Early Modern English, based upon a London dialect used by bureaucrats called "Chancery English" dates to about 1470 CE and is the first dialect of the English language that is really mutually intelligible to modern English speakers today.
An English language intelligible to modern English speakers didn't exist for most of the history of the British Isles that is attested in writing.
Most English speakers, even quite well read ones, can't understand the French and Latin influenced Middle English of more than about 550 years ago (particularly diligent English students might read in the original with much stuggle, the Canterbury Tales of William Chaucer very late in the Middle English era), let alone the Old English of more than about 950 year ago at which point Middle English came into being as a result of the Norman Conquest in 1066 CE.
Before Old English, which is derived from a Germanic language called Frisian spoken in what is now the Netherlands, arrived in England in the first few centuries of the first millennium of the common era, the Celtic languages were spoken in the British Isles before and after the Latin of the Roman era. Celtic languages also existed as a vernacular language during the Latin era. Of course, the Celtic languages have continued to be spoken in Cornwall, Wales, Scotland and Ireland through the present, or at least, the very recent past.
It isn't entirely clear when the Celtic languages were first spoken in the British Isles. Celtic languages were spoken in the region no later than the Iron Age, ca. 700 BCE or so, but possible as much as six hundred years older, either way, from a Central European source, although as I've noted before, many place names (a.k.a. toponyms) in the British Isles have Punic (i.e. pre-Arabic Tunisian) origins.
But we don't really know what language the Bell Beaker culture derived people of the Bronze Age that preceded them in the region spoke. There was almost surely a language shift between the Neolithic era derived people's language prior to the Bell Beaker people's language, since there was an immense population genetic replacement at that time.
The Bell Beaker language may have been in the same macro-linguistic family as Celtic, as the Bell Beaker culture's geographic scope lines up fairly closely with the historical range of the Celtic languages, and the population genetic shifts in the region in the late Bronze Age and Iron Age was much more subtle than the Bell Beaker era near replacement of populations, but we don't really know.
We can, however, be pretty comfortable in assuming that none of the languages spoken in the British Isles prior to the population replacement by Bell Beaker culture derived people, were Indo-European languages, and we can't be certain that they spoke Indo-European languages either, although that possibility is very plausible.
Likewise, there was almost surely another language shift between the hunter-gather people of the region who were largely replaced by Neolithic era derived people who were a mix of Anatolian farmers and European hunter-gatherers. The Neolithic language may have been in the same language family as Basque, but again, we really don't know.
The Mesolithic hunter-gather languages of the British Isles, the Neolithic language of the British Isles, and the Bronze Age Bell Beaker language of the British Isles are all lost, because they were attested in writing and were completely replaced by later languages before any written records or accurate oral recollections preserved them.
The last European hunter-gathers, and the only ones whose languages are attested, from the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, are Uralic languages with roots as the name suggests in the Ural Mountains and Siberia beyond, rather than in the Mediterranean and Atlantic coast of Europe where Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the British Isles have their origins.
Haplogroups (especially Y-DNA), autosomal genetics, linguistics (including historical linguistics) and now also ancient DNA strongly indicate that the Uralic language family comes from Siberian hunter-gatherers rather than European hunter-gatherers. The living language family that most likely comes from some pre-Neolithic (also Neolithic) European hunter-gatherers (I am excluding the hunter-gatherers of the Caucasus parts of Europe, who were mostly closely related to West Asian hunter-gatherers) is the Indo-European language family. Vasconic might be too, even if less likely than Indo-European.
ReplyDeleteLess important but worth mentioning, Old English is not derived from Old Frisian but rather from the common ancestor of Old English and Old Frisian.
Regarding English/Frisian: most sources push Old Frisian back to the 800s, which is after the West Germanic migration to Britain. So it might be better to say that Old English and Old Frisian, along with Old Saxon, come out of North Sea Germanic, or Ingvaeonic.
ReplyDeleteThanks to both of you for the insight. Your points on Old English are well taken.
ReplyDelete"The living language family that most likely comes from some pre-Neolithic . . . . is the Indo-European language family. Vasconic might be too, even if less likely than Indo-European."
If you want to get really deep about it, every language is derived from a hunter-gatherer language, because pre-Holocene, everyone was a hunter-gatherer.
But, the language of the first farmers of Europe is almost certainly derived from the language of Western Anatolian farmers of the initial Fertile Crescent Neolithic, as that is the ultimate source of the Neolithic food package for all of the main Neolithic migration routes (e.g. LBK and Cardial Pottery) in Europe, and ancient DNA from first wave Neolithic farmers in Europe (and North and East Africa for that matter) (really all farmers in Europe prior to the Copper Age) all have a strong Anatolian first farmer derived genetic component together with proportionally much smaller local introgression from various hunter-gatherer populations encountered en route from Western Anatolia.
It is exceedingly unlikely that the language of Western Anatolian farmers of the initial Fertile Crescent Neolithic (and the people derived from them) was Indo-European. The Indo-European languages didn't even exist then and have their origins several thousand years later in the Pontic Caspian steppe, and started expanding with populations with steppe ancestry into Europe not earlier than the Copper age or early Bronze Age. I would put the odds of the first farmers speaking Indo-European languages at 1-5%.
The odds that it was an Afro-Asiatic family language, while also low, are probably higher, maybe 5%. The regions that initially spoke it were Fertile Crescent Neolithic package adopters and it is linguistically much older than Indo-European.
While the evidence is less definitive, there is also good circumstantial evidence (e.g. based on lexicon, geographic distribution when first attested, and Basque cultural features) to think that Vasconic (of which Basque is the sole extant survivor) was a Neolithic population's language rather than a hunter-gatherer population's language, although I think it is also plausible that it could have arrived in Western Europe contemporaneously with, or perhaps 500-1000 years before the Indo-European languages, perhaps the language of a Copper Age people, as a terminal Neolithic language, or as a pilot wave expansion with Indo-European at its heels, rather than with the first farmers in the places where Vasconic languages are attested to have been spoken. There is really no good reason to rule out Vasconic as a Neolithic era language, however, culturally transmitted by Iberian and French Neolithic people to arriving people with steppe ancestry and/or Y-DNA R1-b (of the relevant haplogroups). Its pretty easy to devise a narrative where that happens somewhere.
The odds that the Vasconic language family derives from the language of the first farmers is much higher, although harder to quantify. Maybe 40%-60%.
The final possibility that it was something instead of Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic or Vasconic is thus, maybe 30%-54%. This final possibility could either be a language that is currently extinct and is not attested, or a language that is extinct but is only weakly and sporadically attested like a Etruscan/Lemnian related language.
@Andrew
ReplyDeleteYes, every language family ultimately comes from hunter-gatherers. My point was that Indo-European is the living language family that is the most likely to be derived from some European hunter-gatherer language. Indo-European is most likely derived from the language of the Eastern European hunter-gatherer (EHG) ancestors of the Proto-Indo-Europeans based on their haplogroups.
Even if Vasconic is derived from some European Neolithic farmer language, that does not necessarily mean it is derived from an Anatolian Neolithic farmer language, the main reason being that Western European Neolithic farmers had high frequencies of Western European hunter-gatherer (WHG) ancestry on their paternal lines based on their Y-DNA haplogroups with lots of I2a. But Vasconic origins is highly speculative, so I would not bet on any of the theories.