Re: Bede died (25-5-735)

Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de> wrote:

On 2024-05-30, Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org.invalid> wrote:
 

“Five language communities,” I suppose.

 
* Anglo-Saxon
* Brittonic
* Gaelic
* Pictish, whatever its affiliation was
* British Latin~Romance

 
Yes, with levels of "community". Brittonic and Gaelic were related
languages , but I doubt that the speakers of those languages knew that,

 
I don't really know how linguistically naive people perceive this.
Back in fifth grade or so, when I started learning English as my
first foreign language and knew nothing about language history, I
certainly noticed that English was oddly similar to German and that
there were semi-regular correspondences such as th- <> d-.  One of
my classmates remarked on further similarities between English and
the local Palatine dialect.  (In retrospect easily explained by
Palatine German missing part of the High German consonant shift.)
French, which I started in seventh grade, was conspicuously more
different.
 

The "British Latin" were those who chose to join the Roman Empire. We
don't yet know who the Picts were, apart from guessing a relationship
with the Gaels or the Britons. So it's still a little bit fuzzy.

 
I thought that the consensus about Pictish was flipping back and
forth every so often, but English Wikipedia now aligns itself with
the position that evidence from toponyms and personal names firmly
demonstrates Pictish to have been a Brittonic language.  That Bede
inconvieniently classed them as different language communities is
mentioned and disregarded.
 

Wikipedia, that ultimate arbiter of scientific disputes.
Around the turn of the century there was an attempt to shoehorn little
parts of the already little traces of Pictish into brittonic readings. The
experts being few or none, it went unchallenged for a while, but the
shortcomings of the approach became obvious later on.