Albion
01-31-2012, 05:27 PM
Simplified:
Gaelic arrives with the Bell Beaker Culture. These people were probably much more successful than the earlier inhabitants (could these be the earlier tribes in Irish myths?) and so came to dominate the British Isles.
Brythonic develops from Gaelic when it receives continental influences via small migrations of people practising the Hallstatt culture. This culture also spread to Ireland, but without affecting the language too much it seems. La Tene may have crept in with influences from the Continent.
Brythonic is further influenced by Belgae tribes with the La Tene culture entering the South East and perhaps by earlier migrations. This leads to the differences between the Celts in SE England and the rest of the islands, but their similarities to NW Gaul.
Note: La Tene developed out of the Hallstatt Culture and Hallstatt is thought to have developed from the Beaker Culture. In this way they represent the progression of one cultural entity through time.
Before the spread westwards of Angles, Saxons and Vikings, Britain and Ireland were inhabited by tribes speaking Celtic languages. Who were they? Their origins probably go back to about 2,400 BC, when the first Bell Beaker material appeared in the British Isles. Genetically their predominant signature is Y-DNA R1b-L21 (map) (http://www.eupedia.com/images/content/Haplogroup-R1b-L21.gif) and its parent and subclades. This has been overlain to varying degrees by Germanic genetic markers, for example R1a1a, which in the British Isles correlates particularly well with the areas settled by Vikings from Norway.
The Romans turned tribes into civitates, with a Roman-style town as a civic centre. Ptolemy gives the names of Roman towns. Yet he retained the old names for the islands: Albion for Britain, and Ierne (Latinised as Hibernia) for Ireland. Albion (white) may refer to the chalk cliffs visible from Gaul. The island group had long been known collectively as the Pretanic or Britanic isles. As Pliny the Elder explained, this included the Orcades (Orkney), the Hæbudes (Hebrides), Mona (Anglesey), Monopia (Isle of Man), and a number of other islands less certainly identifiable from his names. The post-conquest Romans used Britannia or Britannia Magna (Large Britain) for Britain and Hibernia or Britannia Parva (Small Britain) for Ireland.2 The Irish retained Alba as a name for Britain. It reappeared in the Gaelic Kingdom of Alba in Scotland,3 and the Gaelic word for Scotsman - Albannach.
Landscape
Prehistorians often look to the landscape for ideas on where tribal boundaries might have fallen. Seas, rivers and mountains form natural barriers. Yet a tribe could inhabit the whole of a river valley, using boats to cross from bank to bank. Water might provide the easiest transport routes in some terrain. Tribes could be linked by the sea. Man's own marks on the landscape provide stronger evidence of divisions. Massive linear earthworks stretching miles across the countryside could only have been built by many people banded together. Such effort speaks of an urgent purpose. Massive defensive structures may not halt an army for ever, but they prevent chariots and horsemen from conducting lightning raids into neighbouring territory. Those in Ireland and some in Britain date from the pre-Roman Iron Age.
Hill-forts are another indication of tribal friction. Since warfare itself is often invisible in the archaeological record, it became fashionable in the latter part of the 20th century for archaeologists to dismiss the defensive role of hill-forts and see them purely as displays of status. However a mass burial at Fin Cop Hill Fort in Derbyshire presents a darker picture. The fort was destroyed c. 400 BC before completion. The walls were thrown down into the surrounding ditch along with the bodies.6 Once the Romans came into in contact with Celtic tribes in Gaul and Britain, their writings reveal warfare between specific tribes, for example the attacks of the Catuvellauni on their neighbours. However most hill-forts were built long before. In Central Europe hill-forts first appear in the Early Bronze Age, though built in greater numbers from the Urnfield period onwards. Those in Britain and Ireland generally date from the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age.
http://www.buildinghistory.org/distantpast/images/Celtichillforts.jpg
Distribution of hill forts in Britain
Languages
By the time the inhabitants of the British Isles were producing literature of their own, five languages were spoken within the islands, as Bede recorded: Latin, English, British, Irish and Pictish. Latin was the language of the Church in Bede's day. It had arrived in Britain with the Romans.
Latin was probably widely spoken in southern Britain by late Roman times. In other parts of the former Roman Empire, Latin developed into the Romance languages, such as French. Perhaps people would be speaking a similar language in England today, had the Angles and Saxons not burst upon the scene, bringing English - the language of the Angles. What happened to the Latin-speakers? Some may have perished on Saxon swords. Some may have adopted the language of the incomers. But it is intriguing that the Celtic which survived in the British highland zone developed a Latin accent at around this time, as though a rush of Romance refugees had arrived and shifted back to Celtic.
