Brittonicisms in English
Encyclopedia
Brittonicisms in English are the linguistic effects in English
attributed to the historical influence of Brittonic
speakers.
The Romano-British inhabitants of England after the Anglo-Saxon influx and political dominance
together with the continual contact over the 1500 year period between English and Brittonic languages (i.e. the Roman-era British language and its descendants) have affected the English language.
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 substratum influence on English has historically been considered slight, but a number of publications in the 2000s suggested that its influence had been underestimated. Many of the developments differentiating Old English from Middle English are proposed as an emergence of a previously unrecorded Brittonic influence.
There are many, often obscure, characteristics in English that have been proposed as Brittonicism. White (2004) enumerates 92 items, of which 32 are attributed to other academic works.
Opposing views by Wolfgang Keller(1925) Ingerid Dal (1952), G. Visser (1955), Walther Preusler (1956), and by Patricia Poussa (1990) were marginal to the academic consensus of their time.
Perhaps more famously, Oxford philologist and author J.R.R. 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
.
Research on Celtic influence in English has intensified in the 2000s, principally centering around The Celtic Englishes programmes in Germany (Potsdam University) and The Celtic Roots of English programme in Finland (Joensuu University).
The review of the extent of Celtic influence has been encouraged by developments in several fields. Significant survival of Brittonic peoples in Anglo-Saxon England has become a more widely accepted idea thanks primarily to recent archaeological and genetic evidence. According to a previously held model, the Romano-Britons of England were to a large extent exterminated or somehow pushed out of England - affecting their ability to influence language.
There is now a much greater body of research into language contact and a greater understanding of language contact types. The works of Sarah Thompson and Terence Kaufman have been used in particular to model borrowing and language shift. The research uses investigations into varieties of Celtic English (that is Welsh English
, Irish English, etc.) which reveal characteristics more certainly attributable to Celtic languages and also universal contact trends revealed by Celtic, African and Indian varieties of English.
This kind of variance between written and spoken language is attested historically in other cultures and may be common. For instance, Moroccan Arabic
(Darija) and other colloquial varieties of Arabic
have not had a literary presence in over a millennium; the substantial Amazigh
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.
Biðun, the 3rd person plural form is also used in Northern texts and seems to parallel the Brittonic byddant. The byðun form is particularly difficult to explain as a Germanic language construct but is consistent with the Brittonic system.
Today, Welsh and English are conspicuously analytic compared with the Indo-European languages of Western Europe.
Language innovations occurred primarily in texts from Northern and South-Western England - in theory, the areas with the greater density of Brittonic people. In the Northern zone of that period, there was partial replacement of the Anglo-Saxon rule by Norse invaders. This situation can variously be seen as mitigating the emergence of Brittonic English or as the direct cause of the Northern language innovations i.e. Middle English creole hypothesis
. However, the attrition in word endings, as witnessed by the loss of the nasal endings(m,n), began before the Norse invasion.
The effects of accent, which may or may not have been substratal, together with Norse influence is perhaps the most accepted hypothesis explaining inflexion attrition.
in Old Welsh literature predates its common use in English by perhaps 400 years - depending on the dating of Welsh texts.
Cleft constructions are more common in Breton French than Standard French and more common and versatile in Celtic English than Standard English. Clefting may be linked to the rise of a fixed word order after the loss of inflections.
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
.
has had a central role in the modern examination of this issue. He is also known for his work on the Vasconic substratum theory and suggests some syntactic structures can be used to diagnose a pre-Celtic substratum language - that is Semitic/Afro-Asiatic.
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
attributed to the historical influence of Brittonic
Brythonic languages
The Brythonic or Brittonic languages form one of the two branches of the Insular Celtic language family, the other being Goidelic. The name Brythonic was derived by Welsh Celticist John Rhys from the Welsh word Brython, meaning an indigenous Briton as opposed to an Anglo-Saxon or Gael...
speakers.
