General: 'Warrior Generation' of British military forged in Afghanistan could address global conflicts

Britain’s decade-long involvement in Afghanistan has produced a “warrior generation” of troops who are ready to be deployed to the world’s trouble spots, according to the head of the British Army.

General Sir Peter Wall, the Chief of the General Staff, suggested that as the Armed Forces make their final withdrawal from Afghanistan, Britain might have to get involved in the country again if terrorists return there.

He said a “resurgent” Taliban and al-Qaeda could require Britain to make “more effort” in Afghanistan despite moves to achieve a total pull-out by the end of the year. The comments come as David Cameron leads the nation in marking the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War.

The Prime Minister will attend a church service with other Commonwealth leaders in Glasgow today, then travel to Belgium for further commemorations, including a visit to a First World War memorial.

Writing in The Telegraph, Andrew Murrison MP, the Prime Minister’s special representative for the First World War centenary commemorations, warns that today’s world order is “an alarmingly fragile thing”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/defence/11009347/Afghanistan-has-left-Britain-with-a-warrior-generation-of-soldiers-says-top-general.html

Hard to imagine much of an appetite for this in the UK ...

I'm afraid as a nation, Britain has seen its warrior days pass it by.

However, I think the British stock, as a people, have always been a warrior people, on a par with Genghis Khan or the Hunnic empire under Attila. The evidence is all around you.

Original Quill wrote:I'm afraid as a nation, Britain has seen its warrior days pass it by.

However, I think the British stock, as a people, have always been a warrior people, on a par with Genghis Khan or the Hunnic empire under Attila.  The evidence is all around you.

wouldn't that be the Normans ??
they DID conqueror England
and took over Most Military west of Byzantine

 

AND look at those countries that their Anglo-Celtic/Saxon/Norman descendants went on to settle :

USA
Canada
Australia
New Zealand

~ all of whom have gone on to form elite warrior forces in their home countries, and incorporating their indigenous cultures to good measure as well...
::lightsab::   ::fishffight::   ::rambo::

AS for the Normans themselves, that region of France is largely inhabited by descendants of Gaul-Celt-Vikings-Germanic-Frankish visitors, and not related ethnically to most of the rest of France. As wiki' puts it, on their item on Normandy :  
"The descendants of Rollo and his followers adopted the local Gallo-Romance language and intermarried with the area's original inhabitants. They became the Normans – a Norman-speaking mixture of Scandinavians, Hiberno-Norse, Orcadians, Anglo-Danish, Saxons and indigenous Franks and Gauls."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normandy  

veya_victaous wrote:

Original Quill wrote:I'm afraid as a nation, Britain has seen its warrior days pass it by.

However, I think the British stock, as a people, have always been a warrior people, on a par with Genghis Khan or the Hunnic empire under Attila.  The evidence is all around you.

wouldn't that be the Normans ??
they DID conqueror England
and took over Most Military west of Byzantine

That's a really good point, veya.  But the Normans are noted because they won a single battle, and ever after established a ruling system that linked families.  Oh, and they also had a written language, whereas the Celts did not.  But the British are much more than the Normans.

As a British historian, I have to take into account all of the people who have inhabited the islands.  Not only their blood, but their cultures are what made them.  Plus, they developed a tradition on their own.  Yes, the nobility of the islands spoke French up until the Court of Edward III, but the common people spoke Saxon and before them, strange languages known as P-Celtic and Q-Celtic, which give us the London Cockney as well as the Scot of today.  So, the British person is a strange coming-together, indeed.

And your surroundings determine your culture, so of course the British became one the best of seafaring cultures in history.  The words "German Navy" don't exactly strike fear in the soul.  Lol.  There you have one important element—world-wide expansion.  But also, the British character has within it a certain brutality, that accounts for the worldwide spread of African slavery, annihilating the native American or the Australian Aboriginal.  And, (tho Didge disagrees with me and Shakespeare notwithstanding) it is a fact that Henry V was one of the first mass murders in history, at the Battle of Agincourt. As a forbearer, he did Jack the Ripper proud.

