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Pulp History
In: Wales
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Crispy...... Opps and Sykes DO give the impression that nobody was replaced as they both make the point that initial founders are extremely hard to replace in the population - indeed they are the most numerous within our gene pool today in England AND Wales.
Also, If we are to argue that the A-S invasion and replacement never happened and that the language was not replaced, then how can we argue for an earlier Celtic invasion, causing indigenous replacement and language replacement?
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Question everything!
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Duncan
In: Yorkshire
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| If we are to argue that the A-S invasion and replacement never happened and that the language was not replaced, then how can we argue for an earlier Celtic invasion, causing indigenous replacement and language replacement? |
All we can know for sure is that we have celtic languages in the west and English in the east. At some point in history English speakers arrived on these shores, as did celtic speakers. Mick's view is that a celtic invasion of sorts led to celtic suzerainty over large numbers of English speakers. I think he is correct to say that both ethnic groups didn't arrive simultaneously and Oppenheimer and Sykes concur. They both differ from Mick's position in that they see the English as the invaders. Mick rejects their viewpoint as a preconception.
The genetics that I have elaborated, and of which you are fully aware, shows that the people who now speak celtic languages were here first. Dan has talked of years of mixing between English and celtic peoples BUT the fact remains that in the east there is an overlay of north-west European DNA. There is far less mixing as we move further west. We certainly have documentary evidence that there were invasions from north-west Europe in historical times and the invaders' genes match those still in north-west Europe. Oppenheimer's analysis shows, however, that the bulk of the similar gene types were here long before the A-S and Danish invasions of historical times. It also shows that the closest genetic match to the bulk of the British population, especially in western areas, is to be found in the Basque country. However we dress up the supposed preconceptions of our geneticists, we can't ignore the extent of their charted divide, the sources of it, and the current linguistic situation. This is our reality.
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Pulp History
In: Wales
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However, if the bulk of the DNA is pre-Celtic and pre-Germanic (I believe Oppenheimer says that the majority are post-glacial hunter gatherers) then we DO have to explain how a minority brought in a new language and this replaced the original tongue (whatever that was). We have merely shifted the problem of A-S / English replacing a 'celtic' tongue to a problem of a minority 'celtic' tongue replacing a previous one.
Opps says "I have used the recent literature in several disciplines, and my own re-analysis, to ask when Celtic languages moved from the European mainland to the British Isles, with which culture and carried by how many people. My answers are 1) Neolithic 2) Neolithic and 3) not many."
So Opps states that a very small minority (5%) moved into the West during the Neolithic and their language became the 'celtic' tongues of Britain..........and the native pre-Neolithic majority adopted this tongue AND/ OR (if post Roman origin is disproved / unlikely) adopted a form of early English in the East, presumably the language of a minority group of incomers? Is this likely????
Again.... this means that either indigenous language replaced TWICE (once in west and once in east), or one or the other WAS indigenous.......... or BOTH were!!??
Could the two groups of languages have been indigenous to the areas to the East and West of the British Isles BEFORE the rise of sea levels, ie the great plains........ as seas levels rise BOTH groups are forced closer together onto the little island left, meaning that BOTH languages DID effectively arrive on the new island at the SAME TIME!!
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Question everything!
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I tend to agree with Dan's collation of megaliths and Celtic-speakers. On various points it seems to be important to distinguish Celts and English in terms of foreign conquest.
| So, did they find the English easily conquered and the Celts not? Well, the Romans found it so! |
Not just the Romans of course. The Belgae were limited to the English bits of Britain; the Anglo-Saxons had trouble subduing Cornwall and never got into Wales or Celtic Scotland; the Normans spent three hundred years subduing the Welsh and never really came to terms with either Celtic Scotland or Celtic Ireland; the English (and Inglis) themselves had lots of trouble with all corners of the Celtic British Isles. But of course none of these had the least difficulty with the English. Even the English, if you see what I mean, which is why we have been so prosperous and successful a nation (we're cheap to run).
Three factors should be born in mind:
1. The Celts occupy the crap half ie easy to defend and holding relatively little attraction for would-be-conquerors
2. The Clan system is excellent for military purposes
3. If the Celts were indeed the natural overlords of the English for thousands of years then this would be pretty much built in to the genes.
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Duncan
In: Yorkshire
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Three factors should be born in mind:
1. The Celts occupy the crap half ie easy to defend and holding relatively little attraction for would-be-conquerors |
This is undoubtedly true and the Welsh apparently refer to England as 'Lloegr', the 'lost lands'. This would imply that the English took the best bits.
| 2. The Clan system is excellent for military purposes |
The problem, as ever, is that the richer English lands can support a much richer economy and therefore afford better armed soldiers in greater numbers. The history of celtic defence has forever been the history of guerrilla warfare. Put the celts into a pitched battle against the English and they invariably lose. Is there any evidence the Welsh and Cornish had 'clans'?
| 3. If the Celts were indeed the natural overlords of the English for thousands of years then this would be pretty much built in to the genes. |
The genetics shows the opposite pattern, that the English were the natural overlords of the Welsh. How else can we explain the fact that a genetic minority on the eastern side of the island was able to impose its language on the genetic majority?
