Talk:Brittonicisms in English

the edits
Thanks for tidying the introduction. re: discussion on "wipe out" theory - maybe a rewording, if no central linguist have taken this theory seriously. I think some mention of the discrediting of the clean sweep model should be present. The linguists do it. There are public acceptance, funding issues. Im not sure about Tolkein as an Oxford Anglosaxonist. The term Anglosaxonist may be used in a critical fashion. Is he primarily known for promoting the English as Anglo-saxons? Describing him as _the author_, will indicate that he is _the_ Tolkein and his work in philology is I think next in line in importance. The dates - The Celtic Englishes programme was a ten year project from 1995-2005(in the intro to CE IV) - but assessing when a peripheral idea becomes prominent is difficult. --Fodbynag (talk) 08:18, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Tolkien (Tolkien) is an Anglo-Saxonist because his field was Old English philology. What do you mean, "promoting the English as Anglo-saxons?" Tolkien's is cited here as an authority on Old English, not as a fantasy author.

I am grateful for this detailed article, but I cannot help noticing a certain bias on your part. You seem intent on emphasizing the "recent" results. To do this, you would seem to play down the degree to which "Brittonicism" are and always have been perfectly undisputed. Saying that the influence of Welsh on English has been "minimal" is a typological statement, comparing the influence of other substates on other languages. You cannot dispel the claim that the influence was "minimal" by listing a bunch of examples. It is, of course, undisputed, that there are Brittonicisms in English. The fact just remains that people familiar with other substrates, say the non-Greek substrate in Greek or the non-IE substrate in Sanskrit, will be surprised at just how little traces Welsh left on English. It is certainly respectable to perform detailed research into such traces as there are, and of course such research is bound to uncover more information on the substrate, but I fail to see any evidence that any independent reviewer came away with the impression that there is "recent" evidence that there had been more influence than had hitherto been assumed.

Consequently, I think some of the material in the article needs to be put in proper perspective wrt WP:DUE. For example, the presentation of the "w, θ and ð" case to me seems rather tendentious. The article text seems to propose that the presence of w, θ and ð in English can somehow be taken as due to Welsh influence. Only those turning to the footnote will then learn that the source cited rejects this possibility. This is one example of the article trying to make more of a case for substrate influence that would be strictly WP:DUE. --dab (𒁳) 19:34, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

The assertion of the Celtic hypothesists is that the Brittonic effect on English are extensive - much of the change from Old English to Middle English. These are assertions by respected authorities. Part of the 'proof' for this position is that many possibilities do add up to a certainty(White). So I think its fair to give examples and people are interested to know. The recent aspect comes among other things from the funded programmes and the possibilties of data mining into English texts - the Helsinki Corpus.

I'll change the introduction to make it clearer we're dealing mainly with the inovations in Middle English. Also Brittonicisms are not necessarily from a substratum. Alex Woolf(Apartheid and Economics in Anglo-Saxon England) suspects a later influence(e.g. from Welsh, but also Irish) - so the change "influence of Brittonic speakers".

The article is written as a significant minority view. It seems to have a significant academic following. I've written what I know of the issue. I dont think the public should be denied the information. A reference to an alternative view on dental fricatives etc is in the foot note - I cited Isaac because of his summary of the occurances of the fricatives. The other two citations suggests Celtic influence is supportive. I dont know if theres a consensus on either view.

So for each item, what are the alternative views? Are you suggesting a caveat at the end of each? --Fodbynag (talk) 03:14, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I appreciate that this articles presents a significant minority view. I wouldn't dream of trying to "deny the information" to the public, I am glad for your contributions. All I am saying is that it should be put into some perspective as a minority view. I.e. give adequate screen time to its opponents.

Ideally, we should give an overview of the proponent's line of argument, and then a summary of the gist of the opponents. We should single out the "Middle English is significantly due to Welsh substrate influence" hypothesis as a thing apart from a mere list of possible or likely Brittonicisms. This hypothesis strikes me as rather far from the received consensus on the transition to Middle English, in the sense of WP:REDFLAG. I am well aware of the Middle English creole hypothesis, but this usually assumes that the creolization was due to contact of Old English with Old Norse and/or Old French, not Welsh. I find the identification of himself or the survival of /w/ as Brittonicisms rather daring in itself, but since both are clearly present in Old English, it is even more tenuous to suggest that, if accepted, they somehow lend support or plausibility to the "Middle English hypothesis". Be that as it may, I do not wish to pretend to be an expert. I simply request the inclusion of the view of experts critical of this hypothesis. --dab (𒁳) 13:19, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

I tried to arrange the material chronologically. I.e., we should try to discuss proposed influence in Old English, in the transition to Middle English, and in Modern English due to "continual influence of Celtic" in separate sections.

I also took the liberty of separating out Vennemann's stuff into a separate section. If the "Middle English hypothesis" is a respected minority view, Vennemann's "Atlantic/Semitid" ideas are very clearly considerably further out on the fringe. --dab (𒁳) 13:46, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

I specifically mentioned the creole hypothesis as an alternative view. I thought it was clear that it doesnt involve Brittonic(please not Welsh) influence. Under the old page layout the Brittonicisms were under the heading Possible Brittonicisms. I'm sure all of them have at least one detracter. Separating the items that support Vennemanns hypothesis out makes it seam like other Celtic Hypothesists who don't support his Affro-Asiatic contentions dont see the items as evidence. As a citation Vennemanns work is recent and he's obviously an expert in the field but ideally his hypothesis would be on a different page(keeping them on this page as well). As regards opposing hypotheses, language internal developement is a big one, with the extreme view being that if English language changes can be modeled without Brittonic influence then they must be - which makes it difficult to model the large scale language adoption of Brittonic speakers. So, I'm supposing, the dominant hypothesis will depend on who you ask.

I suppose you've read some of the citations and agree that they are reliable. The Oxford History of English(2006) doesnt go into Celtic influence because the issue is disputed. As is in the article, they put inflexion attrition down to Norse influence and Germanic accent. For the origin of DO they dont know, they mention Celtic influence in passing, theyre waiting for a bigger corpus.199-209 Apparently there isn't a standard hypothesis.

The reflexive pronoun use is as an intensifier. I don't have a reference for an opposing view. The /w/ item does contain an opposing view obviously. I suppose it's significance is it indicates sustained language contact making it a better candidate for other changes.

I planned this page as hopefully an impartial reference point for all the possible Brittonic influence and not necessarily items that prove the change to analyticism. So for instance, maybe the regularity in Old English compared with Old High German(M.Gorlach in 1991) and a phonological system(P,Schrijver - recent) could be included if I have time to look into the issue--Fodbynag (talk) 08:28, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

The /w/ item is very weak a priori because it brings in substratum influence to explain an archaism. The reflexive pronoun use is as an intensifier to be sure, but we lack any suggestion that this is due to Welsh influence. Lists like "They share this feature only with Dutch, Maltese, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian in Europe" are a red herring.

I understand the term "Brittonic" btw. I may still say "Welsh" for convenience. I realize it is possible to distinguish Welsh from Cornish, Cumbric and possibly Pictish within Brittonic, but after all "Welsh" originates as the catch-all term for these languages, and became narrowed only because some of the dialects died out. --dab (𒁳) 10:11, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

bydd
Tolkein - "But I mention this feature of Old English morphology here only because the _same distinction of functions is associated with similar phonetic forms_ in Welsh. In Welsh one finds a true present without b-forms, and a tense with a b-stem used both as a future and a consuetudinal. The 3sg. of the latter tense is bydd from earlier *bið. The resemblance between this and the OE form is perhaps made more remarkable if we observe that the short vowel of OE is difficult to explain and cannot be a regular development from earlier Germanic, whereas in Welsh it is regularly derived." - so he's the reference for the similarity between bydd and bið.--Fodbynag (talk) 01:02, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

I will point out once again that the man is called Tolkien.

