Interesting theory about the origins of english

http://www.archaeology.ws/

some research which places english speaking people in england in pre-roman times.

click on the minute +'s at the end of paragraphs to follow to more pages.

here is a cut and paste with a summary:

"how long has English been spoken in Britain?

Did the Anglo-Saxons bring English to Britain? Did they drive the "Celts" to the western margins of Britain? Were many of the "Celts" massacred in a wave of ethnic cleansing by continental immigrants?

Since the 17th century, it has been believed that England was invaded by immigrants from the Germanic speaking areas of north-western Europe. The earlier inhabitants, believed to be Celts, were thought to have been conquered, subjected, annihilated or displaced to the western fringes of Britain. The ancient languages of Cornwall, Wales and Cumbria are indeed similar to each other. The English language is indeed to be found in much of England and Scotland since medieval times.

But now a small group of scientists are challenging this view. Win Scutt has discovered, through studies of archaeology and place-names, that an ancient form of English was being spoken in eastern Britain before the Anglo-Saxons arrived - perhaps thousands of years before. And Peter Forster, using phylogenetic methods to analyse the Germanic languages, has found that English is a much more distant relative of continental Germanic languages than previously thought. Stephen Oppenheimer has followed the genetic ancestry of the Celts and English and he too has found that their pathways are very different from previously believed."

It has been suspected for years that there were Germanic (Friesian most likely) Mercenaries in Britton during Roman times, usually sited in Northumbria, but not necessarily exclusive to there.
The last ethnic studies that I have seen gave a wider distribution of native genes (Celtic if you like) than previously expected…from what I read. This would simply mean that the conquered peoples adopted the language of the conquers, something long suspected. Would not this arrangement lead to a similar result if the original place names were translated to the new language?
This may seem too simple but Archaeologists in the past have tended to overcomplicate their findings and when dealing with a linguistic puzzle I am not sure that they should be given the lead in giving a plausible explanation.

There are serious difficulties in deterring who was where by their material culture and even from physical remains. Linguistic Archaeology can put forward loads of new theories without ever being able to prove anything. It might, however, go some distance into explaining the strong Friesian elements in the English language over those of the more straight forward Saxon dialect of German.

Maybe my view is too simplistic, but I find it much harder to believe that there were tens of thousands of proto-English speakers hovering around without some historical mention of the fact.

Note: For what ever reason Friesian & Bavarian are classed as languages while most all the rest are only classed as dialects.

Are you talking about modern Bavarian German???

If so it is certainly more different from the other German dialects that I've heard than the rest, excepting Austrian German of course (and perhaps Swiss German?) because they are basically like Bavarian German but more extreme, at least to my ears.

If not simply ignore me!

The subject is beeing debated on Roman Army Talk, check it here:
http://www.romanarmy.com/rat/viewtopic.php?t=13246

Here a comment from Keith J Fitzpatrick-Matthews from the BritArch:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Keith J Fitzpatrick-Matthews

Although the idea is interesting, I think that there are a number of things that need to be explained before taking it seriously.

First, there's the contemporary onomastic evidence. We have coinage from the later first century BC/early first century AD that gives the names of rulers and occasional placenames. These come from the area suggested as Germanic-speaking, yet all of them are Brittonic Celtic. Why would supposedly Germanic-speaking peoples take Celtic names for their rulers?

Secondly, there are the placenames recorded for eastern Britain in Classical sources. While some of them could be interpreted as germanic, the majority could not and many have direct cognates in Gaulish placenames (such as Camulodunum). If the placenames that are typical of early medieval England (those with elements such as leag/leah, eg or ing(a)) were already present in late prehistoric and Roman Britain, why do we not see any of them in contemporary sources?

Thirdly, there is the evidence from inscriptions that show people with Latinised but otherwise recognisably Celtic names (such as Ti Claudius Togidubnus), worshipping gods and goddesses with Celtic names (such as Senuna or Toutatis) in places with Celtic names. A quick search of RIB reveals almost no Germanic names and of those rare examples which are plausibly Germanic, it is clear from the bizarre spellings that those who composed the inscriptions were dealing with unfamiliar names that they found barbarous, hardly likely in an area in which Germanic was supposedly the indigenous language.

Fourthly, although the work of geneticists such as Stephen Oppenheimer is challenging, I continue to be worried by inferences made from DNA samples taken from living populations. We need a much stronger data set based on archaeologically derived DNA before reading contemporary data back into the distant past. I am also concerned by the way in which each new study seems to contradict the previous study (the debate seems to swing between the two extremes of virtually complete DNA replacement in England during the 'migration period' to virtually complete DNA stability since the Mesolithic). This surely indicates that the science of human population genetics is still in its infancy and is struggling to find ways of interpreting the data.

Fifthly, the idea that the English language arrived during the migration period was not a sixteenth-century hypothesis, but was already present in the early medieval period. Bede, writing in 731, is quite explicit about it. In Book One, Chapter One of the _Historia Ecclesiastic_ he states that there are five languages in Britain - English, British, Irish, Pictish and Latin - and he describes how the British speakers were the first settlers, followed by the Picts and then the Irish. Chapter Two describes the arrival of the Romans, bringing Latin with them. Chapter Fifteen is then the well known and contentious description of the origins of the English in Germany and their arrival during the joint reigns of Marcian and Valentinian III. Bede equates 'peoples' with languages as his view of history is framed very specifically along Old Testament lines. Nor was he alone in this interpretation. Gildas, writing any time between the 470s and the 550s, places the arrival of the English some time in the fifth century and is quite clear that the Britons were the indigenous inhabitants. The early ninth-century _Historia Brittonum_ follows Bede and is even more explicit in the identity of the newcomers as the bringers of a new language (in Chapter 46, the author introduces a snippet of garbled Old English - eu saxones eniminit saxas - in a context that implies that members of the ruling council of Britain will not be able to understand it).

The final problem, as I see it, is that the idea that languages are somehow linked to genes has long been discredited. So what if we have long-term DNA continuity among the population in lowland Britain? So what if the ancestors of this population can be hypothesised as arriving via the (then dry) North Sea basin during the Mesolithic? Do the origins of these people via Germany mean that they had to be speaking a Germanic language ten thousand years ago? Surely not, if linguists' ideas about the development of the Indo-European language family has any validity (not that I'm a believer in glottochronology or Urnfield People - I'm more concerned with the interrelationships between languages).

So, those are the challenges, Win. If you can answer them, it will remove what I see as the main objections to your hypothesis and make it more robust; if you can't, I think you need to look seriously at what your data (about English placenames and landscape) actually tells us. I have an idea, but I'm saving it!

Keith J Fitzpatrick-Matthews
http://www.kmatthews.org.uk

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