The Romano-British inhabitants of England after the Anglo-Saxon influx and political dominance
Heptarchy
The Heptarchy is a collective name applied to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of south, east, and central Great Britain during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, conventionally identified as seven: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex...
together with the continual contact over the 1500 year period between English and Brittonic languages (i.e. the Roman-era British language and its descendants) have affected the English language.
The research into this topic uses a variety of approaches to approximate the Romano-British
Romano-British
Romano-British culture describes the culture that arose in Britain under the Roman Empire following the Roman conquest of AD 43 and the creation of the province of Britannia. It arose as a fusion of the imported Roman culture with that of the indigenous Britons, a people of Celtic language and...
language spoken in Sub-Roman Britain
Sub-Roman Britain
Sub-Roman Britain is a term derived from an archaeological label for the material culture of Britain in Late Antiquity: the term "Sub-Roman" was invented to describe the potsherds in sites of the 5th century and the 6th century, initially with an implication of decay of locally-made wares from a...
on the eve of the Anglo-Saxon arrival. Besides the earliest extant Old Welsh texts, Breton
Breton language
Breton is a Celtic language spoken in Brittany , France. Breton is a Brythonic language, descended from the Celtic British language brought from Great Britain to Armorica by migrating Britons during the Early Middle Ages. Like the other Brythonic languages, Welsh and Cornish, it is classified as...
is useful for its lack of English influence.
The Brittonic substratum influence on English has historically been considered slight, but a number of publications in the 2000s suggested that its influence had been underestimated. Many of the developments differentiating Old English from Middle English are proposed as an emergence of a previously unrecorded Brittonic influence.
There are many, often obscure, characteristics in English that have been proposed as Brittonicism. White (2004) enumerates 92 items, of which 32 are attributed to other academic works.
History of research
The received view that Celtic impact on English has been minimal on all levels, became established at the beginning of the 20th century following work by such scholars as Otto Jespersen (1905), and Max Förster (1921).Opposing views by Wolfgang Keller(1925) Ingerid Dal (1952), G. Visser (1955), Walther Preusler (1956), and by Patricia Poussa (1990) were marginal to the academic consensus of their time.
Perhaps more famously, Oxford philologist and author J.R.R. 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
English and Welsh
English and Welsh is the title of J. R. R. Tolkien'svaledictory address to the University of Oxford of 1955.The lecture sheds light on Tolkien's conceptions of the connections of race, ethnicity and language....
.
Research on Celtic influence in English has intensified in the 2000s, principally centering around The Celtic Englishes programmes in Germany (Potsdam University) and The Celtic Roots of English programme in Finland (Joensuu University).
The review of the extent of Celtic influence has been encouraged by developments in several fields. Significant survival of Brittonic peoples in Anglo-Saxon England has become a more widely accepted idea thanks primarily to recent archaeological and genetic evidence. According to a previously held model, the Romano-Britons of England were to a large extent exterminated or somehow pushed out of England - affecting their ability to influence language.
There is now a much greater body of research into language contact and a greater understanding of language contact types. The works of Sarah Thompson and Terence Kaufman have been used in particular to model borrowing and language shift. The research uses investigations into varieties of Celtic English (that is Welsh English
Welsh English
Welsh English, Anglo-Welsh, or Wenglish refers to the dialects of English spoken in Wales by Welsh people. The dialects are significantly influenced by Welsh grammar and often include words derived from Welsh...
, Irish English, etc.) which reveal characteristics more certainly attributable to Celtic languages and also universal contact trends revealed by Celtic, African and Indian varieties of English.
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. Over a long period, the Brittonic population imperfectly learnt the Anglo-Saxons' language while Old English was maintained in an artificially stable form as the written language of the elite and the only version of English preserved in writing. After the Anglo-Saxon rule was removed by the Norman conquerors, the language of the general population, which was 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 and may be common. For instance, Moroccan Arabic
Moroccan Arabic
Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...