Indeed, some cultural anthropologists speculate that the reason that the British have such a highly developed sense of etiquette and manners, is because of their caution with one another.

Original Quill wrote:

veya_victaous wrote:

wouldn't that be the Normans ??
they DID conqueror England
and took over Most Military west of Byzantine

That's a really good point, veya.  But the Normans are noted because they won a single battle, and ever after established a ruling system that linked families.  Oh, and they also had a written language, whereas the Celts did not.  But the British are much more than the Normans.

As a British historian, I have to take into account all of the people who have inhabited the islands.  Not only their blood, but their cultures are what made them.  Plus, they developed a tradition on their own.  Yes, the nobility of the islands spoke French up until the Court of Edward III, but the common people spoke Saxon and before them, strange languages known as P-Celtic and Q-Celtic, which give us the London Cockney as well as the Scot of today.  So, the British person is a strange coming-together, indeed.

And your surroundings determine your culture, so of course the British became one the best of seafaring cultures in history.  The words "German Navy" don't exactly strike fear in the soul.  Lol.  There you have one important element—world-wide expansion.  But also, the British character has within it a certain brutality, that accounts for the worldwide spread of African slavery, annihilating the native American or the Australian Aboriginal.  And, (tho Didge disagrees with me and Shakespeare notwithstanding) it is a fact that Henry V was one of the first mass murders in history, at the Battle of Agincourt. As a forbearer, he did Jack the Ripper proud.

Indeed, some cultural anthropologists speculate that the reason that the British have such a highly developed sense of etiquette and manners, is because of their caution with one another.

The English were already here at least two centuries before the Romans, their gold coins have been found from Kent to the iron forts of Wessex and North of the Wash.

My personal opinion is that the English arrived in Britain at the same time as the Celts, the fact that there are so few Celtic words or place names in England suggests to me that they settled in the south and East, possibly known at the time as the Suessiones.

 

RUBBISH !

THERE were no "English" back then !

They were the "Anglo's" you're talking about there, Scrat !

The modern day "English" breed is an amalgam of Anglo's, Celts, the occasional Picts crossing the border, Romans, Saxons, occasional Vikings (Norse venturing down from Scotland, and Danes across from Denmark..), Normans, and later on external infusions of Indian, Pakistani and African (and Arab..) genes (e.g. Saracen-Ottoman-South African-Jamaican..) finding their way into the broader mix..

OVER 2,000 years of solid in-, out- and cross-breeding - to produce one of the most 'ethnically' rich and varied nationalities around (and contributing, in turn, to the "multicultural" populations in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand..).

THE false notion of a "pure" god-fearing "English 'race'" magically and mysteriously appearing out of nowhere some 2,000 years ago is the wishful thinking invention of some fringe loon white supremacists and "Eugenicists" during the late 19th and early 20th centuries..  

Lone Wolf wrote: 

RUBBISH !

THERE were no "English" back then !

They were the "Anglo's" you're talking about there, Scrat !

The modern day "English" breed is an amalgam of Anglo's, Celts, the occasional Picts crossing the border, Romans, Saxons, occasional Vikings (Norse venturing down from Scotland, and Danes across from Denmark..), Normans, and later on external infusions of Indian, Pakistani and African (and Arab..) genes (e.g. Saracen-Ottoman-South African-Jamaican..) finding their way into the broader mix..

OVER 2,000 years of solid in-, out- and cross-breeding - to produce one of the most 'ethnically' rich and varied nationalities around (and contributing, in turn, to the "multicultural" populations in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand..).

THE false notion of a "pure" god-fearing "English 'race'" magically and mysteriously appearing out of nowhere some 2,000 years ago is the wishful thinking invention of some fringe loon white supremacists and "Eugenicists" during the late 19th and early 20th centuries..  

Brilliant summary in so short a space.  A fuller version is easily available in G.M. Trevelyan, History of England (1926, 3 vols.)

