The common belief in history is that the Anglo-Saxon Germanics from northern Germany, Holland and Denmark displaced the indigenous Brythonic Celts, forcing them into the fringes of Britannia we now call Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, and Wales.
This however, flies in the face of the fact that all of the nations of the British Isles, including Ireland more or less share the same DNA. England does however show more evidence of outside influence and maps out a bit closer in the direction of continental Europe than Ireland does.
My theory would be that people on the eastern shore of Britain have had trade and contact with those in the Low Countries well before the Roman takeover and thus have been Germanic centuries prior to when the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were founded. And people in the more westerly parts of England spoke Brythonic languages but gradually adapted to speaking the Germanic tongue of their elite Anglo-Saxon class.
So in short, I’d say the English are basically Germanized Welsh with some moderate, maybe 5-30% input from the Continent. What do you think?
The Celtic speaking countries are imo simply the last parts of the British Isles to switch from speaking a Celtic to a Germanic language and shouldn’t be thought of as being racially or genetically distinct from the English.
As I understand it, the Germanic invasions really only replaced the ruling and military classes. The vast majority of the peasants stayed put with different masters.
Yeah and wasn’t most of Germany and Austria “Celtic” at one point as well? Being a Germanic or Celtic people seems more sociolinguistic than genetic in basis. As far as genes go, all Northern European people from Ireland to Norway to Germany are very similar.
Basque is a remnant non-indo-european language. There used to be lots of them all over Europe such as Etruscan, but the others were replaced by Celtic or Germanic or Romance languages. The only connection to Basque is that Basque isn’t indo-european. There’s no reason to think that the pre-indo-european languages of Europe were related to each other, they were just as likely to be in completely different language families.
From my readings I conclude that less emphasis should be given to water as a barrier than one might expect; instead water almost encourages long-distance travel. There was much movement to Britain from the mainland off and on long before the time of Rome. The Y-dna haplogroups of Britain have been well mapped; they include several different subclades of R1b-L11, probably associated with different migrations from the mainland over millenia. (There are also rarish subgroups which have been tracked to specific groups of Roman mercenary soldiers, etc.)
AFAIK, there was no evidence of any Germanic words or names in Britain at the time of the Roman invasion. (Germanic was probably a very young language family at that time.) Also, AFAIK, there has been little success at identifying Basque or any other known language as a non-IE adstrate for Germanic or Celtic. IIRC, those prone to such speculations are more likely to mention Berber than Basque.
They would have to be, if you take “originally” literally. Actually, like everyone else, the English are originally from Africa.
There was a time in prehistory when what is now the British Isles was physically connected to what is now France. There was also a time when all of it was submerged under glaciers. Humans still lived in southern Europe.
Germanic was exactly as old as Celtic and Romance, since they are all branches of Western Indo-European.
The possible relationship of Celtic to Berber most likely has nothing to do with the British Isles, but with the Celtic languages before they reached Britain.
There is a widespread claim that there is almost no evidence for the Celtic languages in Old English, but I think that claim is highly exaggerated. It has not been seriously examined in a hundred years, and English has a number of syntactic differences from the Germanic languages that might be explained by Celtic, as well as a number of words of unknown origin that might, in fact, be Celtic. I’m not saying that they ARE, merely that the people originally looking into the linguistic origins of the English were inclined to look at the Germanic and Romance languages, but not so inclined to consult Celticists.
In a trivial sense, there are some unknown pre-German, pre-Celtic, and pre-Italic languages that can be defined as co-temporal. However the known Germanic languages have a common ancestor much more recent than the common ancestor of Celtic languages. (The Common ancestor of Romance was similarly recent – did you mean Italic?)
The pre-history of Germanic is unknown, but the major changes which separate it from other IE languages may have been relatively recent; at the time proto-Celtic was expanding and dividing into its known branches, the ancestor of proto-Germanic might only barely resemble Germanic.
Oops, I did mean Italic. I’m curious as to your evidence for these dates. I am familiar with the evidence for Celtic and to a lesser extent Italic, but I’m completely ignorant on early Germanic languages.
