Celtic influence

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>Iiffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes:

>The situation in England of that time is a little anomalous,

-- normal.

>for a time everyone spoke his local dialect

-- as virtually everyone in Europe did prior to the emergence of the modern
State and standardized languages in post-Renaissance times.

Check out Martin Luther's choice of language for his German bible.  There was
nothing _but_ regional dialects until then.  Unless you count the language of
the German equivalent of troubadors, which nobody used but them.

>Thus the class barriers in English at that time were relatively recent, and
>there had not been much time for much divergence to occur.

-- nice try but it won't work.  Lowland Scotland, which spoke a Northumbrian
dialect, was never conquered by the Normans, and the court and nobility there
used Lallans right down to the late 17th century.

Same dialect as the farmers, with some Latinate words thrown into the court
poetry for effect.  Awa' wi' it.

Substantial class differences in accent are a rare phenomenon, and vanishingly
rare in preliterate societies.

Remember, an Anglo-Saxon landowner's main social contacts would be with his
social inferiors, not his peers.  Everything from his nursmaid to his groom.
Those are the people he'd spend most time talking to.

Note the similarities of black and white English in the antebellum Southern
plantation belt -- every traveller noted how the planters and their families
"talked like Negroes".

That was because they spent most of their time talking _to_ Negroes.