Yes, the so-called English are actually a relatively recent phenomenon.  The English language was not even spoken in the courts of England until the reign of Edward III.  English is really two languages, which have yet to merge completely.  Large components of the amalgam we know as the English were illiterate...and with half a language, a culture is difficult.  

Yet this race of half-breeds and immigrants has accomplished so much in some 800 years.

Now Stephen Oppenheimer’s groundbreaking genetic research has revealed that the ‘Anglo-Saxon invasion’ contributed only a tiny fraction to the English gene pool. In fact, three quarters of English people can trace an unbroken line of genetic descent through their parental genes from settlers arriving long before the introduction of farming.

Stephen Oppenheimer shows us, in his meticulous analysis, that there is in truth a deep genetic line dividing the English from the rest of the British people but that, fascinatingly, the roots of that separate identity go back not 1500 years but 6,000. The real story of the British peoples is one of extraordinary continuity and enduring lineage that has survived all onslaughts.

Origins of the British.

You are talking about the Britons, essentially Celtics:

Wiki wrote:Britons were the people who spoke the Insular Celtic language known as Common Brittonic. They lived in Great Britain during the Iron Age, the Roman era and the post-Roman era. After the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons the population was either subsumed into Anglo-Saxon culture, becoming "English"; retreated; or persisted in the Celtic fringe areas of Wales, Cornwall and southern Scotland, with some emigrating to Brittany. The relationship of the Britons to the Picts north of the Forth has been the subject of much discussion, though most scholars accept that the Pictish language was related to Common Brittonic.

The Romano-British population apparently mostly continued to speak Brittonic languages throughout the occupation, although the great majority of surviving inscriptions use Latin, and we have little evidence as to how local and international languages co-existed in Romano-British society. At the end of Roman Britain, the Britons lived throughout Britain south of the Firth of Forth. After the 5th century, under the pressure of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Britons migrated to mainland Europe and established significant settlements in Brittany (today part of France), with a smaller migration to Britonia in modern Galicia, Spain.

The earliest evidence for the Britons and their language in historical sources dates to the Iron Age, however it seems increasingly likely that the majority of the population represented a continuity with the preceding British Bronze Age; "Briton" is also a term used for the earlier inhabitants. After the Roman conquest of Britain in the 1st century, a Romano-British culture began to emerge. With the beginning of Anglo-Saxon settlement in the 5th century, however, the culture and language of the Britons began to fragment and much of their territory was taken over by the Anglo-Saxons. The extent to which this cultural and linguistic change was accompanied by wholesale changes in the population is still a matter of discussion. By the 11th century remaining Celtic-speaking populations had split into distinct groups: the Welsh, Cornish, Bretons, and the people of the Hen Ogledd ("Old North"). Common Brittonic developed into two main groups: the Western Brittonic languages, including Welsh and Cumbric, and the Southwestern Brittonic languages, comprising Cornish and Breton.

The information in the first paragraph, above, would explain why a geneticist would find evidence of their existence, even today. However, genetics cannot explain culture, and hence history.

Original Quill wrote:You are talking about the Britons, essentially Celtics:

Wiki wrote:Britons were the people who spoke the Insular Celtic language known as Common Brittonic. They lived in Great Britain during the Iron Age, the Roman era and the post-Roman era. After the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons the population was either subsumed into Anglo-Saxon culture, becoming "English"; retreated; or persisted in the Celtic fringe areas of Wales, Cornwall and southern Scotland, with some emigrating to Brittany. The relationship of the Britons to the Picts north of the Forth has been the subject of much discussion, though most scholars accept that the Pictish language was related to Common Brittonic.

The Romano-British population apparently mostly continued to speak Brittonic languages throughout the occupation, although the great majority of surviving inscriptions use Latin, and we have little evidence as to how local and international languages co-existed in Romano-British society. At the end of Roman Britain, the Britons lived throughout Britain south of the Firth of Forth. After the 5th century, under the pressure of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Britons migrated to mainland Europe and established significant settlements in Brittany (today part of France), with a smaller migration to Britonia in modern Galicia, Spain.

