Arthur's dykes

[Swampster]

From that article "He assumes that many people could speak two or three languages, and notes that almost everyone could speak vernacular Latin"

I guess that the relevant part of Bede is
" There are in the island at present, following the number of the books in which the Divine Law was written, five languages of different nations employed in the study and confession of this knowledge [of Christianity], which is of highest truth and true sublimity: these languages are English, British, Scottish [Gaelic], Pictish, and Latin, the last having become common to all peoples by the study of the Scriptures. "
The article seems to miss the 'languages... employed in the study [of Christianity]' so Latin is common to those employed such activity, rather than by the man in the strata/straet/street.

Yes, I suspect Latin was more commonly used for theological discussion than it was for the purchase of sheep

Anyone up your way still using yan tan tethera (or variants) for their sheep?

[Jim Webster]

From that article "He assumes that many people could speak two or three languages, and notes that almost everyone could speak vernacular Latin"

I guess that the relevant part of Bede is
" There are in the island at present, following the number of the books in which the Divine Law was written, five languages of different nations employed in the study and confession of this knowledge [of Christianity], which is of highest truth and true sublimity: these languages are English, British, Scottish [Gaelic], Pictish, and Latin, the last having become common to all peoples by the study of the Scriptures. "
The article seems to miss the 'languages... employed in the study [of Christianity]' so Latin is common to those employed such activity, rather than by the man in the strata/straet/street.

Yes, I suspect Latin was more commonly used for theological discussion than it was for the purchase of sheep

Anyone up your way still using yan tan tethera (or variants) for their sheep?

Cumbria has a wide and strange collection of dialects 
I don't know anybody who counts like that, but 'yan' is still used widely for one in some parts.
But then so is 'yar', as "I've only get yar left"
And of course, "I've only got yan left" (which is how the legendary puppy came to be known as yan)

[Erpingham]

Yes, I suspect Latin was more commonly used for theological discussion than it was for the purchase of sheep

I think it depends on what you think was the commercial language of markets in the lowland zone was.  The idea that the upland zone maintained more Celtic culture than core lowland zone is not an uncommon one.  Thus a language variation is possible, maybe roughly bounded by a line Exeter, Chester, York.   If we assume a mass depopulation of this lowland zone, removing the British speakers by ethnic cleansing, this accounts for the almost total lack of British influence on Old English.  But this no longer seems to be the consensus.  If we assume that the lowlanders spoke Low Latin, the presence of Latin but not British in OE maybe explicable.  OK, there are lots of problems with this.  We can't demonstrate how the Latin got into Old English because we don't have any material not compromised by the fact it is being written by a church educated elite.  We know people spoke Latin in Roman towns but how widely was it spoken outside?  Did you use your Latin to relate to luxury commerce and your British for buying sheep, as Jim suggests?  Hence the interest in the suggestion that OE develops because it represents a shift in focus toward a North Sea world in which Lower German languages are the common medium, replacing than the old Latin.

[Imperial Dave]

good points Jim. Perhaps large world (ie Roman/Latin+local everyday languages) conditions shrinking to small world (ie post Roman/generic Germanic) meant adoption of a common everyday language as the use of formal language passed to the clergy almost exclusively

[Jim Webster]

Yes, I suspect Latin was more commonly used for theological discussion than it was for the purchase of sheep

I think it depends on what you think was the commercial language of markets in the lowland zone was.  The idea that the upland zone maintained more Celtic culture than core lowland zone is not an uncommon one.  Thus a language variation is possible, maybe roughly bounded by a line Exeter, Chester, York.   If we assume a mass depopulation of this lowland zone, removing the British speakers by ethnic cleansing, this accounts for the almost total lack of British influence on Old English.  But this no longer seems to be the consensus.  If we assume that the lowlanders spoke Low Latin, the presence of Latin but not British in OE maybe explicable.  OK, there are lots of problems with this.  We can't demonstrate how the Latin got into Old English because we don't have any material not compromised by the fact it is being written by a church educated elite.  We know people spoke Latin in Roman towns but how widely was it spoken outside?  Did you use your Latin to relate to luxury commerce and your British for buying sheep, as Jim suggests?  Hence the interest in the suggestion that OE develops because it represents a shift in focus toward a North Sea world in which Lower German languages are the common medium, replacing than the old Latin.

I don't think it's any longer possible to speak of an ethnic cleansing of the lowland zone. It's long been held that Kent was different, and I felt that https://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/axe-the-anglo-saxons.htm made good points with regard to the continuation of agricultural practices and boundaries etc.
It may be that the people in the lowland zone spoke a basic latin with a lot of loan words. Indeed from what I've been told about Welsh, modern 'kitchen Welsh' differs considerably from valley to valley, and there is no reason why the dialect of latin spoken in one settlement would be easily comprehended by the inhabitants of a settlement fifty miles away. If they ever met, perhaps at a market half way between, they might have to make the effort 'to speak proper'

[Jim Webster]

good points Jim. Perhaps large world (ie Roman/Latin+local everyday languages) conditions shrinking to small world (ie post Roman/generic Germanic) meant adoption of a common everyday language as the use of formal language passed to the clergy almost exclusively

I suspect Latin became something of a mess, because it didn't really fit.
As a church language, it was OK but to do theology properly at a high level you had to have Greek
As a rural language it probably lacked a lot of useful terms that were necessary

So it probably did best with the administration and the army, with other people having to use dialects with other words thrown in. Greek terms if you were a serious cleric, British terms if you were a peasant.
When your local lord 'Became German' from the peasant's point of view, they found they had a new language which had all the words they needed, so they just kept names and place names.