Yes, I have checked out the English and Welsh essay, and you are correct. --dab (𒁳) 09:57, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Intensifier - reflexive pronoun
The replacement of the old intensifier info. is taken from Claudia Lange in Celtic Englishes IV - "Similarly, early Middle English witnessed the replacement of the old intensifier self by a fused form pronoun + self; when plain pronouns ceased to be used reflexively and the compound form became obligatory as the reflexive marker in Early Modern English, the modern pattern of formal identity between intensifier and reflexive pronoun was established (cf. König and Siemund 2000 a, b; Lange 2005)."--Fodbynag (talk) 01:23, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Reordering the page
The various Brittonicisms should be under the title 'possible', I'm sure they're disputed. Phonetics should have its own category because other items that arent in modern English may be added. Vennemanns further ideas don't really belong here but perhaps its thought his pre-Celtic hypothesis discredits him as an authority so theres a brief description and a link out on tag questions but not on external possessor because Filppula and co is present for a modern citation(they have a detailed examination). I think there needs to be an example of what an external possessor is. Vennemann has 30 years as prof of linguistics at Munich and he's an expert in historical linguistics, so I think his citations should stay. One of his articles is on line.--Fodbynag (talk) 03:48, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

My main concern here is not the "possible", because obviously each point made here can be debated. It is the "1500 years of contact" which we need to arrange in some meaningful way. The major hypothesis transported by this article is the substrate influence in spoken Old English, invisible in written Old English, that becomes visible only in Middle English. I would prefer it material related to this hypothesis was put under a separate "transition to Middle English" section, separate from both items already present in written Old English and items that are clearly of modern origin.

Regarding Vennemann: please cite a better source for the "external possessor" thing. Vennemann in his Rotary lecture uses it to build his Semitic hypothesis, but even he admits that the interpretation as Celtic substratum "was suggested eighty years ago by an Indo-Europeanist" even though he cannot help claiming it was  "recently proved by myself" (wth?). Our aim must be to make the intended points without getting bogged down in Vennemann's Semitic cruft. I understand that "White (2004) enumerates 92 items, of which 32 are attributed to other academic works" (does this mean that the other 60 are original to White?) -- it may therefore be better to dump the Vennemann references in favour of White. --dab (𒁳) 09:56, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

"external possessor" is already cited by Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, Heli Paulasto (2008) "English and Celtic in Contact" which gives a detailed discussion and is not concerned with the Semitic hypothesis. The Semitic hypothesis doesnt need to be mentioned. Vennemann has 30 years as Prof of linguistics at Munich and is an expert in historical-linguistics - I dont thinks he's a snake oil salesman. "does that mean 60 are original to White?" - I doubt it, but I counted them just in case. You can download and read this article.

I dont think the categorisation should be more specific. It is likely to create errors. For instance, the definition of Brittonicisms was changed from the "influence of Brittonic speakers" to "influence of a Brittonic substratum" - which is only a subset. The use of the sounds in the phonetics paragraph arent a modern developement, so shouldnt be in Modern English. The items arent easily categorised, the tag question might start in Old English, Northern Subject Rule is still used. More specific categorisation may make the article less accurate.

Unless there's any objection, I'll take away the dubious discuss tags--Fodbynag (talk) 02:58, 30 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Vennemann is not a historical linguist. His chair was for "Germanistische und Theoretische Linguistik", i. e., essentially Chomsky-school linguistics with a focus on standard written German (in Munich, the seminar for Theoretical Linguistics is found in the building that houses the institute for German philology). He does dabble in Old Germanic, Welsh, Basque, Semitic languages, and historical linguistics, but he's infamous for his eccentric ideas in those fields. No expert on historical linguistics, Celtic, Semitic, Basque etc. I know of (with the exception of his own alumni, of course) takes his speculation seriously, and his views are very isolated. My experience is actually that everything he has ever written on any topic should be taken with more than a grain of salt, because his methodical approach is substandard and he has an uncanny knack to pick and side with the wrong camp, supporting superficially appealing but specious views that do not hold up to closer examination if you ask the specialists. (It should also be kept in mind that his "professor" title is based on a course of education not quite comparable with the standard usually required in Germany for professorship. AFAIK he never received a proper habilitation and his position as assistant professor at UCLA was recognised as sufficient anyway.) He's basically this uncle who revels in telling tall tales, although the way he once accused his opponents of "anti-Semitic" tendencies for being sceptical of his Semitic etymologies casts doubt on his good faith and "nice uncle" image.
 * It's a pity because substratum and language contact research has become a very lively field recently, and his frivolous and maddeningly popular speculation taints all of it and devalues the painstaking work of real historical linguists. His free-wheeling, speculative and careless approach is exactly how not to do substratum research. Sound-alike etymologies, the bane of historical linguistics, abound, even if his approach is inverted in that he tends to reject the traditional, straightforward explanation as pseudo-etymology, erring on the side of exoticism – a form of hyper-scepticism that discounts obvious interpretations for reasons that attempt to be overly clever but just end up being uninformed nonsense.
 * Ignoring inconvenient expert opinions and appealing to the public directly is a hallmark of crank science. Other red flags are playing the martyr, appealing to the Galileo gambit, or positing a conspiracy that suppresses your unconventional opinion. Having a chair at a renowned university does not confer instant credibility (that's why appeal to authority is an infamous fallacy): it seems to be an unfortunately frequent occurrence that academics start out producing serious work and venture more and more into low-grade, speculative or populist "research" or go full-on bonkers once they have a chair and cannot be fired anymore.
 * That's why it is important to always show respect for the mainstream in a field even if you do not agree with it. Tolkien did it right: he did not agree that Celtic influence on English was insignificant, as most scholars thought at the time, but he didn't simply discount the mainstream opinion, he patiently and politely presented carefully argued points in an attempt to sway his opponents, who could actually evaluate the argument, as opposed to the general public or experts in other fields; but he was not arrogant about his dissenting opinion and acknowledged his weaknesses. (Scientific inquiry is so complicated now that blindly trusting anyone's opinion without any relevant specialist credentials is simply a bad idea. That doesn't mean no academic is allowed ever venture out of their narrow specialisation, but they need to be extra careful and solicit the opinions of experts in other relevant fields, ask for peer review, or co-operate openly and directly, to ensure that their facts are correct, their argument is solid and their reasoning holds water. For example, Vennemann should have worked with scholars who have actually worked on the history of Basque, Semitic/Afro-Asiatic languages, Germanic/Celtic/Indo-European, etc., independently of him, and who are acknowledged as highly competent in those fields, or ideally, even go-to experts such as Trask was for Basque.) If you don't respect the specialists, you can't expect them to respect you. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:36, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

Progressive tense
Why is the theory of the progressive tense being a Brytonic influence not mentioned in the article? --Jidu Boite (talk) 13:56, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

I don't know, I am sure it has been proposed, because anything that is even remotely possible is sure to "have been proposed" in this field. But if you have good references to proponents of this, you are welcome to add them. --dab (𒁳) 14:08, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Main problem remains
The new proposals are interesting, but it doesn't seem that they do much to resolve the longstanding main problem -- namely that it's likely that there was fairly extended contact between Celtic and Germanic speakers, but such contact left almost no Celtic loanwords whatsoever in Old English... AnonMoos (talk) 17:56, 1 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Not necessarily: Per Thomason and Kaufman, this is not at all unusual in cases of substratum influence. This has been phrased as a general rule that superstratum (language maintenance, in Thomason and Kaufman's terms) influence focuses on the material (especially lexical) level and substratum (interference through shift, per T&K) on the structural (especially grammatical). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 15:40, 16 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Others (such as Peter Schrijver) have suggested an additional possible reason for the dearth of Celtic loans, or indeed any kind of Celticisms, in Old English, namely that Old English was initially, in south-east England, not in contact with Celtic directly, but with British Latin/Romance instead, as it is plausible that Latin/Romance had already supplanted Celtic in the southeast by the 5th century. Only after the spread of English to Northern England and Southwestern England did Celticisms appear.
 * Note that it is probably not true that there are no British Celtic loanwords in Old English at all. There are a few likely candidates, such as brocc "badger", which is in any case a Celtic loanword (even if mediated through Latin, or possibly already borrowed into Germanic on the continent, or both). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:57, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

External Possessor
Could someone give an explanation of what an external possessor actually is? There is just one example, which is not very clear. Vincent Moon (talk) 12:55, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

-- Because there is no external Possessor in English it is hard to explain in English what an external Possessor is. But I will have a try. If you want to use External Possessor in a language, that has this feature, you need:

- Two Persons and a thing. (the thing can be a part of the body)

- The thing is owned by one of the two person, (the possessor).

