From: tgpedersen
Message: 59410
Date: 2008-06-25
>Care to elaborate?
>
> > 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.