Dan may be correct on his identification of the celts with the megaliths. Oppenheimer agrees, as Pulp History shows, that the celts arrived during the Neolithic. Perhaps they were the first farmers. Sykes shows a 5% influx around this time, originally from the Middle East. What if Komorokid is correct and these celtic speakers have a language which is closely related to semitic? If they did arrive then they would do so as a ruling elite, rapidly outstripping the natives in terms of food output and therefore population growth. We then need to explain how they persuaded the descendents of the hunter-gatherers to start speaking Welsh.
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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| But frinstance, as I mentioned before, the Rhesus factor affects women's fertility and is relatively common among the Basques and Celts. To explain all this mixing and the similarities/differences between maternal mtDNA and paternal yDNA, you need a robust model of invasion and migration, etc., which seems to be their weakest point |
This is one of the basic flaws in the OppSyk model. They take no account of the fact that interbreeding between the East and West was relatively small and assume a population growth at a mean level over time. The Rh- factor is one of the primary reasons that the two groups have remained distinct. Interbreeding is virtually impossible as the result is that only the first child is likely to survive. The following siblings are usually stillborn or massively handicapped. Child mortality was stronger in the East. This is probably the reason why the Clan System evolved as it ensures a genetic match among like Rh- families.
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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| This is undoubtedly true and the Welsh apparently refer to England as 'Lloegr', the 'lost lands'. This would imply that the English took the best bits |
OR that the Welsh who were former overlords of a green and pleasant land were forced out by a stronger group (or chose withdrawal as a purely commercial move).
If the Celts (and I really hate using the word as it had so many twisted connotations -- linguistically and ethnically) were a maritime trading race first and foremost their powerbase would remain where their ports and strength lay irrespective of how crappy the local environs were.
Their wealth gave them power and resource unavailable to the original (English) inhabitants in the East. They used that power to set up a Suzerain over their neighbours that lasted until the Beakers arrived as another elite but one which was less commercial and more militaristic.
The seafaring traders cut their losses and defended their power base. After all they had all the commercial clout firmly under their control -- sea routes, trading connections and despite the crappy land, the tin and copper.
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Duncan
In: Yorkshire
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| This is one of the basic flaws in the OppSyk model. They take no account of the fact that interbreeding between the East and West was relatively small and assume a population growth at a mean level over time. |
You'll have to help me on this Komori. How would this effect the model? The data does, in fact show that the populations have mixed. YDNA data shows that male immigration has been greater. Men came from overseas and took local wives. Sykes has analysed the mtDNA for us so we know where the women came from too. Far fewer came from north-west Europe.
| The Rh- factor is one of the primary reasons that the two groups have remained distinct. Interbreeding is virtually impossible as the result is that only the first child is likely to survive. The following siblings are usually stillborn or massively handicapped. Child mortality was stronger in the East. This is probably the reason why the Clan System evolved as it ensures a genetic match among like Rh- families. |
This must mean that celts can't marry English, which they clearly do...just look at Liverpool, Newcastle etc. etc.
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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| If the Celts were indeed the natural overlords of the English for thousands of years then this would be pretty much built in to the genes. |
Not when the Rh- factor comes into play. Celtic blood was definitely thicker than English daughters. The entire history of Royalty is that overlords marry the siblings of other overlords not their subjects.
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Duncan
In: Yorkshire
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Komorikid wrote:
| If the Celts (and I really hate using the word as it had so many twisted connotations -- linguistically and ethnically) were a maritime trading race first and foremost their powerbase would remain where their ports and strength lay irrespective of how crappy the local environs were. |
How does this notion of a trading nation square with Mick's notion of the military excellence of a clan system? The Phoenician/Carthaginian traders relied on mercenaries for their miltary clout. Merchants really are a different breed from soldiers.
| They used that power to set up a Suzerain over their neighbours that lasted until the Beakers arrived as another elite but one which was less commercial and more militaristic. |
Conceivably so, a Suzerain maintained by using mercenaries who may have rebelled. Gildas says much the same of the later Britons and their leader Vortigern. Perhaps there is something in the old myths after all?
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Duncan
In: Yorkshire
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Pulp History wrote:
| It's a bit odd how peoples apparently spread rapidly then sit still for thousands of years before deciding to spread again....... |
It begs the question as to why people should move. I assume the graphics on your link show people moving slowly over time, perhaps a mile here and there as population densities rise. The nagging of a mother-in-law could be all it took to up sticks, so to speak. I'm sure there were also times when entire populations were forced to move by natural disasters or military threat. Apparently the era of barbarian invasions was caused when the Huns started, for whatever reason, to push westwards. This displaced the Germanic tribes and so on.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Duncan wrote: | | It begs the question as to why people should move. |
The question you should be asking is, "What does this model explain?" The answer: Practically nothing.
When the only thing a model explains is the data used to construct it, the model is definitively useless.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Because agriculture introduces a step-change in population numbers, there is some reason to believe that the original, non-agricultural population of post Ice Age Britain may not be represented in the current linguistic line-up. However their genes certainly would be. |
Do you mean to say the rapid growth could have meant an economically dominant people in sufficient numbers set up a language cline that walked all the way across the island without displacing the entire population? (Otherwise, it seems to say the people and their language were displaced, but their genes weren't.)