- The other Person manipulates the thing, which belongs to the possessor.

Now there are two cases:

First case : The possessor isn't affected by the manipulation of his/her thing.

Second case: The possessor is affected by the manipulation of his/her thing.

In the first case you set the possessor in genitiv (internal). In the second case you use another construct, for example in german and old english you set the possessor in dativ. Languages without dativ ( eg: norwegian) use a praeposition instead.

External: Seo cwen het þa þæm cyninge þæt heafod of aceorfan

cwen   : First Person (queen)

cyninge : Second Person, the possessor (king)  -þæm cyninge- is dativ

heafod : Thing, (here a part of the body: head of the king)

For the recipient of this message this means: the king was affected from the procedure. But if the king would have been left dead on the battle ground and the queen had ordered to cut off the head from the dead body, you must say:

Internal: Seo cwen het þa þæs cyninges heafod of aceorfan

-þæs cyninges- is in genitiv and this is internal possessor.

This means for the recipient of this message: the king wasn't affected from the procedure (because he was dead, he couldn't be affected). In modern English you must use in both cases the last form with internal possessor:

The Queen then ordered to cut off the king's head (possessor in genitiv: king's)

In modern English it is impossible to code whether the possessor is affected or not.

External Possessors are used in all continental languages. From european languages only the insular-celtic languages and english lacks this construct. Also the semitic and hamitic languages don't have external Possessors. The celtic languages inherited this feature from am extinct semitic-hamitic language, spoken once in Britain and bequeathed(?) it to English.

For a person speaking modern english it is nearly impossible to learn the use of external possessor, so my experience.

(Can someone put this in "good english" and place it in the article) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gimpel43 (talk • contribs) 23:59, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

-- I've been asked to explain what external and internal means here:

"external" means outside the phrase (Satzglied). In the external-example "þæm cyninge"  and "þæt heafod" are both phrases, so the king ist outside of the "heafod" phrase.

"internal": "þæs cyninges heafod" is one phrase, so the king (the possessor) is inside the "heafod" phrase.

Gimpel43 (talk) 20:16, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Ambiguous wording "suspicion of influence"
"Tolkien expressed his suspicion of Brittonic influence"

This could mean "Tolkien suspected Brittonic influence", or the almost opposite "Tolkien was suspicious of theories of Brittonic influence".

Given that Tolkien posited Brittonic influence but did not accept all theories of such influence, both of these interpretations are plausible. The surrounding text doesn't help to remove the ambiguity; if anything it makes it worse.

In my opinion this badly needs rewording, but I can't do so myself because I can't tell what it was trying to say. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.202.196.207 (talk) 15:48, 13 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Hear, hear! I stumbled at precisely the same point. This section stands in serious need of rewording to make the intended meaning clear. The article as it stands states


 * 1) "The received view that [the] Romano-British impact on English [had] been minimal on all levels became established at the beginning of the 20th century following work by such scholars as [...] Max Förster."


 * 2) "Tolkien expressed his suspicion of Brittonic influence and pointed out some anomalies in support of this view in his 1955 valedictory lecture English and Welsh, in which [he] cites Förster."


 * If the sceptical view about the Romano-British impact on English followed work by Förster, and Tolkien, in expressing his own view, cited Förster, then that suggests Tolkien was a sceptic too.


 * But that is not made at all clear. Come to that, even Förster's view is not made explicit! What WAS Tolkien's suspicion?
 * -- Picapica (talk) 19:55, 5 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Tolkien cites Förster's 1921 work on Celtic lexical material in English, where Förster establishes the presence of onomastic material (i. e., names, such as placenames and personal names) in English, specifically in English surnames, in order to bolster his suspicion that Celtic influence on English has been more significant than assumed by most scholars then, including (presumably) Förster himself. That is, Förster appears to have thought that his own work did not help establish a significant influence of Celtic on English in general, onomastic influence generally considered rather unimportant and thus beglected, while Tolkien disagreed insofar as he took it as evidence potentially able to support an argument for significant influence. That is, Tolkien argued that onomastic evidence should be accorded more importance, to support his call for intensified inquiry of the issue.
 * It's probably easiest to simply quote Tolkien's own words:
 * Among the things envisaged by Mr O'Donnell, one of the lines of inquiry that seems indeed to have specially attracted him, was nomenclature, particularly personal and family names. Now English surnames have received some attention, though not much of it has been well informed or conducted scientifically. But even such an essay as that of Max Förster in 1921 (Keltisches Wortgut im Englischen) shows that many 'English' surnames, ranging from the rarest to the most familiar, are linguistically derived from Welsh (or British), from place-names, patronymics, personal names, or nick-names; or are in part so derived, even when that origin is no longer obvious. Names such as Gough, Dewey, Yarnal, Merrick, Onions, or Vowles, to mention only a few.
 * This kind of inquiry is, of course, significant for the purpose of discovering the etymological origin of elements current in English speech, and characteristic of modern Englishry, of which names and surnames are a very important feature even though they do not appear in ordinary dictionaries. But for other purposes its significance is less certain.
 * Does that help? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 15:28, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

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More discussion of the debate? example of DO-periphrasis
I don't see in this article enough discussion of the fact that these Celtic influences are debated. As far as I know -- my doctorate is in Literature, not Linguistics, so I'm no expert -- there is no consensus among linguists that Celtic languages had a wide range of effects on English. For example, the DO-periphrasis can certainly be found in other Germanic languages, even if it's not used in the standard versions of those languages. It's inaccurate to claim that it /had/ to come from Celtic languages. See the discussion in this book for evidence: Nils Langer. Linguistic Purism in Action: How auxiliary tun was stigmatized in Early New High German. Walter de Gruyter, 2001. On a far more anecdotal level, I have heard German schoolchildren use the DO-periphrasis only to be corrected by their parents. Adults sometimes also use the construction when they're being playful with the language. The DO-periphrasis is not considered standard German, but it's still very much in the language. Jk180 (talk) 21:47, 28 August 2017 (UTC)

Recent edits
Hi, CelticBrain I have made some notes on your edits to the article.
 * "Generally, these claims have not received widespread support from linguists" is difficult to evidence. I found a review by Donka Minkova which may be useful: pp899-903 cover the discussion of the influence of Celtic on English in three general works. She said "Work on the Celtic linguistic substratum is still not part of the ESTABLISHMENT history of English". Link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249903234_A_history_of_the_English_language_and_A_history_of_the_English_language_and_The_Oxford_history_of_English_review Source: Language, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Dec., 2009), pp. 893-907 Published by: Linguistic Society of America Reviewed Work(s): A History of the English Language by Elly van Gelderen; A History of the English Language by Richard Hogg and David Denison; The Oxford History of Englishby Lynda Mugglestone.


