When I went to University to do Physics I knew that physics was unlikely to be a career in its own right, but instead it was a means of problem analysis that was applicable to many areas of life. It was, I was taught at school, the fundamental methodology of science:
- gather the evidence
- Review it impartially
- Formulate hypothesis
- Test them
- Repeat
It seems to me that it is stating the obvious, that if you are investigating something, you don’t start from the premise “the human race are destroying planet earth” and expect to get a scientific conclusion any more than you would if you started from the premise that “The English are genocidal maniacs who annihilated an entire population“.
Those kinds of statements, seem to be a tad biased!
Yet, the first has more or less been endorsed by almost every academic who calls themselves a “scientist” and the second by almost every academic who calls themselves an historian, archaeologist & linguists. It is hard to think of any subject that hasn’t in some way bought into one or other of these.
And if you have never heard of the evidence that English is indigenous to England or are inclined to accept the excuse that genocide of a complete welsh-speaking population not just in England, but also in celtic-Gaul (France) as well as all most of the rest of Europe which was supposedly “celtic”, then please read this website:
How old is English?
There summary puts their case well:
Let there be no doubt:
- there is no historical proof whatsoever that the Anglo-Saxons imported English.
- there is on the contrary ample evidence that English is native to England.
We will also challenge the very existence of Celts as a distinct people with a distinct language, but not the existence of a Celtic culture. In fact we discovered an error of interpretation of the known facts and sources so big that everybody missed it until today.
We detected a stunning circular reasoning which is still used by modern historians who are specialized in Celtic language, history and culture.
So, let’s compare the Global Warming theory with that of a genocidal English speakers and their Germanic speaking counterparts that are supposed to have wiped out a welsh speaking population from most of France (this is the place where the Romans tell us the celts were located), from all the rest of Europe and from most of Britain (except the left hand side which”by miracle” 2500 years earlier was the location of the separate Megalithic culture)
| Global Warming | British language | |
| Theory (of evil) |
Humans activity will destroy the earth | The genocide by English annihilated a previous welsh speaking population after Roman occupation. |
| Reason for belief | A chance warming period from 1970-2000 coinciding with rising wealth and CO2 emissions | A chance immigration of a small number of “Anglo-Saxons” coinciding with the date of the earliest Germanic texts. |
| Actual Position | No warming for 18 years | English contains almost no early words from Welsh (or Irish) that would be found if there were Welsh (or Irish) speakers in England at any time. |
| Null Hypothesis | Business as usual. That natural climate variation was responsible for 1970-2000 warming as it is agreed it was responsible for 1910-1940 warming. |
Business as usual. That the indigenous population in the English speaking regions of Britain always spoke a language like early English. |
| Response when asked for proof requiring us to reject null hypothesis | Denial and highlighting consensus | Denial and highlighting consensus |
| Explanation of lack of evidence | The heat is hiding in the oceans | Welsh is hidden by genocide: the (few) Anglo-Saxons supposedly annihilated the population |
| What the evidence shows regarding excuse | No one has been able to show the heat is real. | Archaeological evidence does not show the necessary genocide and DNA evidence points to continuity of populations |
| The burden of proof | On sceptics to prove the negative: that warming was not man-made |
On sceptics to prove the negative: that there were no Welsh or Irish in England, France and rest of Europe |
Notice how scepticism and arguing from the evidence is rejected whilst those asserting their view cite no evidence other than to point to consensus and “established positions”.
It is really concerning that two areas where I have happened to investigate in depth are so alike. This enforces my view that there is a systematic bias in academia and a lack of rigour in their approach to both subjects.
Those that have studied the Global Warming campaign know that it is largely a political movement. It was a way to unify the Greens (who lost their cause celeb when the Berlin wall came down) with the anti-capitalists. They chose a common enemy: oil and coal which in their entirely different way symbolised progress and prosperity – a hatred that could unify their causes against a common enemy (and coincidentally one which gave that energy huge profits as fossil fuel prices rose and that price hike went into rising fossil fuel sector profits).
