I don't know how I missed the obvious association between two recent posts: The Woody Allen clip and the knuckleheaded decision at Cambridge to start declaring that Anglo-Saxons didn't exist.
It was Allen who said "Shakespeare didn't write all those plays. It was somebody else named Shakespeare." I think we are in the same territory here. However much we fuss that they weren't really Angles, or weren't really Saxons, or weren't all that related and associated, or that they stayed too long or left too soon, or there weren't enough of them, or the ones who came were assimilated (or weren't assimilated. That works too) we come up against the brute facts that something involving a movement of people from NW Europe to the east of England occurred, and a new language took over the east of England. We could call it English for convenience' sake.
If that wasn't the Anglo-Saxons, then it was somebody else called Anglo-Saxons.
2 comments:
Or maybe English was already spoken in England and Anglo-Saxon was just a sister language
As in the video below, it is possible that there was an area that spoke some West Germanic language BCE. Widespread use looks unlikely.
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