 * Coates paper shows what he thinks, not necessarily what other linguists think.


 * Norwegian is analytic, however Old Norse was synthetic according to the wikipedia article.


 * Zarranz' paper does not mention Welsh or Celtic and it looks like a masters thesis so probably it is not a WP:RS. TSventon (talk) 20:32, 5 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks very much, TSventon. I have found a number of other papers with things to say on this topic, so when I have the time (hopefully soon) I'll put my proposed edits into the talk page. CelticBrain (talk) 21:00, 5 May 2020 (UTC)CelticBrain

Balance needed
Hi, TSventon, I have found a bunch of sources (something like 25) that can be used to provide specific counterarguments and bring more balance to the page. I'll probably make a separate section detailing the exact changes I intend to make. Anyway, I've paraphrased the sources here:

Non-specific criticism

Coates notes that while widely-accepted substrates such as Gaulish did not massively influence the languages they affected in terms of vocabulary, they still did so exponentially more so than Brittonic influenced English. More than a hundred French words are derived from Gaulish, while the number of likely Brittonic words in English is in the single digits. Coates generally believes that there is no linguistic reason to dismiss the notion of a large-scale population change due to migration of Germanic-speakers from the continent. (Richard Coates, “Celtic whispers: revisiting the problems of the relation between Brittonic and Old English,” 2017) He also notes that “Brittonic underwent far more massive structural transformation than English did during the initial contact period.” (Richard Coates, “Invisible Britons: the View From Linguistics,” 2007).

Diglossia model

Robert McColl Millar has strongly criticized Tristram’s notion that there was a kind of Celtic-influenced underclass population speaking English in a creolized manner, noting that “while an elite written culture did exist, it is difficult to see what benefit Ælfric would have derived from writing many homilies and other works obviously intended for a large and undifferentiated audience, if the language of the masses was so different from that of the elite.” He further concludes that “the idea that this state could continue for hundreds of years seems most unlikely,” and notes that no document from the time period alludes to a situation like this, while in Gaul, sources refer to the lingua romana rustica as a separate entity. (Robert McColl Millar, “At the Forefront of Linguistic Change: The Morphology of Late Northumbrian Texts and the History of the English Language, with Particular Reference to the Lindisfarne Gospels.”)

Periphrastic “do”

Herbert Schendl refers to this construction as being “predominantly seen as having originated in Middle English from the full native verb “do.” (Herbert Schendl, “Middle English: Language Contact,” 2012) All forms of do-support seem to have arisen in the period from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century (Peter W. Culicover, “The Rise and Fall of Constructions and the History of Do-Support,” 2008). It has been theorized that this form arose due to “the general shift in word order that marks the transition from Middle to Modern English.” (Anthony S. Kroch, “Function and Grammar in the History of English: Periphrastic Do,” 1989).

Progessive form

The article currently presents this as a southwestern innovation. However, George Lamont states that “application [of a progressive form] only became frequent regionally in Northern England, Kent, and Worcestershire in Early Middle English (ME), then spread throughout Britain by the end of ME. It did not become grammaticalized (a required practice) until as late as the eighteenth century, and did not assume a consistent passive form until the nineteenth century.” Lamont, citing work by Baugh & Cable, Traugott, and Denison, notes that many examples of the progressive that occurred in Old English seem to be attempts to literally translate Latin, as well as the fact that its use seems to increase somewhat towards the end of the Old English period, while still being broadly rare throughout Middle English. He also argues that gerunds (ending with “-ung,” which shifted to “-ing”) and participles (“-ende”) combined into the modern “-ing” due to similarity in sound over the course of the Middle English period. Overall, says Lamont, “the English progressive verb has an extensive history ... it has undergone several stages of development, with only a toehold at best in the Old English use.” (George Lamont, “The Progress of English Verb Tenses and the English Progressive,” 2005)

The first appearances of the English gerund, which occurred towards the end of the Old English period, were described by Tauno Mustanoja as “slavish imitations of Latin gerunds.” He wrote that “the rise of the gerund seems to take place essentially within the M[iddle] E[nglish] period. The influence of the O[ld] F[rench] gérondif seems to play a significant part in the development of the English gerund.” Mustanoja also believed that the “-unge” gerund and the “-ende” participle amalgamated into “-ing.” He considered that the earliest progressive forms in Old English arose from Latin, and described its occurrence in early Middle English as “limited, except, perhaps, in the North.” (Tauno Mustanoja, A Middle English Syntax, originally published 1960, current edition published 2016, pp. 572-585).

Johan Elsness says that the progressive “derives most directly from a construction in Old English, with parallels in many other early Germanic languages, which also consisted of a combination of a BE verb and a present participle, in Old English generally taking the ending -ende.” Elsness also comes to the conclusion that the merging of the -ende participle construction and the -ung gerund construction, particularly after the latter lost the prepositional element, caused the sudden increase in usage: “at about the same time that this levelling of the difference between the two constructions became widespread, i.e. roughly at the transition from Middle to Modern English around A.D. 1500, the combined construction consisting of BE plus an -ing form seems to have started to increase quite drastically in frequency.” For Elsness, Early Modern English is the key period in the development of the progressive, and he also notes that progressive constructions were “particularly rare in early Middle English.” (Johann Elsness, “On the progression of the progressive in Early Modern English,” 1994) Artemis Alexiadou concurs that “the Modern English -ing is related both to the Old English -ung and the Old English -ende. In Old English, these were distinct suffixes ... but after the changes that took place in the Middle English period, there is only one suffix that can appear in both environments.” (Artemis Alexiadou, “Nominal vs. Verbal -ing Constructions and the Development of the English Progressive,” 2013).

Herbert Schendl states that the origin of the progressive is “hotly debated,” and that its “frequency in early Middle English is as low as in Old English, but strongly increases in late Middle English, particularly in northern texts.” Schendl ultimately concludes that “with this feature, a polygenetic origin also seems attractive, and at least the further extension of the progressive is a language-internal development.” (Herbert Schendl, “Middle English: Language Contact,” 2012) Kirstin Killie believes that while it cannot be definitively ruled out, “the linguistic evidence does not enable us to conclude that there was influence from the Late British verbal noun construction onto the Old English participial (or be on hunting) construction in the post-invasion period.” She notes the variability of such constructions over time as demonstrated by its recent increase in use in German. (Kirstin Killie, “Old English-Late British language contact and the English progressive,” in Language Contact and Development Around the North Sea, 2012)

Regarding progressive/participle forms in other Germanic languages, Jack Hoeksma says that “complement participial clauses existed in Middle Dutch, but disappeared in early modern Dutch, for reasons that are still murky. Until the 19th century, participial constructions could be used as predicates in copular constructions. With some lexical exceptions (e.g. hij was stervende ‘he was dying’), this is no longer possible.” (Jack Hoeksma, Verb Movement in Dutch Present-Participle Clauses)

In modern Welsh English, infinitives are sometimes used in place of gerunds and gerunds are sometimes used in place of infinitives: “To stop the wood to wear out” vs “To stop the wood from wearing out” and “to make it bleeding” vs “to make it bleed.” (Heli Paulasto, “Welsh English Syntax: Contact and Variation,” 2006)

Case endings and the transition to analytic forms

Tristram has claimed that language contact between two languages with case endings does not lead to case endings being lost, which means that case loss couldn’t have come from the Vikings. This flies in the face of scholarship on the loss of case endings in languages such as Swedish and Norwegian, which is thought to derive, at least in part, from contact with Low German during the Hanseatic League period. Muriel Norde explicitly compares the analogous situations of English/Norse and Swedish/Low German: “Middle Low German and Middle Swedish were quite similar in many respects, as were Old English and Old Norse a few centuries earlier.” Norde notes that while Swedish seems to have begun losing its inflectional endings prior to contact with Low German, the contact helped to speed up the losses. (Muriel Norde, “Middle Low German-Middle Scandinavian language contact and morphological simplification,” 1997). Edward Sproston agrees that while the transition to analytic forms might have originated prior to the days of the Hanseatic League, the influence of Low German accelerated the process (Edward Sproston, “The Influence of Middle Low German on the Scandinavian Languages,” 2002). Another source for this is The Nordic Languages, Volume 1, edited by Oscar Bandle, Kurt Braunmüller, Ernst Hakon Jahr, Allan Karker, Hans-Peter Naumann, Ulf Telemann, Lennart Elmevik, Gun Widmark, and Walter de Gruyter, 2008 (p. 217), which notes that in areas that had less contact with Low German based on Hanseatic trading, older synthetic forms remained longer.

