Re: Latin alphabet in Britain

On Wed, 21 May 2008, Cece wrote:
On May 21, 9:35 am, Matthew Huntbach <m...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I can't claim to be any sort of expert on this, maybe Simon Schama
says more. From what I recall, the explanation was that generational
switch in language use can occur more rapidly than we might suppose - in the
case of the Franks in France it was they who lost their language very
quickly and adopted that of their subjects. Also that pockets of Celtic
speakers may have remained in England for longer than we suppose, since
they would have been illiterate peasants, they would have left no written
record of their existence.

Very little of modern English vocabulary is derived from Celtic. Old
English (Anglo-Saxon) and Old Norse (Norse/Vikings) are mutually
understandable.

Yes, so imagine a situation where in what is now geographically
England, a large number of different Celtic languages are spoken,
maybe even some non-Celtic (like Pictish or Basque). Under that
situation a smallish number of people with much more uniform language
standards who had gained leadership status might very easily find
their language becomes the second langauge of all, and the old tribal
languages disappear without much trace. We can look at patterns of
language usage in modern times in other parts of the world to see that
this conjecture, though purely conjecture, isn't unreasonable.

Matthew Huntbach

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