From: no_email@invalid.invalid   
      
   Christian Weisgerber  wrote:   
   > On 2024-05-30, Peter Moylan  wrote:   
   >   
   >>>> “Five language communities,” I suppose.   
   >>>   
   >>> * Anglo-Saxon   
   >>> * Brittonic   
   >>> * Gaelic   
   >>> * Pictish, whatever its affiliation was   
   >>> * British Latin~Romance   
   >>   
   >> Yes, with levels of "community". Brittonic and Gaelic were related   
   >> languages , but I doubt that the speakers of those languages knew that,   
   >   
   > I don't really know how linguistically naive people perceive this.   
   > Back in fifth grade or so, when I started learning English as my   
   > first foreign language and knew nothing about language history, I   
   > certainly noticed that English was oddly similar to German and that   
   > there were semi-regular correspondences such as th- <> d-.  One of   
   > my classmates remarked on further similarities between English and   
   > the local Palatine dialect.  (In retrospect easily explained by   
   > Palatine German missing part of the High German consonant shift.)   
   > French, which I started in seventh grade, was conspicuously more   
   > different.   
   >   
   >> The "British Latin" were those who chose to join the Roman Empire. We   
   >> don't yet know who the Picts were, apart from guessing a relationship   
   >> with the Gaels or the Britons. So it's still a little bit fuzzy.   
   >   
   > I thought that the consensus about Pictish was flipping back and   
   > forth every so often, but English Wikipedia now aligns itself with   
   > the position that evidence from toponyms and personal names firmly   
   > demonstrates Pictish to have been a Brittonic language.  That Bede   
   > inconvieniently classed them as different language communities is   
   > mentioned and disregarded.   
   >   
      
   Wikipedia, that ultimate arbiter of scientific disputes.   
   Around the turn of the century there was an attempt to shoehorn little   
   parts of the already little traces of Pictish into brittonic readings. The   
   experts being few or none, it went unchallenged for a while, but the   
   shortcomings of the approach became obvious later on.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)