(Darija) and other colloquial varieties of Arabic
Varieties of Arabic
The Arabic language is a Semitic language characterized by a wide number of linguistic varieties within its five regional forms. The largest divisions occur between the spoken languages of different regions. The Arabic of North Africa, for example, is often incomprehensible to an Arabic speaker...
have not had a literary presence in over a millennium; the substantial Amazigh
Berber languages
The Berber languages are a family of languages indigenous to North Africa, spoken from Siwa Oasis in Egypt to Morocco , and south to the countries of the Sahara Desert...
substratum in Darija (and likewise, the Coptic
Coptic language
Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...
substratum in Egyptian
Egyptian Arabic
Egyptian Arabic is the language spoken by contemporary Egyptians.It is more commonly known locally as the Egyptian colloquial language or Egyptian dialect ....
, the Western Aramaic
Western Aramaic languages
Western Aramaic languages is a group of several Aramaic dialects developed and once widely spoken throughout the ancient Levant, as opposed to those from in and around Mesopotamia which make up what is known as the Eastern Aramaic languages...
and Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
substrata in Levantine
Levantine Arabic
Levantine Arabic is a broad variety of Arabic spoken in the 100 to 200 km-wide Eastern Mediterranean coastal strip...
, the Syriac
Syriac language
Syriac is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Having first appeared as a script in the 1st century AD after being spoken as an unwritten language for five centuries, Classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from...
and Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
substrata in Iraqi
Iraqi Arabic
Iraqi Arabic is a continuum of mutually intelligible Arabic varieties native to the Mesopotamian basin of Iraq as well as spanning into eastern and northern Syria, western Iran, southeastern Turkey, and spoken in respective Iraqi diaspora communities.-Varieties:Iraqi Arabic has two major varieties...
, 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.
Substansive verb - consuetudinal tense Byð
Old English is unusual as a Germanic language in its use of two forms of the verb to be. The b- form is used in a habitual sense and the 3 person singular form, Byð, has the same distinction of functions and is associated with a similar phonetic form in the Brittonic *bið (Welsh bydd).Biðun, the 3rd person plural form is also used in Northern texts and seems to parallel the Brittonic byddant. The byðun form is particularly difficult to explain as a Germanic language construct but is consistent with the Brittonic system.
Change from syntheticism towards analyticism
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 highly synthetic language. There are different word endings for case (roughly speaking, endings for the object of a sentence, the subject of a sentence and similarly for 2 other grammatical situations (not including instrumental)) varying for plural forms, gender forms and 2 kinds of word form (called weak and strong). This system is partially retained in modern Germanic languages. Brittonic, however, was already highly analytic and so Brittonic peoples may have had difficulty learning Old English. It has been suggested that the Brittonic Latin of the period demonstrates difficulty in using the Latin word endings.Today, Welsh and English are conspicuously analytic compared with the Indo-European languages of Western Europe.
Language innovations occurred primarily in texts from Northern and South-Western England - in theory, the areas with the greater density of Brittonic people. In the Northern zone of that period, there was partial replacement of the Anglo-Saxon rule by Norse invaders. This situation can variously be seen as mitigating the emergence of Brittonic English or as the direct cause of the Northern language innovations i.e. Middle English creole hypothesis
Middle English creole hypothesis
The Middle English creole hypothesis is the concept that the English language is a creole, i.e., a language that developed from a pidgin. The vast differences between Old and Middle English have led some historical linguists to claim that the language underwent creolisation at the time of either...
. However, the attrition in word endings, as witnessed by the loss of the nasal endings(m,n), began before the Norse invasion.
The effects of accent, which may or may not have been substratal, together with Norse influence is perhaps the most accepted hypothesis explaining inflexion attrition.
