LANGUAGES DEVELOPING LOCALLY (COMMENT).

LANGUAGES DEVELOPING LOCALLY (COMMENT). I posted in March 2007 on articles that asserted that a version of English was spoken in Britain before the Roman invasion and that argued against claims that Celtic was spoken in Britain up until Angles and Saxons invaded in around 500 A.D. My wife Mary Jane rightly pointed out that the picture should include a variety of tribes from different parts of Germany, each speaking their own dialects. Now Michael Byrne has posted a long comment which sheds a lot of light on the issues. You should check the comment here, but I want to highlight—I hope accurately–some of Byrne’s points in the next couple days. One of his major points is that we have no basis for making “sweeping racial, cultural or linguistic statements.” I think that the development of the French language gives a guide to what happened in England. I would take 19th century France and Italy as a guide to England one thousand years earlier. For centuries, language in France was local. I posted here that at the time of the French Revolution there were 55 major dialects in France and hundreds of subdialects and here that in the late 1800’s only one Italian in 40 spoke standard Italian. Applying terms like “English” or “Danish” or “Celtic” to the small tribal settlements in England has to be misleading.