The earliest evidence for the Britons and their language in historical sources dates to the Iron Age, however it seems increasingly likely that the majority of the population represented a continuity with the preceding British Bronze Age; "Briton" is also a term used for the earlier inhabitants. After the Roman conquest of Britain in the 1st century, a Romano-British culture began to emerge. With the beginning of Anglo-Saxon settlement in the 5th century, however, the culture and language of the Britons began to fragment and much of their territory was taken over by the Anglo-Saxons. The extent to which this cultural and linguistic change was accompanied by wholesale changes in the population is still a matter of discussion. By the 11th century remaining Celtic-speaking populations had split into distinct groups: the Welsh, Cornish, Bretons, and the people of the Hen Ogledd ("Old North"). Common Brittonic developed into two main groups: the Western Brittonic languages, including Welsh and Cumbric, and the Southwestern Brittonic languages, comprising Cornish and Breton.

One should not base ones argument solely on wiki, "British prehistory will have to be radically re-thought."

Barry Cunliffe, Professor of European Archaeology, University of Oxford.


http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/stephenoppenheimer/origins_of_the_british.php

'Stephen Oppenhimer's exciting new book sets a whole new agenda for prehistoric archaeologists working in Britain...essential reading for everyone interested in the origins of the Britons...British prehistory will have to be radically re-thought.'
Barry Cunliffe, Professor of European Archaeology, University of Oxford

'Stephen Oppenheimer is the supreme genetic detective fishing for evidence in the gene-pools of history. Be prepared to have all your cherished notions of English history and Britishness swept away in this fascinating and superbly illustrated account of what makes up our national character.'
Professor Clive Gamble, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London

'A well-informed, original and challenging application of new genetic data to the early population history of Britain.... British prehistory will never look the same again'
Professor Colin Renfrew, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge

'Stephen Oppenheimer's challenging book contributes significantly to the growing body of genetic, linguistic, and historical evidence for an early Germanic presence in "Celtic" Britain.'
Dr. Peter Forster, Molecular Genetics Laboratory, University of Cambridge

'Oppenheimer calls his book "a genetic detective story". It is. Pre-Roman language in western Europe was a locked-room mystery - until someone looked for the key.'
Aubrey Burl, Archaeologist & author on megalithic monuments

I've found that Wiki is pretty good.  It  shouldn't be criticised just because it is popular.  That's not for nothing.

I have argued for years that the Celtic peoples are much more prevalent, even today.  This is against others who claim that the genetic pool of Celts has been wiped out. I am delighted to see Oppenheimer supporting my own position.

However, we have to place that into context.  That the genes of Celts are still around does not mean that they have not been assimilated into Norse, Anglo, Saxon and French populations as well, in their turn.  The resultant cultures, and histories, have more-or-less overwritten the Celtic culture.

Original Quill wrote:I've found that Wiki is pretty good.  It  shouldn't be criticised just because it is popular.  That's not for nothing.

I have argued for years that the Celtic peoples are much more prevalent, even today.  This is against others who claim that the genetic pool of Celts has been wiped out.  I am delighted to see Oppenheimer supporting my own position.

However, we have to place that into context.  That the genes of Celts are still around does not mean that they have not been assimilated into Norse, Anglo, Saxon and French populations as well, in their turn.  The resultant cultures, and histories, have more-or-less overwritten the Celtic culture.

Wiki is cool, but it is not yet God.,,,,,,,

'Stephen Oppenheimer's challenging book contributes significantly to the growing body of genetic, linguistic, and historical evidence for an early Germanic presence in "Celtic" Britain.'
Dr. Peter Forster, Molecular Genetics Laboratory, University of Cambridge

The common language referred to by Tacitus was probably not Celtic, but was similar to that spoken by the Belgae, who may have been a Germanic people, as implied by Caesar. In other words, a Germanic-type language could already have been indigenous to England at the time of the Roman invasion. In support of this inference, there is some recent lexical (vocabulary) evidence analysed by Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster and continental colleagues. They found that the date of the split between old English and continental Germanic languages goes much further back than the dark ages, and that English may have been a separate, fourth branch of the Germanic language before the Roman invasion.

