Celtic influence

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>sidonian at ggms.com writes:

>(I know it's dreadful to suggest this about the ancestors of the English, but
>the kill all of the men and make concubines of the women method of conquest
>was pretty standard up until this century.)

-- well, no.

People learn their mother-tongue from their mothers.  A group of predominantly
male invaders who rely on local women for their offspring will be assimilated
and lose their own language in a single generation.

Men -- particularly high-status warrior males -- don't spend much time around
small children.

Even if it's only the nursemaids who are all local, the next generation of the
invaders will be completely bilingual from infancy and this will inevitably
"slop over" into their own formally dominant language.

There's a very good study of this (and other issues) in a monograph, "White
Farmers and Black Labor-Tenants", on a small rural community in Natal.

The white landowners are formally English-speaking, but live among a very much
more numerous community of black Zulu-speakers, who furnish their servants,
including nursemaids.  By the time of the monograph (a century after the
British settlement of Natal) the white farmers used Zulu not only to
communicate with their underlings (who were effectively serfs) but often with
each other.  The English they actually spoke was also thickly larded with Zulu
loanwords.  And this is in a setting where Standard English has tremendous
social prestige and is the sole official language, backed up by universal
education, literacy, and mass media.

Likewise, a minority so small that their _household interactions_ are with
speakers of another language will probably be assimilated in a few
generations.

To successfully impose their language (especially in a preliterate setting)
the incomers have to have more than political and economic dominance.  They
have to bring intact family units (meaning women), and they have to be
numerically significant in relation to the locals.  It also helps if they
smash the local social structure very thoroughly, disrupting communities and
families.