- Innovations in the Northern zone texts
- 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
- Innovations in the South Western zone texts
- Rise of the periphrastic aspect, particularly the progressive form (i.e. BE verb-ing:I am writing, she was singing etc.). The progressive form developed in the change from Old English to Middle English. Similar constructs are rare in Germanic languages and not completely analogous. Celtic usage has chronological precedence and high usage. Celtic Englishes employ the structure more than Standard English. e.g. "It was meaning right the opposite" Manx English
- DO-periphrasis in a variety of uses. 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. 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.
Loss of wurth
In Old English, constructions using "wurth" were used where today motion verbs like go and become are used instead e.g."What shall worthe of us twoo!" This use of motion verbs occurs in Celtic texts with relative frequency e.g. "ac am hynny yd aeth Kyledyr yg gwyllt" = "and because of this Kyledyr went mad" (Middle Welsh)Rise in use of some complex syntactic structures
English construction of complex sentences uses some forms which in popularity may suggest a Celtic influence. CleftingClefting
A cleft sentence is a complex sentence that has a meaning that could be expressed by a simple sentence. Clefts typically put a particular constituent into focus...
in Old Welsh literature predates its common use in English by perhaps 400 years - depending on the dating of Welsh texts.
Cleft constructions are more common in Breton French than Standard French and more common and versatile in Celtic English than Standard English. Clefting may be linked to the rise of a fixed word order after the loss of inflections.
Uses of himself, herself etc.
Celtic and English have formal identity between intensifier and reflexive pronoun. They share this feature only with Dutch, Maltese, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian in Europe. In Middle English, the old intensifier "self" was replaced by a fusion of pronoun + "self" which is now used in a communication to emphasise the object in question e.g."A woman who is conspicuously generous to others less fortunate than herself."Northern subject rule
The Northern subject ruleNorthern subject rule
The Northern Subject Rule is a grammatical pattern inherited from Northern Middle English. Present tense verbs may take the verbal ‑s suffix, except when they are directly adjacent to one of the personal pronouns I, you, we, or they as their subject...
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
Cumbric language
Cumbric was a variety of the Celtic British language spoken during the Early Middle Ages in the Hen Ogledd or "Old North", or what is now northern England and southern Lowland Scotland, the area anciently known as Cumbria. It was closely related to Old Welsh and the other Brythonic languages...
.
Lack of external possessor
English does not make use of a construction called an external possessor. The only other "European" languages without the external possessor are Lezgian, Turkish, Welsh and Breton. Old English used the external possessor e.g. Seo cwen het þa þæm cyninge þæt heafod of aceorfan. "The Queen then ordered the King the head to be cut off" but Modern English must use the internal possessor "The Queen then ordered the King's head to be cut off".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. 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). Theo VennemannTheo Vennemann
Theo Vennemann is a German linguist known best for his work on historical linguistics, especially for his disputed theories of a Vasconic substratum and an Atlantic superstratum of European languages. He also suggests that the High German consonant shift was already completed in the early 1st...
has had a central role in the modern examination of this issue. He is also known for his work on the Vasconic substratum theory and suggests some syntactic structures can be used to diagnose a pre-Celtic substratum language - that is Semitic/Afro-Asiatic.
Phonetics
Among the phonetic anomalies is the continued use of w, θ and ð in Modern English (_w_in , brea_th_, brea_th_e). English is remarkable in being the only language (except Welsh/Cornish) to use all three of these sounds in the region. The use of the sounds in Germanic languages has generally been ephemeral and the continual influence of Celtic may have had a supportive effect in preserving English use. The legitimacy of this evidence has been disputed.See also
- List of English words of Welsh origin
- History of the English languageHistory of the English languageEnglish is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic invaders from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the Netherlands. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the...
- Middle English creole hypothesisMiddle English creole hypothesisThe Middle English creole hypothesis is the concept that the English language is a creole, i.e., a language that developed from a pidgin. The vast differences between Old and Middle English have led some historical linguists to claim that the language underwent creolisation at the time of either...