Well, the Germanic influence is what I mentioned when I spoke of two merging cultures.  The Normans--which interprets as Norse men--were more than likely Germanic.  

The Celtics come from eastern Europe, where the Greeks gave them their name of the Keltois, and probably migrated into the Iberian Peninsula, whence traditional history claims the original inhabitants of the British Isles come from.

We know that the Normans went farther south than France, and indeed occupied and created a culture in Sicily, over in the Mediterranean.  It's not too difficult to believe that the Normans intermingled with the Iberians, either.

The point being that we are possibly dealing with a genetic pool that intermingles all of these people somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula and spilled over into Britain and Ireland.

Original Quill wrote:Well, the Germanic influence is what I mentioned when I spoke of two merging cultures.  The Normans--which interprets as Norse men--were more than likely Germanic.  

The Celtics come from eastern Europe, where the Greeks gave them their name of the Keltois, and probably migrated into the Iberian Peninsula, whence traditional history claims the original inhabitants of the British Isles come from.

We know that the Normans went farther south than France, and indeed occupied and created a culture in Sicily, over in the Mediterranean.  It's not too difficult to believe that the Normans intermingled with the Iberians, either.

The point being that we are possibly dealing with a genetic pool that intermingles all of these people somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula and spilled over into Britain and Ireland.

The Celts are German from the Tyrol, Southern Germany. When you jump from the Romans to the Normans you jump 1000 years, the English language is now thought to have been active for Centuries before the Romans landed and despite being administered by the French speaking Normans it remains the language of the English and the majority of British people to this day.

Of course English is a living language! It's etymology is most interesting, for instant Window means wind view (old Norse), and yet in Latin, Welsh and German it is related and spoken as fenster,  I think there was a constant stream of migration, but tribal borders remained, the basques settled in the south west, the Celts branched off North and West, the English South and East, and the Norse North and East.

I think we're all the original inhabitants of these islands, and it appears that that is the general direction of travel.

The belief that Anglo Saxons committed genocide in the 5th century is finally fading into the mists of a myth in history, the reality is far more complicated and the bases for English Dominance is more to do with southern England's trade with continental Europe.

scrat wrote:

Original Quill wrote:Well, the Germanic influence is what I mentioned when I spoke of two merging cultures.  The Normans--which interprets as Norse men--were more than likely Germanic.  

The Celtics come from eastern Europe, where the Greeks gave them their name of the Keltois, and probably migrated into the Iberian Peninsula, whence traditional history claims the original inhabitants of the British Isles come from.

We know that the Normans went farther south than France, and indeed occupied and created a culture in Sicily, over in the Mediterranean.  It's not too difficult to believe that the Normans intermingled with the Iberians, either.

The point being that we are possibly dealing with a genetic pool that intermingles all of these people somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula and spilled over into Britain and Ireland.

The Celts are German from the Tyrol, Southern Germany. When you jump from the Romans to the Normans you jump 1000 years, the English language is now thought to have been active for Centuries before the Romans landed and despite being administered by the French speaking Normans it remains the language of the English and the majority of British people to this day.

Of course English is a living language! It's etymology is most interesting, for instant Window means wind view (old Norse), and yet in Latin, Welsh and German it is related and spoken as fenster,  I think there was a constant stream of migration, but tribal borders remained, the basques settled in the south west, the Celts branched off North and West, the English South and East, and the Norse North and East.

I think we're all the original inhabitants of these islands, and it appears that that is the general direction of travel.

The belief that Anglo Saxons committed genocide in the 5th century is finally fading into the mists of a myth in history, the reality is far more complicated and the bases for English Dominance is more to do with southern England's trade with continental Europe.