As to the loss of case in England, Robert McColl Millar suggests that “starting in the ninth to tenth century in northern England, from the use of grammatical gender and grammatical case as a means of marking both noun class and, probably more importantly, function within the clause developed and spread, with its replacement by an essentially rigid word order pattern where function was expressed through clause position rather than form. These changes appear to have passed first into the east midlands of England.” Millar states that from there, case loss spread to the West Midlands, before finally passing to the southern part of the country. He notes that “in all of the modern Germanic languages, there has been some movement away from a synthetic towards an analytic typology ... it can therefore be suggested that the changes involved are ‘hard-wired’ in all the Germanic languages ...” In English, this change took 400 years. (Robert McColl Millar, “At the Forefront of Linguistic Change: The Morphology of Late Northumbrian Texts and the History of the English Language, with Particular Reference to the Lindisfarne Gospels.”) Millar, dismissing the notion of a “Celtic underclass” for various reasons (see the Diglossia section), has concluded that Norse is the most likely origin for the losses, based on the geographical distribution of the initial stages of change correlating strongly with Viking settlement patterns. (Robert McColl Millar, “English in the ‘transition period’: the sources of contact-induced change,” in The Interaction of Closely Related Linguistic Varieties and the History of English, 2016)

Joseph Edmonds and Jan Faarlund note that “in the first centuries of the second millennium, Scandinavian, Dutch, English, the western Romance languages, and Celtic all underwent a general simplification of inflections.” They agree that case loss in Middle English arose from a combination of contact between Old English and Old Norse and “internal diachronic development in Western Europe generally and in North Germanic in particular.” They believe that Norse was the ultimate catalyst for the change, as part of their controversial argument that Modern English is a descendant of Old Norse rather than Old English. (Joseph E. Edmonds and Jan T. Faarlund, English: The Language of the Vikings, 2014, pp. 149-152)

María Ruiz-Moneva also posits a Norse influence, stating that “the aim [of contact between speakers of English and Norse] would have been to get the most important ideas, for which the inflectional endings must have been fairly superfluous.” (María Angeles Ruiz-Moneva, “A Relevance Theory Approach to the Scandinavian Influence Upon the Development of the English Language,” 1997) Ekkehard Konig and Johan van der Auwera, too, agree that Norse was responsible, though they note that since most Old English documents from the time are written in West Saxon, it is impossible to watch this play out in real time and thus verify it as indisputable fact (Ekkehard Konig and Johan van der Auwera, The Germanic Languages, 2013, p. 112) Cynthia Allen, by contrast, argues that syncretism was language-internal, and that though it was “probably accelerated by contact with Danish and French,” it occurred “in a step-by-step fashion” over several centuries, “and was caused by phonological processes and familiar sorts of levelling.” (Cynthia Allen, “Middle English case loss and the ‘creolization’ hypothesis,” 1997)

The notion that “Welsh and English are conspicuously analytic compared to other languages in Western Europe”

Other linguists have claimed the same thing about other languages--Albert Dauzat, for example, stated in 1950 that “Modern French is, along with English, the European language which has evolved most from a synthetic state to an analytic one.” (Roy Harris, edited by Nigel Love, The Foundations of Linguistic Theory, 2014, p. 45, translation my own) Dutch, too, has developed “strong analytic tendencies” (Ekkehard Konig and Johan van der Auwera, The Germanic Languages, 2013, p. 82) The Scandinavian languages are generally analytic. (The Nordic Languages, Volume 1, edited by Oscar Bandle, Kurt Braunmüller, Ernst Hakon Jahr, Allan Karker, Hans-Peter Naumann, Ulf Telemann, Lennart Elmevik, Gun Widmark, and Walter de Gruyter, 2008, p. 217) V. N. Yartseva says that “English, French, Danish, and Welsh are usually considered to be analytic languages.” (V. N. Yartseva, “Basic Typological Units,” in Language Typology 1985, 1986) While English and Welsh might both be put into the category of being analytic, I have not seen any other source besides Tristram argue that they are unique in this regard among the languages of Western/Northern Europe.

Northern Subject Rule

Michael Benskin has criticized the work of those who have tied the Northern Subject Rule to a Brittonic origin on the basis that they have used modern Welsh, rather than medieval Welsh, as a point of comparison. Benskin concludes that there is at present no way to tell whether the NSR is a feature of contact with Brittonic. or a language-internal development. (Michael Benskin, “Present Indicative Plural Concord in English and Brittonic,” 2011) Nynke de Haas and Ans van Kemenade note that it could have been “promoted by extensive language contact in Northumbrian Old English, with speakers of Brythonic Celtic as well as speakers of Old Norse.” (Nynke de Haas and Ans van Kemenade, “The origin of the Northern Subject Rule: subject positions and verbal morphosyntax in older English,” 2014) Lukas Pietsch, on the other hand, has rejected the Celtic argument (Lukas Pietsch, Variable Grammars: Verbal Agreement in Northern Dialects of English, 2005, p. 60) on the grounds that the rule appears too late, and has instead argued in favor of an language-internal derivation (Lukas Pietsch, “Some do and some doesn’t”: Verbal concord variation in the north of the British Isles,” 2005)

Single form of the definite article

Cynthia Allen theorizes that the merging of definite articles in English was in direct proportion to the loss of case. She notes that in Early Middle English texts that do include case endings, such as those written in Kent, Essex, and Worcestershire, multiple forms of the article are still used, but in texts where they have been eroded, like the East Midlands-composed Ormulum, only þe is used. However, for the northern texts where case is still evident to some degree, variations do creep in. Even later on, texts composed in places like Herefordshire (in the thirteenth century) and Kent (in the fourteenth century) include a slight degree of case/gender-based variation. Over the same time period, þæt, which was once part of the English definite article system, shifted to a new, more specialized meaning. (Cynthia Allen, “The definite determiner in Middle English: What happened with þe?”, 2016) Overall, this seems to have been an ongoing development in Middle English. Brittonic also simplified its system of articles from more complex forms, in this case when transitioning into Old Welsh. (Kenneth Jackson: Language and History in Early Britain, 1956)

Phonology

Coates criticizes the theory that the phonemes θ, ð and w could be remnants of Celtic influence: “This seems a curious sort of argument, amounting to the claim that E[nglish] would no doubt have lost them (like the Germanic languages not perched on the Atlantic periphery) if hypothetical Celts had not wrapped their vocal organs around E[nglish] in the nick of time. We are left to wonder why initial /w/ is retained in Hiberno-English when Proto-Celtic */w/ was lost in that position in Irish and was renewed only in lenition contexts ...” (Richard Coates, Reviewed Works -- English and Celtic in Contact) Other Germanic languages retain these phonemes as well, such as Icelandic (/θ/ and /ð/, see phoneme inventory of Icelandic in Wikipedia), Elfdalian Swedish (/w/, see http://eurasianphonology.info/listview?lang=Elfdalian% 23301), and Flemish dialects of Dutch (/w/, see Bruce Donaldson, A linguistic history of Holland and Belgium, 1983, p. 159). Meanwhile, other Celtic languages such as Irish and Scottish Gaelic have lost them. More generally, Coates states that “Old English phonology is not, in any unqualified sense, Brittonic phonology.” (Richard Coates, “Celtic whispers: revisiting the problems of the relation between Brittonic and Old English,” 2017) Kenneth Jackson said that it is “impossible to point to any feature about Anglo-Saxon phonology which can be shown conclusively to be a modification due to the alien linguistic habits of the Britons.” (Jackson 1953, quoted by Coates)

