Celtic influence

[iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu]

On Sat, 6 Mar 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

> In other words, French has about 200 words borrowed from Gaulish -- including
> many very common items of everyday speech -- while OE has 12 from Brythonic.

	Both still overwhelmingly non-Celtic, as noted before.  That is
the forest, regardless of the trees.

> Furthermore, the emergence of a standardized written form of OE (based on the
> Wessex dialect) took place centuries _after_ the Anglo-Saxon settlements in
> Britain.  For the first 200 years and more, the Saxons were
> illiterate.

	Class dialects have little to do with literacy, especially the
very marginal kind of literacy of early medieval Europe.

					DLW