I think we are saying essentially the same thing, save that you are trying to parse through details to find precise lines.

The Celts originated in, I believe, southern Rhenania. The Greeks originally named them...the Keltois (Κελτοί Keltoi and Celtae).

Wiki wrote:The first literary reference to the Celtic people, as Κελτοί (Κeltoi), is by the Greek historian Hecataeus of Miletus in 517 BC; he locates the Keltoi tribe in Rhenania (West/Southwest Germany). The next Greek reference to the Keltoi is by Herodotus in the mid-5th century BC. He says that "the river Ister (Danube) begins from the Keltoi and the city of Pyrene and so runs that it divides Europe in the midst (now the Keltoi are outside the Pillars of Heracles and border upon the Kynesians, who dwell furthest towards the sunset of all those who have their dwelling in Europe)". This confused passage was generally later interpreted as implying that the homeland of the Celts was at the source of the Danube, not in Spain/France.

They migrated to the Iberian Peninsula in the Iron Age. The following map shows the extent of their range:



Yes, there probably was a people that lived in Britain before the Channel was geologically created.  And yes, they probably spoke a language.  But to say that language was the English of today is as misplaced as saying Latin is French.

The Angles and the Saxons were two different people.  The Angles came from the land between the River Elbe and the River Weser.  They settled in and around East Anglia.  The Saxons come from between Schleswig and the Baltic Coast, and settled in areas of Essex, Sussex, Middlesex (Kent), and Wessex.  They were known as the Kentings.  It is difficult to trace the connection between the Saxon language and English:

EB wrote:The dialects of the Continental Saxons, on the other hand, underwent considerable approximation to High German, and their affinity to those of the English and the Frisians is only to be traced in sporadic spellings in texts now extant, of which none is older than the 9th century.

This point about language is applicable to all aspects of the culture.  There are no lines.  History takes place in a moving context.

The reason is very likely, despite the plethora of modern day books which describe the original inhabitants of Britain as "celtic", there is no compelling evidence that Celts were ever the original inhabitants of Britain. Indeed, as Dr. Stephen Oppenheimer shows, there was NO suggestion at the time of the Roman invasion that the area that is today England was celtic. Only a few loanwords today exist derived from Celtic and almost no placenames exist in modern day England that are Celtic in Origin. Even Caesar described two different societies inhabiting England, one speaking Celtic on the western border of England and another society inhabiting what is modern day England which he described as speaking an entirely different language. The Anglo-Saxon myth is pretty much debunked too, as it is more likely that the language spoken in England before Rome "invaded" was ancient, possibly much older than Celtic, and was already a germanic or more succinctly a scandinavian language.

Not only are there few words of Celtic origin in English, but there are precious few place names in England of Celtic origin. This makes no sense when examining how cultures and languages spread throughout the world. For instance, in America there are thousands of place names derived from Native American languages in almost every state. About half of the states in the US have Indian names (Arizona, Alabama, Connecticut, Dakotas, Minnesota, Massachusetts...) in spite of the fact that these were a subjugated, technologically and numerically inferior peoples. This has been taken by some to suggest that some of the original inhabitants of England were not Celtic but Germanic (e.g. the Belgae — although they are reputed to be either Celtic or Germanic). Makes sense to me. If that were so, it would suggest that the Welsh and Picts and Caledonians were isolated from the English population even further back in time than in Caesar's day and might explain why when the Jutes and Saxons invaded they melded their languages with the primarily Germanic speaking inhabitants. This is supported by modern-day genetic analyses.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19328/why-are-there-so-few-words-in-english-that-are-derived-from-welsh#

I have never maintained that the original inhabitants of the British Isles were the Celts.

