User talk:80.241.74.53

Hi. Welcome to Wikipedia. I'm very interested in your ideas for the English people page. The page has been stable for some time and could do with some new input. I'd like to stress that this page is about English people, it is not about Anglo-Saxon people, there is an Anglo-Saxons article and there is a Sub-Roman Britain article as well. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that your ideas are more relevant to the article about Anglo-Saxons. The section about the Origins of the English has a long list of related articles. The reason for this is that we need to be specific about what we mean. When we talk about the English as a group, we do not mean the Anglo-Saxons, we mean the English. When we talk about the Danelaw we are talking about the Danelaw, and not about the English. Wikipedia articles need to be specific. There is little evidence that people considered themselves English prior to Edward the Elder starting to call himself King of the English (his father Alfred the Great never used such a title, he was King of the Anglo-Saxons). Even at this time England was not unified. It was not untill the Battle of Brunanburh in 937 that England became unified under Athelstan. Even at this point it is evident that England was a political entity and not a ethnic entity, the Danes were the Danes, the Danelaw had different laws and customs, not to mention a different language. Earldormen in the North of the Kingdom were more or less independent of the crown, which was to a large extent still viewed as that of Wessex. Unity came from adversity, the Danish attacks had forced the creation of the Kingdom of England, but whether people viewed themselves as English (the defining idea of nationhood or ethnicity) is another matter. Indeed as late as 1002 Aethelraed ordered the St. Brice's Day massacre, indicating that there was still a great deal of ethnic division in the Kingdom. When people started to see themselves as English is a tricky question. We don't know how widespread the use of Brythonic languages was. Catherine Hills in her excellent book "Origins of the English" makes this point fairly well, all we really know is the language of the elite, we know that elite people were speaking and writing Old English, but we do not know how many ordinary people were speaking Brythonic, nor for how long, she suggests that people may have been speaking Brythonic languages in England even as late as the nineth century, and we would never know about it. Likewise the Brythonic language of Cornish was spoken as late as a few centuries ago, in Cumbria the system for counting sheep is certainly from a brythonic language, though the old language is lost, it is no coincidence that Cumbria is similar to the Welsh word for Wales (Cymru) (Cumbrian_dialect). We do not know how old Germanic languages are in Great Britain, some archaeologists now think that Germanic influence on the east coast of Great Britain is significantly older than previously thought. Barry Cunliffe thinks that there were direct links between the peoples of the North Sea throughout the first millenium BC, Steven Oppenheimer thinks that the genetic legacy of these contacts is still observable, and that there are old genetic differences between people from the east of Great Britain and those from the west, but these are not massive differences, and do not form discrete or discontinuous groups. So what does "Germanic" mean? Does it mean speaking Germanic languages? Does it mean Genetically more similar to Danes and Saxons than to Welsh and Scots? English people certainly speak a Germanic language, but likewise seem to be more similar to Welsh and Scottish people than they are to Danes and North Germans, at least based on our current understanding of genetics. I just mention all this in passing, there is a lot ot consider, and I know a bit of history from about this time, having once been a member of Regia Anglorum. I look forward to hearing your ideas. By the way you might consider getting a user account, its a good idea. I'm going to archive the talk page for English people, it's awfully long, you can still leave your ideas there. All the best. Alun 10:30, 12 April 2007 (UTC)