--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "studey22" <lookwhoscross-
eyednow@...> wrote:
> If the Belgic tribes in Britain settled Britain at a
> fairly recent date, taken to usually have been the 2nd or 1st
century
> B.C., then why is their Brittonic speech not clearly
differentiated
> from the rest of the British tribes? For clearly we should expect
> that the Belgic settlers would speak Gaulish and that that would
have
> been different from the Brittonic spoken by the native British
tribes.
>
> -Michael
********
Pending a reply from someone who really knows about the subject,
my understanding is that we don't know enough to make any
differentiation about languages in Britain, beyond the Goidelic-
Brythonic split and Pictish being whatever Pictish was.
From the limited corpus of inscriptions we can say that Gaulish
differed from the British language(s), but not how much or in what
systematic way. For Belgic we don't have much more than Caesar's
word that it differed from Gaulish.
The Belgae in Britain may have spoken a different language from
their neighbors, a closely related dialect, or have abandoned their
original speech for that of the longer established peoples. How
would we know?
Dan