But it is the same for the “celtic” myth. It, like global warming, was adopted mainly for political reasons and has never been supported by the evidence. This snippet from Michael Goormachtigh & Dr Anthony Durham website “How old is English” explains it well:
Simon James(University of Leicester) reminds us that the theory of the introduction of English was established in the 17th century under James I to suit the political needs of the time. The union of the crowns of Scotland and England was explained as re-union of (Celtic) Britain. State paid historians stated that Britain was ‘Celtic’ before the Roman age. They made no distinction between Celtic art or culture and Celtic language. Strange, because it was already known that the Romans had adopted Greek culture, but not their language. They presumed the existence of a Celtic language [2] all over Britain. This theory was immediately officially accepted for it came handy to quieten the critics who were against unification. The latter argued that the Scots always had been the eternal enemies of the English.
So, like global warming, the celtic myth was adopted without any proof is kept going by endless funds for “research” based on this myth and is now largely supported by groups of activists and zealots who shout down opponents, ignore the growing evidence against their views and generally make me despair that western education is capable of original and evidence based thinking any longer.
” . . . if you are investigating something, you don’t start from the premise “the human race are destroying planet earth” and expect to get a scientific conclusion any more than you would if you started from the premise that “The English are genocidal maniacs who annihilated an entire population“.
Those kinds of statements, seem to be a tad biased!
Yet, the first has more or less been endorsed by almost every academic who calls themselves a “scientist” and the second by almost every academic who calls themselves an historian, archaeologist & linguists.
Which scientists, precisely, have said that? Please provide citations.
“scientist” is in quotes as no real scientist would say that.
Scientists are people like those at CERN who when the evidence suggested that particles were travelling faster than the speed of light, they published this and said they could not explain it.
In contrast the global warming academics tell us that their predictions are “undeniable” science and then when they fail appallingly, they first attack us, then they deny it, then they try to make excuses about it being “hidden”.
Are you aware that over 20 different scientific disciplines are taken into account under the banner of “climatology”?. For example, Planetary Geology, Astronomy, Marine Biology, Atmospheric Physics, Glaciology, Chemistry, etc, etc, and so on. The vast amount of work in all these fields in in cataloging observations, not in predictions.
Why is it that you don’t trust an Atmospheric Physicist when it comes to laser weaponry or satellite imaging, but when it comes to measuring the energy characteristics of CO2, they suddenly are “in it for the grant money”?
And all these scientists work independently within their specialties and sometime in collaboration. They produce hundreds of studies and every 5 years many of these are then discussed in an open forum — the IPCC. This forum is open to ANYBODY — all you have to do is put your hand up as Christopher Monckton has done for example.
Do you realize how utterly impossible it is for one scientific field to concoct false data and not raise a red flag in another field? When the overwhelming consensus within ALL earth, space and atmospherics fields agree on the current theory of man-made global warming based on their own OBSERVATIONS, how can you say they are failing miserably?
A scientific discipline is one which uses the scientific method not a bunch of academics who publish non-science but claim they are “scientists”.
The simple rule of science is that you make predictions based on your hypothesis and if the the prediction fails, then the hypothesis is unquestionably wrong. And a scientist accepts this fact with good grace and tries a bit harder to get it right.
None of those disciplines are “science” unless and until they admit that their failed hypothesis was wrong.
That is how real science works.
Predictions are wrong? 99% of climate science is cataloging and analyzing observations — how is that wrong?
Is it wrong that 90% of the world’s glaciers are in retreat, that Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are losing mass, that we have had all but one year of this century in the top hottest 15 years on record, that the sea level rise is increasing, that the oceans are warming, that CO2 is absorbing outbound radiation as proven by satellite monitoring and that the Arctic has lost 75% of its mass in just 35 years?
Starting your temperature analysis at the top of the largest El Nino of the 20th century and only taking into account land surface measurements over a relatively short time period ignores a huge amount of data from numerous sources.
That is not what I would call being a a scientific sceptic, that is pure denial.
When I first started talking about the pause, I used 2001 as a starting date.
For daring to say that you your type said I should be put in extermination camps.
Until you apologise for that kind of appalling behaviour, I don’t see any reason to discuss petty things like when the pause started.
I’m not entirely sure that the site you link to are making useful claims. I’ve not come across any source that suggests English came here with the Saxons. All sources point to English being the result of a lot of changes both before, after and during the Saxons. What influence, varies by location too, thus Cumbria took longer to speak ‘English’ than say Kent. Even today, each region has words that are unique to their area but modern education and TV in particular are wiping out those unique differences rapidly. Like eventually, we’ll like, all speak American? Ya hear me bro?
