www.proto-english.org

[gilius]

What do you guys think of the alternative history provided by this website? Has it been discussed before? Shame they don't have a forum or quote sources, which doesn't help when promoting something so controversial. However, I myself find their arguments very plausible. I've read books on Saxon history, but they never give their reasons why they believe the Saxons brought Old English with them. They do state that place-name experts are separate to historians and archaeologists, etc. Place-name experts never seem to be in agreement anyway. Any views?

http://www.proto-english.org

[docoflove1974]

It's a topic that has been in one version or another for many, many decades.  Honestly, I don't think it holds much water.  While the English language is an odd duck, true enough, its historical changes are definitely within the Germanic vein; proof for many similar changes can be seen in Dutch, which is English's closest relative of all the Germanic languages.  Additionally, you can attribute other major changes to the Norman Conquest and its introduction of Normal French to the island--pretty standard superstratum influence patterns are shown.

 

The argument that 'there is no record of the language change' isn't exactly true; it just depends on what you're looking for.  The written language of the time by the few who could write was Latin--and continued to be so for many hundreds of years, even after English was a common language by most all levels of society.  And even that isn't 100% accurate; frequently we have texts transcribed in Latin by monks, with 'vulgar' translations of notes in the side margins.  It was the monks' way of trying to figure out what they were writing; they were translating Latin into the language of the people.  We have examples of these from most of the monasteries across Europe, including Britannia.  Most of what we have from the early period of Old English (700-900 CE) comes from various sources, and many of them wouldn't remark about 'Oh, lookie here!  We have a new language!'  They simply would use the language.

 

Place names are not a good way to verify or even trace a language's origin, as they are always going to hold some remnant of languages that are no longer spoken.  If a certain town/village/etc. has always been called a name, that will usually be carried on for generations in one form or another, just because of trade.  If you don't know the name of the place you've been trading with for generations, that's not good for business...it's why toponyms aren't the greatest of resources.

 

And the Saxons didn't bring Old English with them...they brought their language, Saxon.  It was a Germanic language that was very similar to that of the Angles.  When the two groups came and conquered the island, eventually their languages meshed.  There is documentation at the monasteries of how the various regions of Britannia had quite different languages--they weren't so much different languages, as different stages of evolution of the Anglo-Saxon, Jute, and Norse languages that were in the process of becoming what we know as Old English.  Beowulf, for example, is a late Old English text that shows much more regularization that earlier documents and glosses.

 

Lastly, when tracking the origins and evolutions of a language, simply looking at toponyms and words isn't enough.  You have to look at the grammatical structures, as those are much less likely to change at random.  Despite the very thorough dominance of Norman French for many hundreds of years, what the English language got mostly out of that was lexical items--little if any grammar (syntax and morphology) came from there.  In fact, we got more from the Vikings/Norse than we did the Normans/French!  Why?  Because Norman French has a very different syntactical and morphological structure than does Old English and the other Germanic languages of the time...to make such drastic changes would have required that all peoples, regardless of status, use Norman French and be completely bilingual.  But we don't see that in the records; rather, Norman French was mostly kept to the higher levels of society, which explains why the more learned words of English have a Romance tendency.  (Others came in during the Renaissance...but that's another story).  If one were to compare the Norse language of the time to the other West Germanic languages spoken in Britannia at the time, we see much more similarity in the grammar, and the changes affected peoples of all levels of society.  We see that those changes continued on; the object pronouns that we use in Modern English have their roots in both Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse.

 

Regardless, English is very clearly a Germanic language whose origins came in with the Germanic invasions after the fall of the Roman Empire.