Re: Breton, Cornish & French

Alan Crozier wrote:
> "Cloudberry@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
" <flink@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
> news:4radnaGYJtFxuTHanZ2dnUVZ8rCdnZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
>>"Chess One" <OneChess@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
>>news:TeCdnX2dT6UF-zbanZ2dnUVZ_qOknZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>
>>>"John Briggs" <john.briggs4@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
>>>news:59tqj.2590$v04.2221@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>>
>>>>Chess One wrote:
>>>
>>>And some answer, or contra-proposal, is proposed by John Fowles, who
> 
> had a
> 
>>>Cornish mother, who preferred to name this language Anglo Celtic,
> 
> rather
> 
>>>than Anglo Saxon. It is a very difficult cusp to investigate, it
> 
> being the
> 
>>>very mark of early written records overlapping with oral tradtion.
>>>
>>>The thing about Cornwall being that is was highly resistant to Anglo
>>>Saxon, whereas, was A. Sax resistant to its p-Celtic language
> 
> neighbours -
> 
>>>seemingly not, and unless some exception can be established why not,
> 
> which
> 
>>>would itself be unusual in the world, then the language we know
> 
> speak
> 
>>>seems to be a very permeable once, admitting many, so to speak.
>>
>>They call themselves Anglo-Saxons in order to distinguish themselves
> 
> from
> 
>>the Continental Saxons in Germany.
> 
> 
> 
> I wonder if they really called themselves Anglo-Saxons back in what WE
> call Anglo-Saxon times. There might have been an occasional learned
> writer who used this compound term, but I doubt if many ordinary people
> would have identified themselves as such.


Yes, and no.  Thanks for the heads up, Allan.  In the early days it 
seems that there was a demarcation of some kind: the Angles were in the 
North in Northumbria and Mercia, the Saxons in the south and they 
divided themselves into east, west, south, etc.  How hard and fast these 
distinctions were is hard to tell.  By the 8th century however there 
seems to already be emerging a state where the difference between a 
Saxon and an Anglishman is nonexistant and blurry to say the least. 
Bede may be instrumental in this or he may simply be re****ting what is 
already reality for him.  But he writes the history of the church of the 
English....and in this history he includes ALL the churches he can find 
info throughout the island (exceptions being British churches)--i. e. he 
does not differentiate between "Saxon" and "Angles" churches or 
kingdoms.  Boniface provides even better information: he is from Wes***, 
and calls his homeland "Saxon" and yet identifies himself in another 
place as an "Angle".  This all seems to indicate that whatever 
differences there may have been in the fourth or fifth century have all 
but disappeared completely by the early 8th so that Boniface can 
identify himself as both Saxon and Angle.

Shortly after Boniface, the continental writers of the Carolingian 
courts coined the term Anglo-Saxon and similar terms to refer to the 
Germanic peoples on the island of Britain to distinguish them from the 
Saxons of Saxony.

King Alfred takes up this term and calls himself king of the 
Anglo-Saxons among other things and really begins the political unit 
that will become "England" and his descendant Athelstan will call 
himself the King of the English.  Both meant of all those "Anglo-Saxons".

As for what the "ordinary" people called themselves, that is next to 
impossible to determine since we don't have any writings from them, but 
it probably wasn't too different from what is re****ted above.  We do 
have people like Boniface and Aelfric and so on who though educated had 
been "average people" before we hear of them.