Place names have the same mix and I’m not sure there’s a good formula for calculating how many ‘Welsh’ place names there should be. Welsh, English, German and French are all meaningless terms before the rules of each language were set down. All the languages seem to be the result of a lot of cross pollination. Trade would have been as significant as war.
On the site you link to, one of the first pieces of evidence for the durability of language uses modern Welsh speakers as proof. Read this on the Welsh language and its decline during the early part of the 20th century and tell me that a language can’t vanish in 100 years. It would be almost dead now if not for written language, recording and a concerted and very modern effort to keep it alive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Welsh_language
And that’s without considering how different modern Welsh could be from ancient Welsh. No warfare necessary. Conversely the Welsh speakers have had to be very aggressive towards non speakers to artificially revive the language. Modern sentimentality for all things traditional was a luxury that past civilisations couldn’t always afford.
To assess what influence the Saxons had on ‘English’ you’d first have to define what the average vocabulary was before the Saxons in each area and then compare it to what there was afterwards. You’d also have to know to what extent different areas were bilingual. Places with a lot of trade would have been more multi lingual and have less pronounced accents. The more remote places could have maintained a more unique language. Who’s to say how many people retained their local languages long after the Saxons had gone if nobody recorded that their village spoke Celtic or Cumbric or Viking or Swahili?
So how old is English? It would vary from word to word. if you consider that Old English had about 60,000 words max and modern English half a million I’d have to say that English is very, very modern. Of course about 80% of those are influenced by Latin so it’s about 2000 years old. Television being both Greek and Latin.
I think the question is stupid, much like ‘do you believe in climate change’. The picture is a lot more complcated.
“When I first started talking about the pause, I used 2001 as a starting date.”
This is in the body of your article:
“Actual Position No warming for 18 years”
You want me to apologize to you for someone else’s behavior?
First, I was NOT referring to you in the “stupid” category – it’s really the academics who have wilfully refused to consider the likely early British Germanic in Briton.
Having studied Old English in depth (as well as several other languages), I can tell you categorically that I’ve very very rarely found anything which appears to come from Welsh. There are some that are common, not many, but even those I have suspicions they are Old English words that have migrated into Welsh rather than the other way around.
Old English is amazingly empty of outside “intrusions”. This is why I love reading the dictionary – because once you start to see how words are related, you can spend hours following through the words and seeing how one word has morphed into (or more accuately is close to) another.
Danish is another language like that, but German, Latin and evern Welsh are full of odd “intrusive words” which just don’t fit the language. They must have come from somewhere else.
That is totally the opposite from what you would expect if Old English had been in extensive contact with a welsh population for any period of time.
So, the only way there could have been a previous welsh speaking population in the UK is for that whole population to have been wiped out almost without speaking a word. So, yes, various Germanic groups did come to England but there must have been one “complete genocide”.
And yes, with modern communications, language has changed rapidly. But it actually hasn’t changed as fast as you suggest. The earliest census which asked about Gaelic, saw only a small change to the next where it asked specifically if they spoke “some Gaelic”. So, unless you wilfully misinterpret the census and equate the question “do you speak Gaelic” with “do you only speak Gaelic”, then there has been a slow decline in Gaelic speaking over several hundred years.
You only get the massive declines, if you start with the idea of “100%” Gaelic just before the first census and then take the worst possible interpretation of the data.
What I found when I investigated early Christian churches in Scotland is that the Highland Gaelic-Lowland split was present from the earliest churches 600AD? The boundaries in language were actually very enduring before the modern age of travel and instant communication.
But the fundamental problem is that the null hypothesis has got to be “no change”. And so the only reasonable thing to do is to start with an assumption that the earliest language in England was always there, unless or until we can find good evidence to support a change to another.
And there isn’t the evidence in Old English, there isn’t the evidence in place-names, there isn’t any historical accounts of mass genocide, there isn’t any archaeological evidence of mass genocide. There is in fact, no evidence that could cause a reasonable person to reject the null hypothesis until that is the ice-age.
So ok if there was English in England before the Saxons which Roman place names reflect that?
