Thread: A Lexicon of English Words From (mostly) Hindi

Originally Posted by coqauvin

I didn't know the Celts~ were invaders either, I had assumed they were the descendants of the first people to immigrate to the island before it was populated, but then I can't say I've ever truly studied the situation in depth.

It's an interesting area. There isn't really an established name for the peoples who lived in the British Isles before the Celts came over, since we don't have any histories or records that discuss them, and they definitely didn't keep histories of their own. The first recorded information about the people living in the British Isles is from after the Celts had already settled there. So everything we know about the pre-Celtic Britons is based on archaeological evidence. These people migrated via the land bridge that connected the British Isles to mainland Europe during the glacial periods of the current Ice Age (as recently as about 8000 years ago), when sea levels were much lower. In fact there is evidence that for as long as this land bridge existed, people migrated in and out of the British Isles multiple times, depending on what the climate was like (i.e., when it got too cold, the people living there would cross back into mainland Europe and head south, then when it got warmer, the limits of human habitability would move north, and people would come back into the British Isles). These people were neolithic hunter-gatherers, obviously, with a pre-metallic level of technology. Anyhow, when the most recent glacial period ended and the sea levels rose, separating the British Isles from the rest of Europe, the people living there were stuck there, and lived there until ~500 BC or so until the Celts finally came over from Europe. Then came the Romans, then the Angles and Saxons and other Germanic peoples, including Scandinavians (who are Germanic), then the Normans.

If you really wanted to pick a period of "radical change" in the English language, it would probably be the several hundred years following the Norman conquest. During that period, English was transformed from essentially an all-Germanic language into the predecessor to the language we know today, which has a huge amount of French-derived (and therefore Latin-derived) vocab grafted onto it. It was the Norman conquest that caused English to diverge sharply from the other Germanic languages.

You can see the results in the way we talk today. French was originally the language of the aristocracy in post-Norman-conquest England, whereas English (meaning Old English, before it picked up all those French influences) was the language of the recently-conquered peasantry, who were naturally viewed in a distasteful light by their new French-speaking overlords. So certain French-derived words for certain things are considered acceptable--like "excrement". That's a word that the nobility might have used. But the English word for the same thing, "shit", is considered vulgar and profane, because it comes from an Anglo-Saxon root and therefore was what the dirty, low-born English-speaking peasants would say. The same is true of "fuck", which also comes from Anglo-Saxon roots, whereas "copulate", for instance, comes from French roots (because it was originally Latin) and therefore is considered less offensive even today. "Cunt" is also from Germanic and therefore Anglo-Saxon roots, while Latin-derived words for the same piece of anatomy are seen as much less offensive.

/language ramble