General thoughts

On the whole, there are a few linguists who seem to be really into the “Celtic hypothesis” (as Donka Minkova says, a “small but vocal” group), and if one actively searches out papers on it they’ll be readily available, but many others don’t even mention it, and in most overviews on the history of English, if it is commented on at all, it is more in the sense of “here’s an idea that some people like but that we don’t have any proof for.” I don’t think that the incessant citations of Tristram and Filppula et. al. are inappropriate, but I think it is definitely necessary to provide the (many and varied) counter-arguments to their claims; otherwise, the page reads like an uncritical regurgitation of their theories rather than a discussion of a controversial idea for which a large number of valid criticisms exist. CelticBrain (talk) 01:13, 13 May 2020 (UTC)CelticBrain


 * Hi CelticBrain, I look forward to seeing your suggested changes. Possibly Alarichall will want to comment as well. TSventon (talk) 14:07, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

Proposed Changes
TSventon, here are several changes I propose to make on this page regarding the debate around Brittonic influence in English and other explanations for how these forms developed. For all the things I haven't changed, the extant citations would remain.

Header

Brittonicisms in English are the linguistic effects in English attributed to the historical influence of Brittonic speakers as they switched language to English following the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain and the establishment of Anglo-Saxon political dominance in England.

The research into this topic uses a variety of approaches to approximate the Romano-British language spoken in Sub-Roman Britain on the eve of the Anglo-Saxon arrival. Besides the earliest extant Old Welsh texts, Breton is useful for its lack of English influence.

The Brittonic influence on English is generally considered to be very small, but a number of publications in the 2000s suggested that this may have been underestimated. Some of the developments differentiating Old English from Middle English have been proposed as an emergence of a previously unrecorded Brittonic influence.

There are many, often obscure, characteristics in English that have been proposed as Brittonicisms. White (2004) enumerates 92 items, of which 32 are attributed to other academic works. However, other explanations have been given for the development of these features, and the notion of a Brittonic influence on English has generally not achieved widespread acceptance among linguists.

Diglossia model

Endorsed particularly by Hildegard Tristram (2004), the Old English diglossia model proposes that much of the native Romano-British population remained in England while the Anglo-Saxons gradually took over the rule of the country. According to this theory, the Brittonic population would have imperfectly learnt the Anglo-Saxons' language while Old English continued in an artificially stable form as the written language of the elite and the only version of English preserved in writing. After the Norman conquerors removed Anglo-Saxon rule, the language of the general population, which would have been a Brittonicised version of English, was eventually recorded and appears as Middle English. This kind of variance between written and spoken language is attested historically in other cultures, notably Latin, and may occur commonly. For instance, Moroccan Arabic (Darija) and other colloquial varieties of Arabic have had virtually no literary presence in over a millennium; the substantial Berber substratum in Darija (and likewise, the Coptic substratum in Egyptian, the Western Aramaic and Hebrew substrata in Levantine, the Syriac and Persian substrata in Iraqi, etc.) would not have appeared in any significant Arabic works until the late 20th century, when Darija, along with the other varieties of Arabic, began to be written down in quantity.

''The notion that such a diglossia could have existed in England has been criticized by several linguists. Robert McColl Millar, for example, has pointed out that many works written in Old English, such as Ælfric’s homilies, seem to be intended for a “large and undifferentiated audience,” suggesting that the language they were written in was not different from the language of the common people. He further concludes that “the idea that this state could continue for hundreds of years seems most unlikely,” noting further that no document from the time alludes to such a situation (by contrast, in Gaul, references are made to the lingua romana rustica as being different from written Latin). (cite Millar) John Insley agrees that "there is not a scrap of evidence for [Tristram's] 'Late British-derived Old English.'" (cite Insley) Richard Coates, too, has questioned the notion of a significant substratal influence, pointing out that modern French has over a hundred Gaulish words while modern English seems to have fewer than ten Brittonic words, and believes that for this reason there is no linguistic reason to dismiss the notion of a large-scale population shift resulting from the Anglo-Saxon migrations. (cite Coates)''

Transition to Middle English

The development from Old English to Middle English is marked particularly by a change from syntheticism (expressing meaning using word-endings) to analyticism (expressing meaning using word order). Old English was a synthetic language, though its inflections already tended to be simpler than those of contemporary continental Germanic languages. There are different word endings for case (roughly speaking, endings for the direct object of a sentence, the subject of a sentence and similarly for two other grammatical situations (not including instrumental)) varying for plural forms, gender forms and two kinds of word form (called weak and strong). This system is partially retained in modern Germanic languages, especially German, Icelandic and Faroese. Brittonic, however, was already a highly analytic language and so Brittonic peoples may have had difficulty learning Old English. It has been suggested that the British Latin of the period demonstrates difficulty in using the Latin word endings.

''While some, such as Tristram, have claimed that the transition to more analytic forms was due to Brittonic influence, the more widely accepted view is that this arose due to a combination of contact with Old Norse--in part due to the strong correlation between areas of Norse settlement in England and the initial centers of loss of case and gender (cite Edmonds and Faarlund, cite Moneva, cite Konig and van der Auwera, cite Millar)--and language-internal developments (cite Allen, cite Insley). In some areas of southern England, inflectional endings and grammatical gender remained in use well into the Middle English period. (cite Millar)''

''The loss of inflections in English has been compared to that in the modern Scandinavian languages, where it is held to have been partly a result of contact with Middle Low German during the time of the Hanseatic League. (cite Norde, cite Sproston, cite Bandle et. al.)''

Various possible Brittonicisms

The progressive tense

''This form is held by some (cite Tristam, cite Filppula) to be a possible Brittonicism, on the basis that superficially similar constructions occur in Celtic languages, and that Celtic Englishes use it more than other varieties of English. (cite Filppula et. al.) Other linguists have demonstrated that it arose from two constructions that were used fairly rarely in Old and early Middle English. The first used a form of beon/wesan (to be/to become) with a present participle (-ende). (cite Lamont) A form identical to this one exists in Dutch. (cite Hoeksma) The second used beon/wesan, a preposition, and a gerund (-unge), and it has been variously proposed that it might have been influenced by similar forms in Latin and French (cite Mustanoja) or that it might be a Britonnicism, though evidence one way or another is scant. (cite Killie, cite Insley) Over the course of the Middle English period, sound shifts in the language meant that the (-ende) participle ending and the (-unge) gerund ending merged into a new ending, (-ing). This change, which was complete in southern England around the end of the Middle English period and spread north from there, rendered participles and gerunds indistinguishable. It is at this point that a sudden increase in the use of a progressive form is visible, though it would not take its current form until the eighteenth century.(cite Lamont, Mustanoja, Elsness, and Alexiadou) Herbert Schendl has concluded that "with this feature, a polygenetic origin ... seems attractive, and at least the further extension of the progressive is a language-internal development.” (cite Schendl)''