Let me think:-
VINDOLANDA (Romans wrote W as V) so WindoLanda = windy-land
SULIS (bath where the springs are – which would have been warm muddy patches before the romans built there baths) sulis is Old English for mud
EBERACUM (York) – the highest point to which the tide went in Roman times. from Ebb – and reach. (Reach also means a stretch of a river)
LONDINIUM (London Cockney Landn) – from Landeng (“Landing”)
CORINIUM (Cirencester). Named from the local river the “Churn”, which also gave its name to “Cerney”. The old English “churn” is hardly changed – presumably as the river made a “churning” sound.
LINDINIS Ilchester, Somerset Derived from OE lind lime tree.
SEGEDUNUM Wallsend, Tyne & Wear From OE secg ‘sedge’ and the common Latin suffix dunum based on the OE dun.
BRIGE ?? [ Iter XII..Brige ] From OE brycg “bridge”
The other great word which the Romans tell us came from Britain is:-
DRUIDAE – The old English is “drygeþ” (he dries). To see the relationship look at the following:
Old English:
Dry – magician
Druw – drug
drygan (to dry).
We can see the similarity with drugaþ, drugoþ, (DRUGOTH) A DROUGHT.
So, drug, means “dried” (herbs). And a druid was a herbalist.
But there are arguments for at least some of those being celtic or pre celtic so it doesn’t help. Culled from the internet –
eg First element from Celtic *windo- ‘white’ (Welsh gwyn); in Vindolanda, Celtic *landā ‘land, place’ (Welsh llan). Cirencester – There is no clear origin of the name as we know it today, but Korinion was mentioned by the Egyptian-born scholar Ptolemy in his “Geographica” written in about AD 150. It thus seems probable that the Romans adopted the name Corinium from the local tribe the Dubonnii, of the Cornovii peoples. Some references through the years are to the Romanised name of “Corinium Dobunnorum”. There is also a probable connection to the Celtic word, corin, for corn; this is also thought to be the origin of the name Churn for the river which still flows through the town.
There are several explanations for London via a celtic derivation and I can’t be bothered to look the others up because I suspect I’ll find similar possibilites. In other words, you can find a connection to either language if you look hard enough. In fact every place name I look up seems to start with ‘it’s not clear but’ and then punctuated with mays and coulds (like climate science).
What comes across from reading about the subject is not that the truth is cast in iron but that there are lots of areas of debate and theory. Even the introduction of DNA evidence has made things more complicated rather than solved the issues as to whether the Saxons wiped out, merged with, drove out or just dominated the locals. What doesn’t seem at all impossible is that a language could largely vanish over a relatively short timescale if the pressures were right. I’m not sure I care whether it did or didn’t.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_settlement_of_Britain
This explanation may or may not be an accurate picture of the Saxon English debate but it seems reasonable and unlike climate science, isn’t demanding society be reordered to suit the consensus. I don’t automatically accept sceptic climate science and I’ve said before now that I don’t beleive or disbelieve either side unless the claim is clearly wrong. I think there isn’t enough evidence to panic or relax.
This fellow Drewski sure sounds delusional. How do these people live with themselves and how do they believe lock, stock and barrel in all the climate alarmism claptrap?
Common sense is a commodity that is lacking in this modern day. What a fool!
Add the arrogance of academia, to the arrogance of environmentalism, then give them an unfettered internet to spread their gospel of fear…
The most worrying things is that if I had stayed at university to do a PhD, I too could be like Drewski. It’s not that I’m better – it’s just that he never got the chances I did.
The better question Peter is why don’t you trust the experts?
I assume you see a medical specialist when you have a medical problem? Yet to get anywhere near 90% consensus for anything in medicine would be an amazing achievement. Well climate science is an amalgamation of more than 20 scientific fields and the agreement within all these disciplines is above 90%. The fact that over 80 scientific organizations whose lifeblood is evidence and analysis (from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists to the World Meteorological Organization) support of the prevailing theory of AGW should tell you that the evidence is strong. Can you name one scientific organization — anywhere in the world — and who conducts original research, which disagrees with the theory?
I will let that sink in for a while.
An expert is someone who when they say their predictions are “unequivocally right” – they are right.
An expert is a person trained and/or educated in a particular field or craft whose knowledge of that specialty is superior to the untrained or uneducated person.
Predictions that are “unequivocally right” only exist in fantasy novels.