Natural History

Posted in Absolute Piffle | 2 Comments

2 Responses

1. on December 1, 2013 at 5:32 pm May

   You look much younger than I guessed.

   
   
2. on December 2, 2013 at 7:23 am chervilmeadow

   Correct me when I say das ist schone und wunderba. Unfortunately for my missed educational opportunity when serving in Germany was beacause my German girlfriend at the time spoke excellent English. Incidentally, this was in lower saxony, one of the areas where the ancestors of the people who became known first as the saxons and then the anglo saxons and finally the english largelycame from. Most of my ancestors were the anglians who settled on the north east coast of england first as paid mercenaries of the celts to protect them from the raiding picts and scots of Scotland after the romans had left to defend beleagured Rome back around 439 AD.

   Unfortunately for the celts, inevitably these germanic mercenaries turned on their employers. They were better organised militarily than the romanised britons even though the angles and saxons only numbered 10,000 against the resident celtic population of two million. Therefore more of the germanic invaders’ children survived and in the course of not many years my wife’s ancestors, the welsh and cornish were driven to the less fertile western fringes of this island; some celts even driven into taking to the boats and establishing a new refuge across the channel which they named Brittany and which subsequently became part of France and where the celtic language breton is still spoken today as is welsh the language of those celts who stayed to farm in the west of Britain, although cornish died out by about the eighteenth century.

   Meanwhile, back on the eastern coast of England but spreading westward once the romans had gone, the anglians settled in the north and the saxons in the south but soon after with viking raiders forming a wedge between these merging anglo saxon communities. The english language soon became the lingua franca of all three germanic groups. English even then was closly related to the dialect still spoken today in north Friesland Holland and there is a famous historical poem (about cows if I recall correctly) which is virtually identical in both modern English and the friesland dialect. Too much information? sorry about that. If you look via google you can see where the ancestors of the people referred to above came from and where they went.

   
   

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