Why isEnglish a Germanic language?
- Thread starter Derekc2
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Sior
Banned
Britain was not invaded; Prydain was invaded the correct name is Prydain the garble mouthed invaders mangled it to Britain.
Snake Featherston
Banned
English was the language of a number of Germanic tribes, these tribes either displaced/eradicated the locals or seamlessly assimilated the locals in a pattern that happened nowhere else in Europe at the time when Germanics did it 
rolleyes. The Romance languages happened because Roman soldiers set up colonies and overtook the Celtic languages of the natives in a slow, gradual process. The Slavic peoples and Balts had less contact with a society bent on eradicating languages and cultures of the locals.
rolleyes. The Romance languages happened because Roman soldiers set up colonies and overtook the Celtic languages of the natives in a slow, gradual process. The Slavic peoples and Balts had less contact with a society bent on eradicating languages and cultures of the locals.
Actually, it was the Romans who turned it into Brittania, after borrowing the Greek word for the islands.
There is population genetic evidence based on Y-chromosomal sequences, that the Anglo-Saxon-Jutish invaders by whatever means (jus primae noctis, enslavement, simply killing off the local males?) prevented the local male britonic population from procreating. The Y-chromosomes of tested males in England are closely related to those of tested males in Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, Denmark and Frisia while quite different from those of males tested in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. So it was not a simple invasion, it was a complete takeover of what later became known as Anglecynn and much later England.
What I find interesting is, that the resulting country was named after the Angles, not the Saxons. While there were Essex, Sussex and Wessex clearly derived from the term Saxon only East Anglia was named after the Angles and since it was Alfred of Wessex who unified the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms it would have made more sense to name the unified country Saexeland, not Angleland, especially since large parts of the Anglish settlement zone were still occupied by the Danes at that time.
What I find interesting is, that the resulting country was named after the Angles, not the Saxons. While there were Essex, Sussex and Wessex clearly derived from the term Saxon only East Anglia was named after the Angles and since it was Alfred of Wessex who unified the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms it would have made more sense to name the unified country Saexeland, not Angleland, especially since large parts of the Anglish settlement zone were still occupied by the Danes at that time.
Flocculencio
Donor
Yup the Angles were a very insignificant group compared to the Saxons. Of course no one really knows who the Jutes were- the name Jutland post dates this period and the only other reference to the Jutes is in Bedes Chronicle and that single reference may be a later interpolation.
Well the Northumbrians and Mercians were also Angles, weren't they? Indeed, I think the Mercian royal house claimed descent from the original ruling dynasty of the Angles back on the continent. The term "Englaland" or some predecessor of it could have become popular during one of the frequent periods of Northumbrian/ Mercian (or even East Anglian, during Raedwald's reign) dominance, and caught on enough to stay in use afterwards.
If the country had ended up being named after the Saxons, it would undoubtedly be called Sexland...The snide comments would never stop.
If the country had ended up being named after the Saxons, it would undoubtedly be called Sexland...The snide comments would never stop.
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Even if this is an accurate description of the status of Y-DNA in England, this doesn't mean the British male population was slaughtered and replaced. Over a period of generations, for example, giving men of Anglo-Saxon male descent a 10% higher chance of having surviving male children would result in the same DNA spread.
The problem there is that England is not Britain and the Anglo-Saxons never made very big inroads towards conquering Scotland so we say "England" out of convenience.
Sior
Banned
The invaders were just murdering thieving barbarians, the only culture they had was growing between their toes.
MAlexMatt
Banned
From what I've heard it was political: Alfred the Great, I think, was interested in emphasizing that he wasn't just another Bretwalda, but rather a proper king of a united English kingdom. In that eye, he wanted to placate northerners (who were Angles) who were afraid his kingdom was a violent inroads by southerners (who were Saxons), so he called his realm 'Angleland'.
Close. What I had in mind was, a language that was basically born as a creole of what the Frisians(yes, there were plenty), and the native Celts(Britons and Welsh, maybe) spoke, at least on the common level(things may have been different for the nobles; remember, this did happen in Normandy. The majority of the common people were always French in ethnicity, just that many of their rulers after the arrival of Rollo happened to be of Viking, mainly Norse, ancestry.)
I Blame Communism
Banned
Och, jings. We are aware that not only have the Anglo-Saxons left us plenty of culture, but that they and the Britons, there is strong evidence, at times inhabited the same polities and mixed pretty freely? Enough of this absurd nationalist historiography.
The Saxons arrived in the southeast overland and settled extensively in the dales there, there language spreading at some point to the hillside pastoralists (though some scraps of Brythonic survive in Borders topology and dialects). Before the coming about of the kingdom of England, they were almost certainly a reasonably compact majority who had been living in places like Lothian for several centuries.
The monks of the Border abbeys used to give their location as 'in England, in the kingdom of the Scots'. What is meant by 'England', and 'Scotland', has changed completely more than once in history.
And to take it the other way, until 1707 there was no certainty as to whether 'Britannia' was the Latin for the island of Prydain or referred to the Roman province corresponding to the kingdom of England with Wales. The pre-1603 English monarchy encouraged the confusion in pursuit of its imperial goals. The earliest Scottish unionists, for this reason, preferred 'Albion', with its whiff of 'Alba'. This ambiguity persisted even after the Union in political allegory, where Caledonia, like Hibernia, was a younger sisters of Britannia, which doesn't make sense in terms of modern understanding.
So who are we to say that Britain wasn't England to certain people at any given point in the past? This is the peril of nation-state history.
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I am not disputing it because I believe that it is the proper classification but this might be of interest:
Although Romance and Latin have contributed more to English, remember those are often the bigger words (Honorificabilitudinitatibus - From Latin).
Another thing worth bearing in mind is that, while French does make up a disproportionally large amount of English vocabulary, a lot of those words are themselves Germanic in origin! Remember, it was the Normans who overtook and ruled England...as in "Northmen", since Normandy was settled by Vikings (Norman=Northman). A not insignificant amount of those French words that entered our word-hoard were originally from Old Norse, then transliterated into Norman French over a few centuries. So technically, one could make the argument that there should be a margin of error between French and Germanic vocabulary by about 2-3%
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This is the most ridiculous and simply untrue statement I have seen on this forum in awhile, Saxons and Britons often coexisted and thrived together and to say they where culterless is a disgrace to a people who clearly had a very longstanding story telling tradition.
More importantly, a lot of French words are themselves of Frankish (and thus Germanic) origin. Frankish was from a different branch of the Western-Germanic languages than Old English (and for that matter Saxon and Frisian), though.Another thing worth bearing in mind is that, while French does make up a disproportionally large amount of English vocabulary, a lot of those words are themselves Germanic in origin! Remember, it was the Normans who overtook and ruled England...as in "Northmen", since Normandy was settled by Vikings (Norman=Northman). A not insignificant amount of those French words that entered our word-hoard were originally from Old Norse, then transliterated into Norman French over a few centuries. So technically, one could make the argument that there should be a margin of error between French and Germanic vocabulary by about 2-3%
"Central Germanic"? Sure, it's had a large influx of Northern Germanic vocabulary (every language in the region had, though English more than others for the reasons you stated), but that doesn't change the language's Ingvaeonic core.