The Irish spoke Gaelic, the more archaic form of Insular Celtic. We can picture this language gradually developing from an early form of Celtic spoken in the Bronze Age. Bede assumed that Gaelic arrived in Scotland with Irish people forming the early medieval Kingdom of Dál Riata. His view was unquestioned until the end of the 20th century, when the lack of archaeological evidence for it was pointed out. To the contrary the evidence suggests movement from Britain to Ireland from the Iron Age onwards. Ewan Campbell suggested that Gaelic simply remained in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland from early times, cut off by the Grampians from linguistic developments further south. Yet Scottish, Irish and Manx Gaelic all descend from a common ancestor, attested in ogham inscriptions of the 5th and 6th centuries AD. Its spread into Scotland cannot be much earlier than this.
Dimly a picture emerges of Britons drifting into northern Ireland over centuries, adopting Gaelic and introducing it to their kin across the water. One means would be intermarriage. The origin myths of the Picts preserved by Bede in 731 includes the idea that the Picts had taken Irish wives, promising that they would choose their kings from the maternal line.
In the earliest phases of this process, there was so little difference between the Insular Celtic languages that we could compare them to British and American English. From 300-700 AD Gaelic and the British Celtic languages diverged much more sharply.
British (or Brythonic) and Pictish fit into a family of Celtic languages in which the kw sound of Indo-European had shifted to a p sound. P-Celtic probably developed about 1100 BC. There is written evidence of it in Northern Italy from 600 BC and it was spoken in Gaul. So we can deduce that this sound-change arrived in Britain with Iron-Age migrants from Gaul. The surviving form of it is Welsh. Another form - Cornish - survived in Cornwall into Tudor times. Cumbric was the form spoken in what is now northern England and Lowland Scotland as far north as Dumbarton (Dùn Breatainn, fort of the Britons) during the Early Middle Ages. It was closely related to Welsh. As Anglian settlements advanced, Cumbric was replaced by English and its Scottish variant - Lowland Scots. Pictish, the language of the eastern Highlands, was similar to Cumbric.
Gaelic arrives with the Bell Beaker Culture. These people were probably much more successful than the earlier inhabitants (could these be the earlier tribes in Irish myths?) and so came to dominate the British Isles.
Brythonic develops from Gaelic when it receives continental influences via small migrations of people practising the Hallstatt culture. This culture also spread to Ireland, but without affecting the language too much it seems. La Tene may have crept in with influences from the Continent.
Brythonic is further influenced by Belgae tribes with the La Tene culture entering the South East and perhaps by earlier migrations. This leads to the differences between the Celts in SE England and the rest of the islands, but their similarities to NW Gaul.
Note: La Tene developed out of the Hallstatt Culture and Hallstatt is thought to have developed from the Beaker Culture. In this way they represent the progression of one cultural entity through time.
Before the spread westwards of Angles, Saxons and Vikings, Britain and Ireland were inhabited by tribes speaking Celtic languages. Who were they? Their origins probably go back to about 2,400 BC, when the first Bell Beaker material appeared in the British Isles. Genetically their predominant signature is Y-DNA R1b-L21 (map) (http://www.eupedia.com/images/content/Haplogroup-R1b-L21.gif) and its parent and subclades. This has been overlain to varying degrees by Germanic genetic markers, for example R1a1a, which in the British Isles correlates particularly well with the areas settled by Vikings from Norway.
The Romans turned tribes into civitates, with a Roman-style town as a civic centre. Ptolemy gives the names of Roman towns. Yet he retained the old names for the islands: Albion for Britain, and Ierne (Latinised as Hibernia) for Ireland. Albion (white) may refer to the chalk cliffs visible from Gaul. The island group had long been known collectively as the Pretanic or Britanic isles. As Pliny the Elder explained, this included the Orcades (Orkney), the Hæbudes (Hebrides), Mona (Anglesey), Monopia (Isle of Man), and a number of other islands less certainly identifiable from his names. The post-conquest Romans used Britannia or Britannia Magna (Large Britain) for Britain and Hibernia or Britannia Parva (Small Britain) for Ireland.2 The Irish retained Alba as a name for Britain. It reappeared in the Gaelic Kingdom of Alba in Scotland,3 and the Gaelic word for Scotsman - Albannach.
