languages of early britain

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LANGUAGES OF EARLY BRITAIN: INTRODUCTION

By STEPHEN LAKER and PAUL RUSSELLKyushu University and University of Cambridge

This thematic issue arose from a one-day symposium carrying the same title held at

Manchester University on 21 May 2009. Papers by Paul Russell and Katrin Thier stem from

the event, while those of Michael Benskin and David Parsons were later offered on

invitation.1 With such a vast theme, the four papers can offer just a sample of current research

into the languages and the linguistic situation in Britain in the first millennium. Nonetheless,

we believe the papers are representative of current research trends and together, with their

varied yet interrelated themes, manage to cover considerable ground. The contributions focus

especially on the linguistic impacts of the Roman and Anglo-Saxon invasions and settlements,

though later contacts involving Irish and Old Norse also come up for discussion in the final

paper. All papers therefore bear a resemblance, in that they each deal with issues relating to

language contact and multilingualism in early Britain; however, the fields explored and the

questions addressed by the authors differ considerably. The following topics are explored: the

use of Latin in Roman Britain as viewed from the place-name evidence (Parsons), the

influence of Latin on Brittonic morphology (Russell), Brittonic influence on verbsubject

agreement in English dialects (Benksin), and how loanwords reflect the technological transfer

at different periods (Thier).

The first two papers, by Parsons and Russell, consider the linguistic impact of Latin in

Britain during almost four centuries of Roman rule (ca. AD 43410). As both authors make

clear, opinions about the nature and use of Latin in Roman Britain have changed significantly

in recent decades. Earlier suggestions that British Latin was more conservative in terms of itsphonology than in other parts of the Empire have largely been discredited. Newly discovered

inscriptions, in particular curse tablets in vernacular language, have added weight to this view,

and it is now argued that British Latin shared several characteristics with the Latin of Gaul.

Although Latin was undoubtedly spoken by many citizens in Roman Britain, some scholars

have reasoned that Latin probably became the main vernacular language in the lowland areas

of the South-East, which are known to have been intensely Romanised both archaeologically

and culturally.

Deducing the multilingual setting of late Roman Britain is complicated firstly by the fact

that Latin was the only language committed to writing and, secondly, because of the rapidity

of the Anglo-Saxon settlement from the mid-fifth century on, with its early epicenter in the

South and East, which eradicated virtually all traces of the earlier linguistic situation.

Substantial numbers Latin loanwords, including items of basic vocabulary, as attested in

mediaeval Welsh, Cornish and Breton, are possibly suggestive of widespread Latin use in

Roman Britain; more controversially, a not insubstantial number of early Latin loanwords in

Old English could point in this direction too, but firm conclusions about language

demographics cannot be drawn from loanword evidence alone. Recently, however, Peter

Schrijver (2002, 2007) has opened up a new avenue in the debate, arguing that the influence of

Latin on Brittonic was not limited to the lexicon but went to the very heart of its structural

1Three papers from the event have already appeared elsewhere (see Blom 2009, Laker 2010, Trudgill 2010); paperspresented by Guto Rhys and Philip A. Shaw are still in the process of being written up as a Ph.D. dissertation and abook project respectively.

Transactions of the Philological Society Volume 109 109112

The authors 2011. Transactions of the Philological Society The Philological Society 2011. Published by Blackwell Publishing,9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.


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organisation. He provides numerous examples from the domain of phonology, as well as

some suggestions of morphosyntactic influence, which, if they are owed to contact, are

difficult to conceive unless Latin had gained widespread usage in late Roman Britain.

Such new insights call for us to reconsider the influence of Latin in other linguistic domains,

and Parsons ventures to do so in his study of Roman and post-Roman place-name evidence.

His contribution begins with a judicious survey of past research on the use of Latin in Britain

and follows with an authoritative evaluation of what the place-name evidence can and cannot

reveal about the Romano-British linguistic scene. His study of place-names, which

incidentally merits comparison with a recent survey of personal-names in Roman Britain

(see Mullen 2007, Mullen & Russell 2009), probes among other things the evidence for Latin

place-names in both Roman and Post-Roman sources, the productive use of Latin elements in

Old English place-names, and the phonological form of both Latin and Brittonic elements.

The number of Latin place-names is shown to be modest, when compared to the situation in

Gaul, but mere numbers of place-names, as Parsons points out, are not a reliable gauge forcalibrating the degree of Romanisation, linguistic or otherwise, since it is unlikely that

bilingualism or language shift would lead to a spate of renaming activity only for new

buildings and settlements would such be expected. Of special interest, however, is the

productive use of some Latin elements (in contrast to Brittonic elements) in Old English

place-names of southern England, which may well point towards more widespread use of

Latin. Parsons shows convincingly, however, that place-names provide strong evidence that

Brittonic could not have been completely given up in the Lowland zone, because Brittonic

place-names even in south-eastern Britain show the effects of several Brittonic sound changes

that all experts agree occurred towards the very end of the Roman period. Thus, whatever the

increasing role of Latin was in the Lowland zone, place-names would indicate that Brittonic

also continued to be spoken there into the fourth and fifth centuries.