Trevelyan writes:

Trevelyan wrote:We may conveniently speak of these pre-Celtic peoples, collectively, as "Iberians", though in fact they consisted of many different races, not all of them dark-haired.  Some 'Iberian' blood probably flows in the veins of every modern Englishman, more in the average Scot, most in the Welsh, and Irish.  The Iberians were no mere savages.  They raised themselves, during the long stone and bronze ages in Britain, from savagery on to the first steps of civilized life.  GM Trevelyan, History of England (1926)

This characterization takes us back to before the Strait of Dover separated England from Europe.  It is pre-recorded history, though the even the Celts had no written language.  I have no doubt that Germans, Franks and even Tunisians were involved.  Even if we separated them out genetically, we would know no more about their culture.

So why did you provide this wiki link, with this quote.

Britons were the people who spoke the Insular Celtic language known as Common Brittonic. They lived in Great Britain during the Iron Age, the Roman era and the post-Roman era. After the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons the population was either subsumed into Anglo-Saxon culture, becoming "English"; retreated; or persisted in the Celtic fringe areas of Wales, Cornwall and southern Scotland, with some emigrating to Brittany. The relationship of the Britons to the Picts north of the Forth has been the subject of much discussion, though most scholars accept that the Pictish language was related to Common Brittonic.

@Scrat
Iceni were very different that Saxon   

Who were DEFINITELY in Britain before any Anglo Saxon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceni

  

THE very name "Englische" is a Teutonic name, given to the Brit's by the Saxons...

THE "English" language is basically a Germanic language, further influenced both by those foreign visitors in the early days, and by many bits and pieces adopted during the later expansion of the British Empire..

INDEED, you good Englische peeps even divide your language into three distinct phases: Ye Olde Englische, Middle English and Modern English.

AND then to top it all off, you then went out and kindly adopted a lost and homeless German Royal family, and made them your own..   

scrat wrote:So why did you provide this wiki link, with this quote.

"Britons were the people who spoke the Insular Celtic language known as Common Brittonic..."

There are at least three different words derived from the root term: Britons, Bretons, and Brythonics...not to mention, British.  That is apparently why Trevelyn abandons the term in favour of the term Iberians when speaking of the earliest people in the British Isles.  

I was following Trevelyn's lead in discussing the Iberian Peninsula.  That, of course, is the western European peninsula encompassing Spain, Portugal and France...perhaps Belgium (Flanders), as well.  That is a big area.  Perhaps I went too far, but I suspect (though he doesn't say it directly) that Trevelyn assumes that based upon the natural bridge from Calais to Dover (crossing the Dover Strait), that we know existed one time, the original inhabitants came from the area of Iberia...which, stated backwards, is that there is no reason to distinguish those who lived on British land from those on Iberian land.

That is why Trevelyn says that Britain was originally inhabited by 'Iberians'.  We don't know anything about them, their language, or their culture, so it is commonly adopted that the language of the Celts is the first known language.

As the ice sheets melted some 20,000 years ago the first wave of migrants arrived on these shores, the Alps and Pyranees are natural borders, logic would dictate that the first migrants would more than likely come from modern France, Belgium, and Holland, these people had already crossed the Pyranees from the Basque region of Iberia, and crossed the Rhine from modern Germany.

In fact as you witness the ice sheet melt and recede you can form a good picture as to how these islands became populated.

The recent influx of Celts and Germans occurred some 500 years before the Romans arrived, they were obviously moving West under sail probably under the pressure of expanding Mediterranean and East European empires of antiquity, with the promise of new lands.

I believe that during this period the two cultures both originating from Germany had grown apart through the natural boundaries of geography, the English who probably stemmed from the Northern frontier of Gaul spoke a form of Scandinavian, related but now considered a separate branch of German. The Celts formed in the North and West, the English formed around the South and East closest to their cousins on the continental land mass of Europe.

We know this because Ceasar tells us that there were two separate cultures and languages, one Celtic and one English, in reality there were probably several Celtic languages because the Celtic language branched off into several related forms, again due to the natural boundaries of geography.

Hannibal teaches us that their are no natural boundaries to military campaigns, by the time of the Romans migration to this island, nature and language had fixed the inhabitants within their own borders.

