English and Celtic

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu

>Thus it is entirely conceivable that Britons could have an "accent" in (Old)
>English, and yet choose not to carry over any great number of British words,
>essentially because of the status differential.

-- illiterate peasants, in great numbers, managed to acquire all the Old
English vocabulary but didn't bring any loan-words across the language
boundary despite prolonged bilingualism?  Not even for everyday
rural/agricultural/household items?

This wasn't the way things happened anywhere else in the former territories of
the Roman Empire.

In any case, an _accent_ (which adult speakers of another language will find
it difficult to lose) doesn't affect the _grammar_ of a second language, just
the sounds.

(If it weren't for the chronology, I'd be very tempted to assume that Proto-
Germanic was IE spoken with an accent.)

If someone can acquire all the vocabulary, they can acquire the syntax.

Besides which, the grammar of Old English is quite conservatively West
Germanic.