Further clues as to the impact of Latin in Roman Britain are presented by Russell on the

basis of morphosyntactic traits of Brittonic which share a strong resemblance with those in

Latin. In doing so, Russell investigates a number of features proposed by others (cf. Schrijver

2002: 967) and quite deliberately sets the methodological bar very high. Although several

other Latin influences could be taken into consideration, the development of compound

prepositions and the formation of a pluperfect tense in Brittonic stand as credible candidates

for contact. In these examples we see the formation of new structures and grammatical

categories using native Brittonic elements but based on the Latin model. These examples

would therefore suggest that Latin was spoken among the wider populace in late Roman

Britain and was not simply the preserve of a small minority.

The alternating directions of the results of Parsons and Russells results are intriguing:

Parsons paper weakens Schrijvers position that Latin had become the main or only language

on the streets of Lowland Britain, yet Russells might be seen to strengthen it. These two

papers should not, however, be considered simply as reactions to Schrijvers work; as Russellpoints out, the features discussed in both his paper and Parsons could usefully be examined in

the light of the various competing theories of language contact in early Britain. It seems that

more thought must go into the question of how the phonological and morphological features

entered Brittonic, on which Russell provides some preliminary exploration. One suggestion

has been that, following the Anglo-Saxon settlements, many speakers who spoke either Latin

or a heavily Romanised variety of Brittonic from the more heavily populated Lowland zone

moved into the Highland zone of the North and West, which had knock-on effects on the

varieties there spoken. Another scenario would admit a situation of steady bilingualism over a

longer period in late Roman Britain, whereby Latin morphosyntactic and phonological

features steadily permeated into Brittonic from Romanised centres in a wave-like manner.

How such features entered Brittonic, must ultimately be revealed from a closer examination of

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the features themselves in relation to what is known and continues to be ascertained about the

mechanisms of language contact and language change. The evidence so far suggests that

Romanisation was well under way, but that any process of language shift from Brittonic to

Latin was not as advanced or complete in Lowland Britain as it was in Gaul at the time this

is explainable from the fact that Britain was at greater range from the heart of the Empire and

did not fall under Roman rule until a later date.

The two remaining papers focus mainly on later situations of language contact involving

Anglo-Saxons and share a more northerly compass. The subject of Benskins paper is the well-

known and highly distinctive present tense verbsubject agreement pattern found in Northern

English and Scottish dialects since the mediaeval period: the so-called Northern Subject Rule.

Central to his study is the question of whether Brittonic had any influence on its development,

as has been suggested previously by a number of scholars. Such an explanation is viewed as

slightly controversial, because it has long been presumed that Brittonic had little influence on

English. However, in the last decade scholars have reasoned that the dearth of Brittonicloanwords in English that initially led some scholars to dismiss the possibility of Brittonic

influences on English is not decisive. Instead, many linguists now argue that, similar to

contemporary situations of adult language learning, foreign accent and grammar will be the

most perpetual reminders of first language encroaching on the second language (see

discussions in Filppula et al. 2008, 2009). What Benskin makes abundantly clear in his

contribution is that a clear grasp of the historical data is the first requirement for any credible

analysis or position of contact.

While an obvious parallelism with the Northern Subject Rule and the verbal agreement

system in Brittonic languages has been noted before, linguists have not attempted to work out

how such an agreement system might have developed out of the inflectional paradigms of

early English. In this particular instance, this point is crucial, for we have to do here not with

a simple calqued construction, but rather with a systematic agreement alteration which, if it

did emerge through contact, must have arisen out of the verbal inflectional system of (Pre-)

Old English, which, as Benskin explains, was subject to alternating forms too. Instead of

considering the historical data, researchers have instead assembled all manner of typological

and theoretical arguments to argue their case. Benskin, in contrast, investigates the matter in a

direct scientific manner, marshalling the facts and running through all possible scenarios

before making any final assessment. Starting out as a critic, he demonstrates that nothing

rules out such a contact scenario with Brittonic; his derivation, however, is very different from

those suggested by previous scholars, who based their reconstructions on later evidence.

Clearly, Benskins paper could have some bearing on the conclusions drawn in Parsons

and Russells papers pertaining to the ideas of a possible HighlandLowland linguistic divide.