Landscape
Prehistorians often look to the landscape for ideas on where tribal boundaries might have fallen. Seas, rivers and mountains form natural barriers. Yet a tribe could inhabit the whole of a river valley, using boats to cross from bank to bank. Water might provide the easiest transport routes in some terrain. Tribes could be linked by the sea. Man's own marks on the landscape provide stronger evidence of divisions. Massive linear earthworks stretching miles across the countryside could only have been built by many people banded together. Such effort speaks of an urgent purpose. Massive defensive structures may not halt an army for ever, but they prevent chariots and horsemen from conducting lightning raids into neighbouring territory. Those in Ireland and some in Britain date from the pre-Roman Iron Age.
Hill-forts are another indication of tribal friction. Since warfare itself is often invisible in the archaeological record, it became fashionable in the latter part of the 20th century for archaeologists to dismiss the defensive role of hill-forts and see them purely as displays of status. However a mass burial at Fin Cop Hill Fort in Derbyshire presents a darker picture. The fort was destroyed c. 400 BC before completion. The walls were thrown down into the surrounding ditch along with the bodies.6 Once the Romans came into in contact with Celtic tribes in Gaul and Britain, their writings reveal warfare between specific tribes, for example the attacks of the Catuvellauni on their neighbours. However most hill-forts were built long before. In Central Europe hill-forts first appear in the Early Bronze Age, though built in greater numbers from the Urnfield period onwards. Those in Britain and Ireland generally date from the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age.
http://www.buildinghistory.org/distantpast/images/Celtichillforts.jpg
Distribution of hill forts in Britain
Languages
By the time the inhabitants of the British Isles were producing literature of their own, five languages were spoken within the islands, as Bede recorded: Latin, English, British, Irish and Pictish. Latin was the language of the Church in Bede's day. It had arrived in Britain with the Romans.
Latin was probably widely spoken in southern Britain by late Roman times. In other parts of the former Roman Empire, Latin developed into the Romance languages, such as French. Perhaps people would be speaking a similar language in England today, had the Angles and Saxons not burst upon the scene, bringing English - the language of the Angles. What happened to the Latin-speakers? Some may have perished on Saxon swords. Some may have adopted the language of the incomers. But it is intriguing that the Celtic which survived in the British highland zone developed a Latin accent at around this time, as though a rush of Romance refugees had arrived and shifted back to Celtic.
The Irish spoke Gaelic, the more archaic form of Insular Celtic. We can picture this language gradually developing from an early form of Celtic spoken in the Bronze Age. Bede assumed that Gaelic arrived in Scotland with Irish people forming the early medieval Kingdom of Dál Riata. His view was unquestioned until the end of the 20th century, when the lack of archaeological evidence for it was pointed out. To the contrary the evidence suggests movement from Britain to Ireland from the Iron Age onwards. Ewan Campbell suggested that Gaelic simply remained in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland from early times, cut off by the Grampians from linguistic developments further south. Yet Scottish, Irish and Manx Gaelic all descend from a common ancestor, attested in ogham inscriptions of the 5th and 6th centuries AD. Its spread into Scotland cannot be much earlier than this.
Dimly a picture emerges of Britons drifting into northern Ireland over centuries, adopting Gaelic and introducing it to their kin across the water. One means would be intermarriage. The origin myths of the Picts preserved by Bede in 731 includes the idea that the Picts had taken Irish wives, promising that they would choose their kings from the maternal line.
In the earliest phases of this process, there was so little difference between the Insular Celtic languages that we could compare them to British and American English. From 300-700 AD Gaelic and the British Celtic languages diverged much more sharply.
British (or Brythonic) and Pictish fit into a family of Celtic languages in which the kw sound of Indo-European had shifted to a p sound. P-Celtic probably developed about 1100 BC. There is written evidence of it in Northern Italy from 600 BC and it was spoken in Gaul. So we can deduce that this sound-change arrived in Britain with Iron-Age migrants from Gaul. The surviving form of it is Welsh. Another form - Cornish - survived in Cornwall into Tudor times. Cumbric was the form spoken in what is now northern England and Lowland Scotland as far north as Dumbarton (Dùn Breatainn, fort of the Britons) during the Early Middle Ages. It was closely related to Welsh. As Anglian settlements advanced, Cumbric was replaced by English and its Scottish variant - Lowland Scots. Pictish, the language of the eastern Highlands, was similar to Cumbric.