And this is probably the reason why there are so few Celtic words or place names in England simply because the English were already here.

500 years later, again due to the pressure of expanding Germans and retracting Romans, just about everyone was turning up at our shores, Scandinavians, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, nederSaxons and Danes, naturally their language would have been similar to the Germanic English, already long established in South Eastern Britain and as soon as writing formed, English began its long transition to what we have today.

The hordes of invading Anglo Saxons has been debunked, as a British historian one would've of thought you would've known that.

May I but in here. I've had my DNA analysed for both male and female lines, and it showed that the female line goes way back to near the end of the last ice-age, when Britain was still attached to Europe. My ancient ancestors were among some of the very first settlers in Britain, and apparently they came from a group of people who lived in Eastern Europe, who, no doubt following herds, finally finished up here.

My paternal line shows Norman and Basque connections, going back to the Norman invasion.

So we are a collection of different people, but surely, as time went by, we Brits forged a new identity and psychology, making us what we are today. The eventual flooding of the North Sea and English Channel cut us off, which also helped us to forge that identity.

stardesk wrote:May I but in here. I've had my DNA analysed for both male and female lines, and it showed that the female line goes way back to near the end of the last ice-age, when Britain was still attached to Europe. My ancient ancestors were among some of the very first settlers in Britain, and apparently they came from a group of people who lived in Eastern Europe, who, no doubt following herds, finally finished up here.

My paternal line shows Norman and Basque connections, going back to the Norman invasion.

So we are a collection of different people, but surely, as time went by, we Brits forged a new identity and psychology, making us what we are today. The eventual flooding of the North Sea and English Channel cut us off, which also helped us to forge that identity.

Gd post, Stardust. It's entirely consistent with what history tells us about the early presence of several peoples ending up in Britain.

stardesk wrote:May I but in here. I've had my DNA analysed for both male and female lines, and it showed that the female line goes way back to near the end of the last ice-age, when Britain was still attached to Europe. My ancient ancestors were among some of the very first settlers in Britain, and apparently they came from a group of people who lived in Eastern Europe, who, no doubt following herds, finally finished up here.

My paternal line shows Norman and Basque connections, going back to the Norman invasion.

So we are a collection of different people, but surely, as time went by, we Brits forged a new identity and psychology, making us what we are today. The eventual flooding of the North Sea and English Channel cut us off, which also helped us to forge that identity.

Hiya stardesk, it sure is an interesting subject, the genealogy, archaeology etymology and linguistic skills of science in this era are truly astounding.

One can understand why Britain leads the field in this science.

Your route to who you are sounds very familiar to many of us Brits, especially the English, some came from the south and some came from the East, two separate cultures existed here at the same time, gradually these cultures developed into the English, the Scots, the Irish, and the Welsh.

Of course your Norman "bits" are as interesting, as your basques "bits" Norse is the connection here, the English Language of old and old Norse are very similar, Beowulf is a tale that reaches deep within us English and it was around the time of Alfred the Great that England as a nation was conceptualised, at the battle of brunanburh a few decades later, England United against the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh and the Vikings and thanks to the tactics of King Athelstan the battle was ours, and our battle cry was "we are the English", these are the borders we have to this day, and why English is the language of Shakespeare, of commerce and tongue to over 1000 million people.

Britain has always been a cauldron of ethnicity, you could say that our success was built on the fact we're such a diverse nation.

Hi Scrat & Quill.
Dare I say that the forging of the Americans, Australians, N.Z. etc, followed a similar pattern, and now they all have their own identities.

Concerning Australia, whilst researching my family history I found two chaps and a girl, all convicted of theft, and transported to Australia in the 1800s whose descendants I've been in touch with. In the 1600s two brothers should have inherited their father's farm when he died, but an uncle claimed it and had the boys shipped off to the New World, America. They would have been amongst some of the earliest settlers in the USA. Most of their descendants live in eastern America, New England I believe.

Perhaps we should start a new topic just for this kind of subject. Any ideas folks?