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| How did the celtic languages become dominant in the west? How did the celtic speakers force the non-celts to start speaking celtic? |
Since there are Celtic people in the west, it's not a matter of the language becoming dominant: it's what they were already speaking when they arrived. The incoming population could itself only become dominant with a lot of time and effort.
The Celtic speakers will not have forced anybody to speak Celtic. (It has never been shown to work and it has been shown not to work.) Non-Celtic speakers subsumed in Celtic society will have become multi-lingual then Celtic-speaking under the ordinary pressures still operating today (except that the pressure is in favour of English, nowadays.)
| If the genes of the initial hunter-gatherers are dominant, at what point did these people start speaking celtic. |
"At some point" is a mistake perpetrated by the historians. English must have turned up (just like that) when the Anglo-Saxons came. The French took up Latin (just like that) when the Romans arrived; and set about changing it to French (just like that) when they left.
On historical grounds, they decide that such-n-such changes took place at such-n-such times; and then find ways to explain what is now taken to be an observed fact. Hence, adopting a new language, forcing your language on others and rapid evolution in accordance with linguistic "laws" all make sense to linguists because they have... well... taken them for granted.
What shall we call what really happens? Continual discontinuity? Granular flow?
Statistically, it's a gradual process. Language X is spoken over here, language Y over there and the language cline is the line in between where the majority language changes from one t't'other. Depending on the political situation, the cline probably lies in the middle of an area where both languages are spoken, neighbours having different mother tongues.
In evenly matched circumstances, unlike the arrival of European colonists, the cline moves slowly as the dominant language spreads. But this is by a series of individual decisions to "change", a series of sudden state-changes: the family's mother tongue is either X or Y, there is nothing in between.
As far as I can tell, no one ever gives up their language, so what changes? Imagine an immigrant community, say, Pakistani's in England. The first generation speaks Punjabi. Their children are bilingual: their first language is still Punjabi, but they can conduct everyday business in English. (The speed with which the kids pick up the host lingo could be the only thing that lets the first generation survive there. It buffers them from the demand to know the local language themselves.) They teach their children English from birth: and their children will do the same and so on. (They might now speak Punjabi only as a second language, only for talking to the olds.) The mother tongue of the family has switched, and switched "suddenly", but none of the individuals "gave up their language".
And no-one was coerced: it's just a practical matter. Of course, not all immigrant communities disappear by the third generation: their presence attracts new Punjabi-only speakers... whose presence encourages even the younger generations to keep up with Punjabi... All the bilingualism buffers the foreign language community against the host language community, as it were; and how fast it shrinks or grows or sustains is, again, a function of the practical matters of the case (including incentives and programmes of eradication and pride in cultural identity and... you name it).
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There is bilingual buffering between the foreign rulers and the hoi polloi, too. If the Roman officials only ever converse with the local officials in Latin, what pressure is there on the British, French, Spanish, Italian... peasantry to learn Latin at all, let alone adopt it?
'Course, once you're a nation-state where all levels of society speak the same language, you have a new economic landscape to play in.
A question in the Beakerism debate is whether that is a reversible situation.
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Hmm. If bilingualism is a facet of economic affairs and is also a necessary stage between speaking X and Y as mother tongue, then the pressure to change only exists where families are responsible for their own economic affairs. We would also do well to consider the circumstances and periods in history where this has appertained.
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Maybe the telly helps us to misunderstand multilingualism. Every inter-national and inter-planetary telly prog glosses over the fact that people do not naturally speak each other's languages and need interpreters on a regular basis. Even on a programme like Tribe, where there is clearly an interpreter in tow, their bits tend to go straight to the cutting room floor.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Opps and Sykes DO give the impression that nobody was replaced as they both make the point that initial founders are extremely hard to replace in the population - indeed they are the most numerous within our gene pool today in England AND Wales. |
"We can tell the initial founders have not gone away because they are the most numerous in the gene pool today" is fine if you have independent means for determining who the initial founders were!
("Imagine a man who says 'I know how tall I am' and puts his hand on top of his head to prove it.")
| Also, If we are to argue that the A-S invasion and replacement never happened and that the language was not replaced, then how can we argue for an earlier Celtic invasion, causing indigenous replacement and language replacement? |
Exactly as Mick has done in THOBR: they're still here, we're most unlikely to have arrived together and the balance of the argument is that the Celts arrived on the western coasts after everyone else. The Megalithic argument further indicates just how long and difficult a job it was to get enough people in constitute the general population.
(I'm baffled by the suggestion that Anglo-Saxon warriors suddenly turned to tilling the soil themselves -- and that there was anywhere for them to do it -- but scholars still claim that what comes naturally is whatever they say in their narratives. Round here, we prefer to suggest that what happens is what we can see happening and build our accounts -- and judge others' -- accordingly.)
As above, try to rid yourself of the ball-and-chain of the scholars' notion of language replacement.
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