Celtic influence

Gordon Selway gordonselway at gn.apc.org
Tue Mar 16 22:41:13 UTC 1999


At 7:28 pm 15/3/1999, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>In a message dated 3/14/99 10:11:38 PM Mountain Standard Time,
>iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes:

>>Except in the rest of world and the rest of history where standard languages
>>of stratified societies are always class dialects.

>-- That's simply not so.  In the US, dialect is regional rather than class-
>based.  "Standard American" or "NBC News English" is simply a regional Midland
>dialect.  I hear a dozen different regional dialects of English every week,
>and they have no correlation to class at all.

>The 19th and 20th-century British situation, where the upper classes speak a
>class dialect and the lower a series of regional ones, is historically a very
>rare phenomenon.

The English upper classes in the earlier part of the 19th century spoke
regionally (Lord Derby, with a base outside Liverpool in Lancashire, served
as a Tory and then as a Liberal cabinet minister in the 1860s to 1880s, and
is credited with having a Lancashire sound to his voice).  Earlier this was
even more so (and Gladstone is also reputed to have had a Liverpudlian
tinge to his speech).

But their vocabulary &c was another thing (and that may have been the case
in other places and times).

And were not the French aristos in the tumbrils reputed to be identifiable
by their speech?

The English case (and it may be found in certain strata in Ireland and
Scotland) probably arose from the railways, the great extension of the
boarding system of "public" schools, and the need for many more people to
staff the empire.

>Standard languages are usually simply a regional dialect

>Eg., the Border ballads show laird and crofter speaking the same dialect...
>because that's exactly what they did.  Prior to the 18th century, squire and
>tenant in England also spoke the same regional dialects.

But was not the first standard late middle/early modern English the result
of a government civil service standard?  There was a standard Gaelic at the
same time, but that was established by bards and the like.

>There's absolutely no reason to assume that the situation was different in
>Anglo-Saxon times; thegn and peasant and thrall (unless imported) all spoke
>various regional dialects of Old English; nor is there any reason to suppose
>that the standardized written tongue of the Wessex kings' scribes was much
>different from the spoken language.  Perhaps a bit more conservative, but
>then, contemporary written English is more conservative than the spoken
>language as well.

But in late AS times, of course, there was an importation of Normans and
others, such as Richard who set up his Castle where I used to live under
the aegis of the Confessor in the 1050s.

And at 7:37 pm 15/3/1999, JoatSimeon at aol.com also wrote:

>>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>><snip>
>>And there is evidence that dirt farming (versus husbandry) did not take
>>hold in the British Isles until the early bronze age.

><snip>

>Agriculture was established in Britain in the centuries after 4000 BCE and the
>plow was already employed there in the 4th millenium.

>(Dates from the OXFORD PREHISTORY OF EUROPE, chs. 4&5).

There is evidence to suggest that not only was agriculture in place in this
part of the Severn Valley (Worcestershire) in the fifth millenium BCE, but
that some at least of the bones of the present road and field systems were
in place then.

Gordon Selway
<gordonselway at gn.apc.org>



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