Celtic and English Again

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/8/99 11:11:49 PM Mountain Standard Time,
petegray at btinternet.com writes:

>Perhaps a comparable situation can be found in Egypt, which was
>Egyptian-speaking for yonks, then Greek speaking for nearly a thousand years

-- Not so.  Greek never replaced demotic Egyptian as the popular language --
Coptic was the majority tongue in Egypt down to the 13th century CE.  Greek
was never more than a minority tongue, spoken by Greek immigrants and their
descendants and a rather thin layer of Hellenized locals.  It was mainly
urban, as well.  Comparable to Norman French in England.

>but now speaks Arabic with very little, if any, trace of either "substrate".

-- Greek, as explained above, isn't a "substrate", and Egyptian Arabic is
extremely different from that of say, Syria or Saudi Arabia or Morocco.
Furthermore, Arabic arrived in Egypt with a written standard.