Also we don't actually have the ancient spoken languages, we merely have the literary version. This is important

I thought this paper was interesting
https://www.academia.edu/2305301/Loanwords_in_Welsh_Frequency_analysis_on_the_basis_of_Cronfa_Electroneg_o_Gymraeg_Celts_and_Slavs_in_Central_and_Southeastern_Europe._Studia_Celto-Slavica_III_Editors_Dunja_Brozovic_Roncevic_Maxim_Fomin_Ranko_Matasovic_Zagreb_2010._P._183-194

In the conclusion it makes a very serious point

" A huge gap still exists between the literary norm and spoken dialects in Welsh. On the lexical level one of the most obvious differences is the wide use of loanwords in spoken language and a tendency to avoid them in the literary standard. "

[Imperial Dave]

really interesting Jim....no different to Queens English and common English today with all its regional variants and 'flavours'

[Jim Webster]

really interesting Jim....no different to Queens English and common English today with all its regional variants and 'flavours'

As somebody who once had to act as an interpreter between a Glaswegan and a Geordie, I would suggest that this is the sort of 'language' we would expect to find in various villages as we travelled around Britain in the 4th and 5th centuries 

[Erpingham]

As somebody who once had to act as an interpreter between a Glaswegan and a Geordie

I'm sure they made it easier because they realised they were speaking to foreigners, so spoke slowly and loudly   I once worked with two Glaswegians.  It was OK when they talked to me but when they talked to each other, they lost me.

However, we should be careful talking about modern parallels.  UK English is a much more homogenous language than it was even a hundred years ago, thanks to the pressures of formal education and the influence of mass media.  Our Glaswegian and Geordie probably had a lot of common grammar and vocab if you could get past the accents, especially as they both speak northern variants of English.

[Andreas Johansson]

As a rural language it [sc. Latin] probably lacked a lot of useful terms that were necessary

It evidently worked well enough for peasants on the continent.

(The success of Latin in replacing the indigenous languages in the Western Empire is pretty remarkable: the survivors are pretty much British, Basque, and Berber - apparently there's something magical about the letter 'b' - plus Greek, but that doesn't really count.)

Hence the interest in the suggestion that OE develops because it represents a shift in focus toward a North Sea world in which Lower German languages are the common medium, replacing than the old Latin.

If we accept that, despite what the article says, Old English clearly isn't a contact language, I'm not sure how this is supposed to work. And why, anyway, would Pictavia be outside this brave new North Sea world?

(It's tangentially vaguely interesting that modern English, with its simplified inflection, heavy use of auxiliary verbs, and massive amounts of borrowings, looks more like a contact language than what Old English does.)

[Erpingham]

If we accept that, despite what the article says, Old English clearly isn't a contact language, I'm not sure how this is supposed to work.

Fair point but worthy of further reflection rather than total rejection, I think (I got the impression from the review that the whole book is full of these imaginative ideas where you might want to say "OK, but hang on a minute....."

And why, anyway, would Pictavia be outside this brave new North Sea world?

Because it looked westward culturally?  It's hard to get a handle on Pictish language.  We have little idea what level of borrowing it might have taken from the North Sea languages or Irish, on when over its long existence it did so.

It's tangentially vaguely interesting that modern English, with its simplified inflection, heavy use of auxiliary verbs, and massive amounts of borrowings, looks more like a contact language than what Old English does.

There is an old theory, of course, that this is exactly what it is - a language which evolved to allow inter-operability between two different but related language groups Old English and Old Norse.  Once it had that structure, it was well positioned to adapt to and ultimately hybridise with Norman French to create early modern English and continue with the same magpie tendencies from then on.

But this is drifting ever further from the topic.

[Jim Webster]

(It's tangentially vaguely interesting that modern English, with its simplified inflection, heavy use of auxiliary verbs, and massive amounts of borrowings, looks more like a contact language than what Old English does.)

"The English language is in fact three languages stacked on top of one another wearing a trenchcoat."   

[Anton]

If I recall correctly the linguists think the Celtic languages were mutually intelligible until the 5th Century.   Then they begin to diverge. By the time the Irish are converting the Picts interpreters are needed. Conversely the Irish dynasties in Wales become Brythonic speakers after a couple of generations. I guess it was an easy shift linguistically and a shared legal/social system helped.

There's also the point that post Empire Latin loses out to Brythonic as the prestige language among the British elite. That seems to have happened before anything like a substantial German conquest in lowland Britannia.

[Jim Webster]

If I recall correctly the linguists think the Celtic languages were mutually intelligible until the 5th Century.   Then they begin to diverge. By the time the Irish are converting the Picts interpreters are needed. Conversely the Irish dynasties in Wales become Brythonic speakers after a couple of generations. I guess it was an easy shift linguistically and a shared legal/social system helped.

There's also the point that post Empire Latin loses out to Brythonic as the prestige language among the British elite. That seems to have happened before anything like a substantial German conquest in lowland Britannia.

The problem is, in a thousand years time, the linguists may well assume that all English dialects were mutually intelligible in the 20th century 

[Imperial Dave]

Almost certainly Jim unless specific books are read that explain the difference between written and spoken english