Re: V-, B-

> I'm reading Oppenheimer's 'Origin of the British'. He reaches the
> conclusion based on genetics that there was no mass extinction in

the

> Adventus Saxonum, as Gildas claims; at the same time the lack of any
> Celtic inscriptions and the lack of Celtic loans in English is a

problem.

> He therefore claims the East Coast of England must have been
> Germanic-speaking before the Adventus Saxonum. He also brings Kuhn's
> maps of the extension of Celtic place names relative to Caesar's
> Belgian area (book is revised 2007, he might have seen them here),

and

> acknowledges the existence of that linguistic border, but then says
> Kuhn has 'other agenda' and doesn't seem to have gotten the point

that

> the NWBlock language(s) (the Dreimännerbuch, 'Völker zwischen

Germanen

> und Kelten' he calls 'The People between Germani and Celts') is
> neither Celtic nor Germanic, which leads him to assert, as

mentioned,

> that Eastern England was Germanic-speaking.

Oppenheimer jumped the shark with this one - his arguments are
patently ridiculous.

- Chris Gwinn