Researchers past (Jackson 1963: 60) and present (Coates 2010: 443, Laker 2010: 252) have

sometimes suspected a northern bias to Brittonic influence on English; hence, the geography

of the Northern Subject Rule could bolster such claims. While not ruling out this possibility,Benskin is cautious about entertaining speculations and instead points out that a variety of

other factors could equally explain why the split verbsubject agreement pattern is found in

the North (e.g. differences in the inflectional morphology of [Pre-]Old English dialects could

help explain matters). For Benskin, such speculations are at present secondary to the need of

evaluating putative contact-features on an individual basis and specifying the path by which

such features could have entered English. In future, scholars will then be able to attempt a

synthesis of all significant findings about possible Brittonic influence in all domains of the

English language, to see whether any telling connections between the findings actually emerge.

The final article, by Thier, comes at the questions raised in this issue from a different

direction in that it is concerned not with a single contact situation involving Brittonic and

Latin or Brittonic and Old English, but with the movement of Germanic and Celtic loanwords

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in early Britain at different periods. Thiers special interest is with seafaring technology and its

associated terminology all very pertinent to Britain throughout its history. With reference to

formal evidence from spellings and their phonological interpretation, along with details

concerning the documentation of various terms for vessels and rigging in mediaeval works,

Thier is able to chart the etymological development of the terms in English and, where

relevant, in other Germanic languages too. In addition, Thier also draws on the distribution

of particular vessels in terms of archaeological remains and, in some cases, modern

descendants in Britain and on the Continent, sometimes with the effect of showing how

changes to the craft themselves and associated semantic developments are reflected in both the

archaeological and historical records. Through her detailed and perceptive analysis, Thier

thus takes us beyond the etymologies of the words and reveals to us what the various craft

and equipment may tell us about linguistic and cultural interchanges right up to those

involving Irish and Norse at the end of the first millennium, in which a glimpse into the

multilingual setting of early mediaeval Northumbria is provided.Together the papers in this issue show how in different ways language is being used to

illuminate the early centuries of British history, about which comparatively little detailed

historical documentation exists and little else is likely ever to be found. New ways of

processing and interpreting the data are helping to advance current knowledge and, at the

same time, fresh information and insights are being gained from new archaeological finds,

occasionally bearing linguistic information. The findings from the papers in this issue may not

be as tangible as those of archaeologists or as grand as those claimed by some geneticists, yet

together we believe they advance current research, and we hope they will provide an incentive

for more progress to be made.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Professor David Denison and Dr Alexander Rumble of the University of

Manchester for help in organising the Languages of Early Britain Symposium, and the Brook

Symposium Fund and the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures for providing financial

support. Thanks are due to the editor, Paul Rowlett, and the Council of the Philological Society for

supporting the project and the external referees for providing valuable and constructive commentary on

the papers.

References

BLOM, ALDERIK H., 2009. The Welsh glosses in the Vocabularium Cornicum, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 57,2340.

COATES, RICHARD, 2010. Review of Filppula et al. 2008, Language 86, 441444.FILPPULA, MARKKU, KLEMOLA, JUHANI& PAULASTO, HELI, 2008. English and Celtic in Contact, London: Routledge.FILPPULA, MARKKU& KLEMOLA, JUHANI, (eds.) 2009.Special Issue on Re-evaluating the Celtic Hypothesis [= English

Language and Linguistics 13.2], Cambridge: University Press.JACKSON, KENNETH H., 1963. Angles and Britons in Northumbria and Cumbria, in Henry Lewis (ed.), Angles and

Britons [= ODonnell lectures], Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 6084.LAKER, STEPHEN, 2010. British Celtic Influence on English Phonology. Ph.D. dissertation, Leiden University.MULLEN, ALEX, 2007. Linguistic evidence for Romanization: continuity and change in Romano-British

onomastics. A study of the epigraphic record with particular reference to Bath, Britannia 38, 3561.MULLEN, ALEX & RUSSELL, PAUL, 2009. Celtic Personal Names of Roman Britain, Cambridge: ASNC. http://

www.asnc.cam.ac.uk/personalnames/SCHRIJVER, P ETER, 2002. The rise and fall of British Latin: evidence from English and Brittonic, in Markku Filppula,

Juhani Klemola & Heli Pitka nen (eds.), The Celtic Roots of English, Joensuu: University Press, 87110.SCHRIJVER, PETER, 2007. What Britons spoke around 400 AD, in N. J. Higham (ed.), Britons in Anglo-Saxon England,

Woodbridge: Boydell, 16571.TRUDGILL, PETER, 2010. What really happened to Old English, in Peter Trudgill, Investigations in Sociohistorical

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