Do-periphrasis Modern English is dependent on a semantically neutral 'do' in some negative statements and questions, e.g. 'I don't know' rather than 'I know not". This feature is linguistically very rare, although all West Germanic languages except Afrikaans can use "do" as an auxiliary. Celtic languages use a similar structure, but without dependence. The usage is frequent in Cornish and Middle Cornish — e.g. "Omma ny wreugh why tryge", "You do not stay here" — and it is used in Middle Breton. "Do" is more common in Celtic Englishes than Standard English. ''There are, however, other theories for how this feature developed in standard English.[35] The key difficulty in explaining this form as a Brittonicism is its late appearance in the language--it only began to arise in the fifteenth century. (cite Culicover). Thus, several linguists have proposed that it developed independently during the transition between Middle and Early Modern English. (cite Kroch, cite Schendl). John Insley states that "we really cannot take features of Early Modern English as evidence for a Late British substrate into Middle and Early Modern English from a hypothetical 'Late British-derived Old English.'" (cite Insley)''

'Northern subject rule

The Northern subject rule was the general pattern of syntax used for the present-tense in northern Middle English. It occurs in some present-day dialects. The 3rd person singular verb is used for 3rd person plural subjects unless the pronoun, "they", is used and it is directly adjacent to the verb, e.g. "they sing", "they only sings", "birds sings". This anti-agreement is standard in Modern Welsh — excepting the adjacency condition. It had general usage in Old Welsh and therefore, presumably, in Cumbric. ''Other linguists have proposed that influence of Old Norse may have been a contributing factor as well (cite de Haas), or that it was an entirely language-internal development (cite Isaac, cite Pietsch). The relative lack of northern Old English texts makes dating the rule’s first appearance difficult. (cite Benskin)''

Tag questions and answers

The statistical bias towards use of tag questions and answers in English, historically, instead of simply yes or no has been attributed to Celtic influence. Celtic languages do not use yes and no. Answers are made by using the appropriate verb. For example, "dych chi'n hoffi siocled?/ydw, dw i'n hoffi siocled." (Welsh: 'do you like chocolate?' 'I do, I like chocolate.' More literally: 'are you liking chocolate? I am, I am liking chocolate.'). In this case, 'ydw' is not 'yes,' but rather the first-person present tense conjugation of 'fyddo,' 'to be,' that is only appropriate as the positive response to a question (the neutral or negative conjugation would be 'dwi' or 'dw i.'). It has been suggested that yes is a fossilised tag answer (a combination of gea (“yes”) and si (“it may be”) making the 's' in yes seemingly redundant. However, when the alternate meaning of gea (“so”) is taken into account, the translation becomes “so be it,” which is not a tag answer. This usage was a more emphatic version of the simpler “yea.” (cite etymonline, cite wiktionary) (I honestly think the whole "yes" thing might be crossing over into WP:FRINGE territory, and should thus be deleted altogether, but I'm open to other views on that.)

Phonology

Among the phonetic anomalies is the continued use of /w/, /θ/ and /ð/ in Modern English (win, breath, breathe). Welsh and Cornish also use these phonemes. The use of the sounds in Germanic languages has generally been unstable and it has been theorized that the continual influence of Celtic may have had a supportive effect in preserving English use. The legitimacy of this evidence has been disputed.[6] (cite Coates) ''The use of one or more of these phonemes has been preserved in other Germanic languages, such as Elfdalian, Icelandic, and some dialects of Dutch. Kenneth Jackson commented that it is “impossible to point to any feature about Anglo-Saxon phonology which can be shown conclusively to be a modification due to the alien linguistic habits of the Britons.” (cite Jackson via Coates)''

Various URLs:

Used in multiple sections

- Richard Coates, "Celtic whispers: Revisiting the problems of the relation between Brittonic and Old English," https://ul.qucosa.de/api/qucosa%3A31804/attachment/ATT-0/

- Herbert Schendl, "Middle English: Language Contact," https://www.academia.edu/12524687/Middle_English_Language_contact

- John Insley, "Britons and Anglo-Saxons," in Kulturelle Integration und Personnenamen in Mittelalter (p. 264), https://books.google.com/books?id=ENGJDwAAQBAJ&dq=editions%3AISBN3110268868&source=gbs_book_other_versions

Phonology

- Richard Coates, "Reviewed Work: English and Celtic in Contact," https://www.jstor.org/stable/40666330?seq=1

Loss of Inflections

- Robert McColl Millar, "At the Forefront of Linguistic Change: The Morphology of Late Northumbrian Texts and the History of the English Language, with Particular Reference to the Lindisfarne Gospels," https://www.academia.edu/5772279/_At_the_Forefront_of_Linguistic_Change_The_Morphology_of_Late_Northumbrian_Texts_and_the_History_of_the_English_Language_with_Particular_Reference_to_the_Lindisfarne_Gospels_

- Robert McColl Millar, "English in the 'transition period': the sources of contact-induced change," in Contact: The Interaction of Closely-Related Linguistic Varieties and the History of English, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g0515w

- Muriel Norde, "Middle Low German-Middle Scandinavian language contact and morphological simplification," https://www.academia.edu/688792/Middle_Low_German-Middle_Scandinavian_language_contact_and_morphological_simplification

- Edward Sproston, "The Influence of Middle Low German on the Scandinavian Languages," http://www.lowlands-l.net/talk/eng/scandinavian.html

- Oscar Bandle et. al., The Nordic Languages (p. 217), https://books.google.com/books/about/Bandle_Oscar_Braunmuller_Kurt_Jahr_Ernst.html?id=P6bMn9c6musC

- Joseph Embley Edmonds and Jan Terje Faarlund, English: The Language of the Vikings (pp. 149-152), https://ff.upol.cz/fileadmin/userdata/FF/katedry/kaa/sborniky/vikings2014.pdf

- María Ruiz-Moneva, "A Relevance Theory Approach to the Scandinavian Influence upon the Development of the English Language," https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/16359565.pdf

- Ekkehard Konig and Johan van der Auwera, The Germanic Languages (p. 112), https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Germanic_Languages.html?id=DVBdAgAAQBAJ

- Cynthia Allen, "Middle English case loss and the 'creolization' hypothesis," https://www.academia.edu/12161487/Middle_English_case_loss_and_the_creolization_hypothesis

Do-support

- Peter W. Cullicover, "The Rise and Fall of Constructions and the History of Do-Support," https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/culicover.1/Publications/do.pdf

- Anthony S. Kroch, "Function and Grammar in the History of English: Periphrastic Do," https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kroch/papers/function-grammar-do.pdf

Present progressive

- George Lamont, "The Progress of English Verb Tenses and the English Progressive," http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6362-lamont.htm

- Tauno Mustanoja, A Middle English Syntax (pp. 572-585), https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Middle_English_Syntax/GLWwDAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

- Johan Elsness, "On the progression of the progressive in early Modern English," https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/455f/5bdb18ddeb74a5c5015c733b4f0691bfe8f3.pdf

- Artemis Alexiadou, "Nominal vs. Verbal -ing Constructions and the Development of the English Progressive," http://www.sciedu.ca/journal/index.php/elr/article/view/3846/2269

- Kirstin Killie, "Old English-Late British language contact and the English progressive," in Language Contact and Development Around the North Sea, https://books.google.com/books/about/Language_Contact_and_Development_Around.html?id=k0mAoV-K52MC

- Jack Hoeksema, "Verb movement in Dutch present-participle clauses," http://www.let.rug.nl/~koster/DenBesten/Hoeksema.pdf

Northern Subject Rule - Nynke de Haas and Ans van Kemenade, "The origin of the Northern Subject Rule: subject positions and verbal morphosyntax in Older English," https://www.academia.edu/16381486/The_origin_of_the_Northern_Subject_Rule_subject_positions_and_verbal_morphosyntax_in_older_English

- Graham Isaac, Diagnosing the Symptoms of Contact: Some Celtic-English Case Histories (I don't have a URL for this one but it was already cited as an argument for a language-internal origin at Northern Subject Rule, which I fixed up because it had a bunch of "citation needed" tags)

- Lukas Pietsch, "'Some do and some doesn't'": Verbal concord variation in the north of the British Isles," http://lukas-pietsch.de/documents/Pietsch_2005_Concord.pdf

- Michael Benskin, "Present Indicative Plural Concord in Brittonic and Early English," https://www.academia.edu/28316832/Present_Indicative_Plural_Concord_in_Brittonic_and_Early_English1

Overall, I think these changes would improve the page because they would better reflect the overall debate. CelticBrain (talk) 22:53, 18 May 2020 (UTC)CelticBrain


 * Hi CelticBrain I agree that the article needs rebalancing with some counterarguments. Please could you complete the references, including urls where available? Yhat would make it a lot easier to check your additions. Also, could you confirm for each section if you are replacing the whole section or if not, which part of it?


