britain’s history, and could make the traditional model obsolete. Because of this, the results are usually ignored or dismissed by the historians who study the language, if they know of any. Genetic mapping is a method that gathers DNA samples from a wide range of people, including thousands of living individuals. Additionally, it uses bones that date back to prehistoric times to collect the data and trace lines of migration and patterns over time. One of the most important findings in this article is the fact that the British Isles were populated as far back as the Mesolithic period, shortly after the last ice age receded, originally from the Basque area of Spain. Since then, Britain was not colonized by waves but a continuous 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 migrations arrived in Britain through a northern route from the Baltic Sea and Scandinavia. It is also fascinating to consider the fact that the British population’s genetic base was created by Neolithic and Mesolithic migrations. Later invasions, in more recent times – the last two millennia–have only contributed a small percentage to the British population’s “blood” in the present, with each major invasion supplying a mere 5 percent or less (Oppenheimer).
New research offers a new perspective on the relative positions of Anglo-Saxon as well as Celtic languages in the early millennium of Britain. The findings are straightforward and striking, even though they have been right in front of us all along. The so-called Celtic problem was never there in the first place; the Celts weren’t forced into the western or northern regions of Britain because they were always present. This is where their populations have been for centuries. The Saxons and the Angles have also resided in their respective regions since Neolithic times. All were present in England since the Iberians. However the largest numbers of people were discovered at the most geographically logical entry points. The Celts were not originally from Central Europe (Germany or the Alps), but rather originated from Spain. They came to Britain’s western coast naturally via the Atlantic. While the Germanic peoples (Saxons, Frisians, and Frisians) crossed at the nearest point to south England while the Scandinavians moved to the east of England and the Celts were from Central Europe.
It is also shockingly easy to solve the question of how the Anglo-Saxons were able to help Britons in England accept their culture and language at such speed after 449 years. The language they spoke was called “Anglo-Saxon” since it refers specifically to the language of the invaders. It could be referred to as “English,” though it is completely distinct from and different from the English spoken today. According to research conducted by computer scientists (Forster and Renfrew), this ancient English which I will call “Anglish,” broke off from Common Germanic during earlier waves of migration to England hundreds or thousands of years before the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons in 449 and is now 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 revised view, English is more closely linked to the eastern part of North Germanic (Danish and Swedish). The two terms could be reversed when we look at the linguistic situation from this perspective. The Anglo-Saxons were not the ones who assimilate to the Anglo-Saxons. It was the Anglo-Saxons that did this, just like any other invaders to Britain through recorded history — the Vikings, Romans and Normans–just as we would expect them to do, because of the reasons above.