There’s no doubt the traditional explanation of how English came to Britain is hogwash. At its core it requires a supposed total genocidal massacre of Welsh speaking population before the Anglo Saxons arrived in three longships and genetically and linguistically replaced the Welsh. That’s nonsense and it’s about time someone said so.
The traditional view of the origin of English: that English came from Europe and replaced Welsh. But that requires a total genocide of a complete population of Welsh speaking Britons leaving almost no Welsh speakers left. Otherwise how does one explain the almost total absence of Welsh place names in Britain? There just is not the evidence to support it. A massacre of this scale would leave material evidence in abundance. It hasn’t! So it didn’t happen.
That leads to one inescapable conclusion: the English always spoke a form of English even before the Romans invaded.
Now I’ve written a new article in which I go back much further than the Romans to the ice-age to look at a possible origin of English and to suggest a possible means by which we arrived at the pre-Roman distribution of languages in Britain and also Europe.
Origin of British & West European Languages
However, it may help to read my previous article leading up to this one:
Alternatively here is a summary.
- There is no evidence for the “Celts” being in Britain and Caesar explicitly says that the Celts were a tribe in France.
- There is no evidence for a genocide in England so it must be assumed that whatever language was there before did not change dramatically.
- Likewise, there is no evidence for a wholesale change of French. It’s nonsense to suggest a supposed Welsh speaking France started speaking French (a language closely related to Latin) when the Non-Latin Franks arrived.
- Gaulish is nonsense. The few words that supposedly form this language do not fit the required Welsh speaking language. Instead this failure is hidden using the “Celtic” myth which allows those looking to translate these words turn to Irish. I show it’s as easy to find the origin of these words in French and so the idea they derive from Irish does not wash.
- Finally in the last article I outlined how I see the languages in Britain before the Roman Invasion.
Origin of British & West European Languages
Why do you think Welsh was spoken in England? I thought it was an offspring of a common ancestor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Brittonic
And changing a language doesn’t involve killing people, just persuading them that the new language would be in their best interest (either survival or trade).
But people aren’t PC – and whilst they might change their language, they usually keep referring to places by the same names.
So, e.g. we would expect a lot of places with “aber-” (mouth of) as a name for places at the mouth of a river.
It just didn’t happen. So either the population were totally removed 100%, or there simply wasn’t any welsh place names to pass on.
What we really would expect is more of “Norman” invasion. Here, the incomers took over the kingdom, killed many nobles and anyone else that resisted and made everyone else into “serfs” (slaves). And yes, for a while Norman French was the recorded language in many court documents, but very soon the pressure of all those English speaker serfs forced the Normans to adopt the language of the slaves: English.
But it is very obvious looking at the language after the invasion that each language contributed a whole raft of new words (e.g. Pork-pig, Beef cow, etc.)
Nothing like that is present in Old English. There’s no sign of English taking in a whole load of Welsh words from the “slaves”.
So, in other words a few Saxons are supposed to have come in, and then rather than enslaving all the natives and living off their labours – they slaughtered the lot and lived like peasants scratching a living from the land with not a single native to help!
You’d imagine that one of those invaders might have thought: “if only we didn’t kill these people I would have someone to do all the hard work …”
Place names were ephemeral until map making started and the map makers put it down how they thought it had been said. Thus Aber might be written down as Ber or Ba or Abbo or any variant you can think of. During severe times, places could be emptied and there would have been nobody to make a note of how the place was originally labelled. Places varied greatly in their significance and what might seem an important and old place is relatively new. eg Coventry was insignificant during the Roman era but became one of the country’s biggest cities. The origins of its name is speculative, and had several forms of spelling, as well as many theories regarding its meaning, but “Cofa’s tree” (also spelt “Coffa’s tree”) is thought to be a most likely source of the name. Nothing is known of Cofa, but a tree planted by, or named after him may have marked the centre or the boundary of the settlement. An alternative favoured by some is “Coventre” – derived from the words “Coven” (old variation of “Convent”) and “tre” (Celtic: “settlement” or “town”), giving rise to “Convent Town”. A third hypothesis is that the word Coventry is derived from the word ‘coven’ meaning a collection of witches. Confusing much?
As for invaders, while peasants might have wanted to call their areas after the original name if their lord threatened them with death if they didn’t use the new name, they’d soon make the change. Would you teach your kids the old name if they might slip up and use it at the wrong moment? A lot of places were named after the local lord, either as an appeasement or because he demanded it. Other places got their name because they were connected to something or someone there – Smithfield, Ironbridge, Newcastle.
As I see it language evolves for key reasons.
Invention – thinking up new words for new things or concepts.
Mutation – familiar words change over the years as people miss learn them and then pass on the flaw to their children or lessers. Changes in facial features would have also slowly made things sound different.
Addition – adding words from other languages because they fit a new thing.
Substitution – the replacement of old words for new either by choice (fashion or trade) or by force.
Duplication – the addition of new words to existing words for the same thing. This would happen as part of dual populations (trade or invasion) or for the appeal of a larger vocabulary.
Obsolete – words stop being used because they are no longer relevant or fashionable.
Contraction – longer words shorten to something easier.
Syntax is more complicated but similar processes would apply.
Invasion, trade, travel and disease probably make for a very changeable language and let’s face it, we had a lot of those.
It’s worth noting how empty a lot of the UK was. During the Roman era there were about 4 million people which halved after they left, probably due to disease and (dare I say it) climate change. Numbers didn’t increase much until the medieval warm period and got up to about 5 or 6 million but then crashed again to 2.5 million during the Black Death. It didn’t regain the peak numbers until the beginning of the 18th century. The rest, as they say, is history.
You’ve provided a good list, however, it’s quite ironic because if this were climate scientists claiming that the world was heading to doomsday even though they had not evidence, then you would very happily accept assertions that they are probably wrong.
But when it’s historians who similarly assert that “the pause in welsh – is hidden in the oceans – and the fact we cannot see any welsh proves it is in the oceans” – you seem to take a very much more believing viewpoint.
I spent months, even years trying to find one shred of evidence that supported the hypothesis of a welsh language, and I found it was completely missing.
The “null hypothesis” in anything like this must be that if there is no evidence of change, then we must assume that change did not take place (otherwise we can invent anything we like!).
And like climate science, I’m now asking that those asserting a welsh language in England put up the evidence or shut up. So far, no one has been able to put up any evidence at all (and we’ve been discussing it where those who should know would have heard).
So, it is really up to those who assert a genocidal-type event to find the evidence to support their view, otherwise logic dictates that we adopt the simplest theory in line with the evidence.
It also doesn’t help that in at least one early account they talk of “Britons” and “welsh” as two different peoples – at least they do in the Latin – but by the time it gets into English, that clear difference has been removed and replaced by “welsh” or “Britons” (with a footnote to say they were welsh).
All this is covered in The History of Britain Revealed (aka The Secret History of the English Language) by M J Harper (no relation, we are one and the same) published back in 2002. The academic apes attacked.