I’m afraid there may be serious flaws in their methods, but a clading chart of Indo-European languages estimated by Atkinson and Gray may be a useful starting point. It shows Germanic and Romance first separating into subclades at about the same time, after AD, with the Brythonic-Goidelic split about 11 centuries earlier (presumably a Continental-Insular split was even earlier). The chart offers no opinion on pre-Romance Italic, since Tocharian and Hittite are the only extinct languages included in the analysis.
(I’d use that chart with caution. It shows Germanic as closest to Italic – I don’t think that is widely accepted. Also, the great distance of Germanic from other I-E languages may be due to effects like “imperfect learning,” while IIRC Atkinson-Gray attribute all distance to time depth. Finally, I think most linguists assume the Baltic-Indic common ancestor was more recent than the Baltic-Italic or Baltic-Celtic common ancestor, but Atkinson-Gray reverses this.)
I cannot imagine what methods they are using, but none of the higher level branchings are consistent with what you usually find past #1. It is agreed by all that Indo-Hittite split into Indo-European and Anatolian (Hittite, Lydian, Luwian, etc. all extinct).
Then Indo-European split into Indo-Germanic and Centum, where Centum gave rise to Celtic and Italic, plus some “lost” branches (Vandic, Lusitanian, presumably others) as part of a general western European continuum of which Gaelic, Brythonic, and the large Romance branch are the only survivors.
Indo-Germanic split into Germanic, Satam, and Balkan Peripheral. Satam combines Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian, while Balkan Peripheral included many poorly documented early languages (Messapian, Illyrian, Macedonian, Thracian, Dacian, Cimmerian, Phrygian) as well as the early-documented Greek, late-documented Tocharian (they moved to central Asia shortly after the Trojan War as part of the “Sea Peoples” upheaval) and Armenian (perhaps derived from something like Phrygian but there are centuries of gap), and very-late-documented Albanian (ultimately from Illyrian? heavy overlays of Slavic, Greek, and Turkic influence).
This is usually how linguists see the sub-branching, but some prefer an “Indo-Achaean” branch combining Indo-Iranian with some of the Balkan Peripherals (particularly Greek and Armenian) rather than with Balto-Slavic, which they see as being closer to Germanic (assuming that Germanic got mutated by contact with something else, perhaps a “creolization” process in which it was rapidly imposed on a population whose original tongue was very different). The chart that you link to does not make any sense to me at all.
I think that’s an understatement. The idea that Celtic split off that early is arrant nonsense. In any case, this is just a chart: what is the evidence for a late common Germanic?
Idries Shah, British writer of ethnically Afghan ancestry, published a theory that the tribe of Angles originated in the Nuristan province of northeastern Afghanistan and migrated to the North Sea coast on their way to having England named after them. However, Idries Shah is openly a world-class bullshitter. He admitted sprinkling his works with utterly bald-faced bullshit mixed in with the real stuff, and that only those in the know would understand the esoteric message hidden underneath the surface. Shah was initiated into a Wiccan coven by Gerald Gardner, and later published “evidence” that Wicca originated in Saudi Arabia, from a tribe that includes the ruling Al Sa‘ud and Wahhabi clans. Yeah, right. Shah also wrote that when St. Francis of Assisi traveled to the Sultan of Egypt during the Crusades he was only pretending to preach Christianity to the Muslims; on the contrary he went to get Sufi initiation and founded the Franciscans as an order of Whirling Dervishes. Shah loved to poke fun at people, including his own readers, who would swallow unquestioningly any amount of bullshit from a holy man, no matter how fake.
So if Shah’s theory that the English came from Afghanistan sounds incredibly farfetched, it’s probably on purpose.
Yep; this is why I find mitochondrial DNA usually more interesting. MtDNA shows the history of cultures whose women stayed home instead of migrating to a foreign land. It’s through MtDNA that you can discern genetic substrata that aren’t necessarily tracked by the male line. MtDNA would be where to look for the genetic continuation of the pre-Celtic inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland, I’m thinking.
