Modern English more Germanic or Romance?

[Jackson]

Do you think that the former "Danelaw" areas around York would be as Germanic as southeast England? I always had this idea that York was the blondest part of England.

Pretty much so, most of the areas of Danish settlement fall within the 'big red blob' which is in area in the south, east and centre that is fairly uniform throughout genetically (although i'd bet there's a fair bit of variation on a local level, overall it's not significant enough to make new clusters).

[Jackson]

The Britons lost the most fertile land that the Angles & Saxons didnt want. That would've pushed them westward mainly.

Arable land would have been for the Germanics.

I wonder if that was a factor in why they had a demographic advantage too. I mean better land and also legal and military advantage. I mean it's well known that you don't need a massive advantage for one population to replace another over time, even something that gave them a 10 or 20 percent age could explain why they became genetically dominant despite almost certainly being a numerical minority.

Edit: I mean East and Anglia and parts of the South East were by far the most populous areas up until fairly recently.

[Wolf]

Old english and even proper anglish languages probabily were closer to scandinavian languages than to modern german.

Old English was closest to Old Saxon/Old Low German and Old Frisian.

[curupira]

By the way, the native languages of Britain were not Germanic nor Celtic either. They were wiped out long ago, and one can only but speculate what they were like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goideli...ate_hypothesis

[Comte Arnau]

Galloromance peoples were all derived from the stratification of gaulish and latin element.



Britonic laguages isn't a remnant of gaulish, but derived from ancient britonic, brought there when a good amount of celts escaped from north-western England during anglosaxon invasion (then, the name ''Brittany'').

The substrate of English was Brythonic and not Gaulish, but if the Romans had stayed in England and Vulgar Latin there had fully developed, I'm pretty sure we'd be classifying modern Brito-Romance as one more particular branch of the Gallo-Romance macrogroup.

[LightHouse89]

By the way, the native languages of Britain were not Germanic nor Celtic either. They were wiped out long ago, and one can only but speculate what they were like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goideli...ate_hypothesis

Well intellectuals and historians all agree there was no such thing as celts to ever exist.

[LightHouse89]

The substrate of English was Brythonic and not Gaulish, but if the Romans had stayed in England and Vulgar Latin there had fully developed, I'm pretty sure we'd be classifying modern Brito-Romance as one more particular branch of the Gallo-Romance macrogroup.

The only languages of any importance in history of the west is latin and Germanic.

[LightHouse89]

English can almost be considered a creolle or pidgin, a mix of Old English and Norman French, but more realistically it's a Germanic language with a Romance upper register.

Fin.

what is upper register?

[Longbowman]

what is upper register?

Big words. High falutin' vocabulary.

[Ultra]

Genetically Britian is a Keltic nation.

It's Germanic. A lot of Brits cluster genetically with Dutchies, Germans and Scandinavians. North Sea Facade is the real shit. :naughty2: