Re: Breton, Cornish & French

"John Briggs" <john.briggs4@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message 
news:g9Brj.1163$875.878@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> John Cartmell wrote:
>> In article <BMorj.3671$R_4.2780@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Alan Crozier
>> <name1.name2@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>
>> I've jumped in part way so this may already have been aired, but:
>>
>> You seem to assume the validity of some rather dubious history. There
>> is no evidence that what we call Anglo-Saxons (ie the people and the
>> language) are post-Roman - and plenty of evidence that they are
>> pre-Roman. There is no evidence that what we call Celts ever lived in
>> SE England - and plenty of evidence to say that they didn't, and that
>> the 'Anglo-Saxons' of that area were overwhelmingly the original
>> post-glacial settlers in the area.
>>
>> What *we* call Celtic and Anglo-Saxon cultures and people and
>> language is hopelessly confused with utterly false and fictional 19th
>> and 20th century mythology. Does it matter whether 1st millennium
>> people used the same words; they almost certainly had different
>> understanding of the concept - just as we (should) have shrugged off
>> the confused ideas of the 2nd millennium.
>
> So, we could broadly sum up your view as "History is Bunk"?

I don't know which 'we' speaks, or broadly sums up. What is necessary for 
people attaining some level of individual attention is a critical 
observation of what is studied and also their own recepetion of it; so
that 
the reader does not swallow wholesale some recieved basis of any subject, 
presented as factual, without admitting that this is in order to make a 
comprehensive statement of an idea of things - as if all should
harmoniously 
accord that, and 'we' even admit 'we' want that.

If that idea is /not/ correct - if it is not even even assertably
sup****ted 
by what is known - and if it is investigated without curiousity, then
indeed 
it matters not if history is bunk, since the metaphysical aspect is
present; 
to wit, bunk to whom? To the librarian of things or to those who actually 
*****s no-doubt awkward factual datum, without presenting it directly as 
overview?

To even suppose on 'history' alone is to be rather naive of which 
disciplines inform it, since what can that term mean? Which discipline of 
inquiry is this, and where are the great certainties, and where the great 
question marks? Not to have any is to merely admit to not having any 
discrimination, and instead, some need for belief <right?>

These are very valid questions - not cheaply gone into, and where 
certainties are desired, under these cir***stances, ever suspect!

Phil Innes

> -- 
> John Briggs
>
>