 * Pinging Alarichall and Florian Blaschke in case you want to comment. TSventon (talk) 19:47, 20 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Hi Tsventon, yes, absolutely, I will edit that information into this section. CelticBrain (talk) 20:08, 20 May 2020 (UTC)CelticBrain


 * TSventon, I've italicized my changes and included links to all my sources. CelticBrain (talk) 21:22, 20 May 2020 (UTC)CelticBrain

Change from syntheticism towards analyticism: Response Hi, this article needs to follow Wikipedia's guidance on Academic consensus "A statement that all or most scientists or scholars hold a certain view requires reliable sourcing that directly says that all or most scientists or scholars hold that view. Otherwise, individual opinions should be identified as those of particular, named sources. Editors should avoid original research especially with regard to making blanket statements based on novel syntheses of disparate material." At present it presents one side of the argument, which is unbalanced, but we also need to find sources before presenting the other side as the consensus. I have looked at "Change from syntheticism towards analyticism" as an example. I think we need to find criticism of the model of Brittonic substratum influence on English which was published in the early 2000's, rather than imply that works that don't mention Brittonic influence are rejecting the idea. Several of the references were published in or before 2002, so they predate most of the works about Brittonic influence. Also a work about Scandinavian languages may not mention Brittonic influence because it wasn't relevant to their topic. The only references I saw that criticise the Brittonic influence model directly are Millar's two papers. (Edmonds and Faarlund is recent but doesn't examine Brittonic influence and is arguably a fringe viewpoint.)

I agree with removing the sentence "Today, Welsh and English are conspicuously analytic compared with the other Indo-European languages of Western Europe." from the first paragraph, but I think the next two paragraphs and the section on "Innovations in the Northern zone texts" are important as they summarise the evidence for a link to Brittonic influence. My alternative suggestion, using some of your material is something like:

The development from Old English to Middle English is marked particularly by a change from syntheticism (expressing meaning using word-endings) to analyticism (expressing meaning using word order). Old English was a synthetic language, though its inflections already tended to be simpler than those of contemporary continental Germanic languages. There are different word endings for case (roughly speaking, endings for the direct object of a sentence, the subject of a sentence and similarly for two other grammatical situations (not including instrumental)) varying for plural forms, gender forms and two kinds of word form (called weak and strong). This system is partially retained in modern Germanic languages, especially German, Icelandic and Faroese. Brittonic, however, was already a highly analytic language and so Brittonic peoples may have had difficulty learning Old English. It has been suggested that the British Latin of the period demonstrates difficulty in using the Latin word endings.

''Tristram argues that contact with both Brittonic and Norse speakers explains the language innovations in texts from Northern England. The attrition in word endings, as witnessed by the loss of the nasal endings (m,n), began before the Norse invasion.


 * ''Innovations in the Northern zone texts which Tristram associates with Brittonic influence include:
 * ''Old English had case and gender word endings for nouns, pronouns and adjectives while at the time Brittonic did not have these endings. The endings in English were lost.
 * Old English had several versions of the word the while at the time Brittonic only had one. The variations of the were lost in English. The lack of different forms of the'' is an unusual language feature shared only by Celtic and English in this region.
 * ''English developed a fixed word order, which was present earlier in Brittonic.

''However Millar argues that “in all of the modern Germanic languages, there has been some movement away from a synthetic towards an analytic typology ... it can therefore be suggested that the changes involved are ‘hard-wired’ in all the Germanic languages ...” He concludes that Norse is the most likely origin for the losses, based on the geographical distribution of the initial stages of change correlating strongly with Viking settlement patterns.''

Pinging TSventon (talk) 14:38, 21 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Tsventon, that seems fair enough. One extra thing I found since I first made these proposed changes is a 2018 book chapter by John Insley in which he writes “[Tristram] regards the erosion of substantival inflection in late Old English and early Middle English as a substratal Late British feature and is too ready to dismiss the argument that the strength of stress on the first syllable of Old English triggered this development.” This could be used as an argument in favor of the view that inflection loss was a language-internal development. The Insley chapter actually has a lot of pretty specific criticisms of some of her other arguments, including the diglossia model and a Celtic derivation for the present progressive and periphrastic "do." CelticBrain (talk) 15:19, 21 May 2020 (UTC)CelticBrain


 * CelticBrain thanks, I will have a look at present progressive and periphrastic "do" next. TSventon (talk) 13:25, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Response part 2 Hi CelticBrain, sorry this has taken so long, I found it more complex than I expected. Could you make your suggested changes (with references) to the body of the article and I will then try to edit for balance, a section at a time. I think your change to the lead should have a citation before it is posted. I have made some notes on the first few sections, what do you think?


 * Lead: "However, other explanations have been given for the development of these features, and the notion of a Brittonic influence on English has generally not achieved widespread acceptance among linguists." needs a reference. Alternatively a paragraph about criticism (with references) could be added to "History of research" to support a sentence in the lead.


 * Do you want to remove the table, which I think is a useful summary?


 * Diglossia model: the original text needs expansion to show Brittonicisms are expected in North and West England: "According to this theory, the Brittonic population in the North and West of England would have imperfectly learnt the Anglo-Saxons' language while Old English continued in an artificially stable form as the written language of the elite and the only version of English preserved in writing. After the Norman conquerors removed Anglo-Saxon rule, the language of the general population, which would have included Brittonicised and Danicised dialects of English, was eventually recorded and appears as Middle English."


 * I don't think it is relevant to say that Coates "believes that for this reason there is no linguistic reason dismiss the notion of a large-scale population shift resulting from the Anglo-Saxon migrations" as the diglossia model does not rule out population shift in parts of England. Coates says "the linguistic evidence favours the traditional view, at least for the south-east and ... East Anglia" and Tristram 2004 and Coates 2018 both accept that Anglo-Saxon migrants were more numerous in the South and East than in the North and West.


 * Transition to Middle English
 * The progressive tense and Do-periphrasis should stay in this section as the argument in Tristram 2007 is based on Middle English forms.
 * The Artemis Alexiadou Sciedu Press reference triggers a MediaWiki:Abusefilter-warning-predatory so it probably should be omitted. TSventon (talk) 00:30, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

TSventon, most of this seems fine. As far as the lead goes, we could put a less strongly-worded sentence there like "However, these theories have not become a part of the mainstream view of the history of the English language," and reference it in the 'history of research section.'

My main issue with the table is that a lot of the features listed (for Coates in particular) are dialectical, common in the north and southwest of England, and this is not incredibly clear. Anyway, I'll make my proposed changes and then you can retool them if necessary. CelticBrain (talk) 03:44, 9 June 2020 (UTC)CelticBrain

Thanks CelticBrain, I will return to this article shortly. I will probably have some questions about History of England too. TSventon (talk) 13:10, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

No worries TSventon. I've put the quotes from my sources in the citations in History of England so hopefully that clears some things up. CelticBrain (talk) 18:33, 9 June 2020 (UTC)CelticBrain