Carol's questions for New Steve Was: Tempest in a teapot/cup/kettle

[Carol]

Cabal wrote:
> So I'll got tell the Head of my English Dept. and the Provost who
teaches linguistics that they are wrong?
> 
> England was settled by the Germanic tribes before the Anglos and
Saxons ever arrived -- they spoke German -- they couldn't have spoke
old Saxon first because they where there for generations before the
Saxons -- I have taken two courses in the last two years alone and
have three textbooks that tell the same story.
> 

Carol responds:
I don't mean to argue, but if your history books say that the Angles
(not Anglos) spoke German, they're mistaken. They spoke some form of
*Germanic.* The exact name given to the language they spoke probably
depends to some degree on the source you consult. One of my
dictionaries and my (admittedly dated but authoritative) edition of
Baugh and Cable's "History of the English Language" calls it
Anglo-Frisian. Other sources call it Old Saxon, a branch of Low
German. (German at that time was not a language but a language family
divided into Low German and High German.) I seem to recall (but don't
have on hand) sources that referred to the language spoken by the
three tribes as Low German, which may be the term that your textbooks
also use.

The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes *were* Germanic tribes, and it was the
non-Germanic Celts who preceded them.

>From the Random House College Dictionary:

"The tribes inhabiting Roman Britain were chiefly of Celtic or
pre-Celtic stock. <snip> In the fifth century A.D.,Britain was invaded
by Germanic tribes from the mainland, who moved into the vacuum
created by the withdrawal of the Roman legions. These tribes, of which
the best known were the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes, displaced
the earlier Celtic-speaking inhabitants and established Germanic [not
German] as the principal language of Britain. The majority of our
texts of the language that developed there came from the West Saxon
area, the dialect of which in time became the dominant one. The
Angles, however, were most numerous and gave their name to the
language that has since been called English (in OE englisc or
anglisc). The Latin name for the Angles was Angli, reflected in the
modern combining form Anglo- [as in Anglo-Saxon].

"The language spoken in Britain from the Germanic invasions of the 5th
century up to the 11th century is now usually called Old English,
though a learned coinage, Anglo-Saxon, is also in use."

Germanic, an Indo-European language, had three main branches, East
Germanic (Gothic), North Germanic (Old West Norse and Old East Norse,
which developed into the Scandinavian languages), and West Germanic,
which had two branches, Anglo-Frisian (which included Anglo-Saxon or
Old English) and German (which included High and Low German). Low
German included Old Saxon.

The source I'm looking at (a dictionary) shows Old English/Anglo-Saxon
as distinct from Old Saxon, but other sources say that Anglo-Saxon
developed from Old Saxon (which makes sense whether it's accurate or not).

In any case, what the three main Germanic tribes--Angles, Saxons, and
Jutes--spoke was a form of West Germanic. Their dialects merged into
what we now call either Old English or Anglo-Saxon.

Possibly you'd like to quote from one of your textbooks to present a
counter view, but I don't see how you can argue with the facts
presented in that first quoted paragraph.

Carol, who is not attacking your provost or the head of your
department in any way