--- In Nostratica@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham
<richard.wordingham@...>" <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

>
> The earliest *recorded* tribes in England are generally reckoned to
> be Celtic, and thus their linguistic heirs are the Welsh, but the
> English, high and low, now have a high proportion of British (i.e.
> pre-English) blood in them. 'England', of course, means the land

of

> the Angles, though the Romans and our Celtic neighbours called us
> Saxons. Torsten has, if I understand him correctly, proposed on
> Cybalist that the Anglo-Saxons themselves were largely of
> (continental) Celtic ancestry.
>
>> Richard.

Inasmuch as 'Celtic ancestry' makes sense genetically. The Celts were
conquerors themselves and came from elsewhere. I suggested the Jutes
were once Celtic (or similar) speaking, Tacitus says the Aestii on
the coast of the Baltic spoke a language similar to that of Britain,
and a logical conclusion of that would seem to be that the area
between West Jutland and the Rhineland, where both banks show the
same archaeology just before Caesar mentions the Germani for the
first time in history, was Celtic-speaking too. But some have
suggested a Nordwestblock language in that area.

Impressionistically, I have a hard time characterizing the Dutch.
They seem like no other people in Europe, like some aboriginal I-
don't-know-what (this is obviously not the case for most of the
people, but once I've recognized elements from the rest of Europe,
there remains a kernel of fascinating differentness). I can believe
the Flemish are a-kind-of-German or a-kind-of-French, but not the
Dutch.

As for the Saxons, the Thuringian Chronicle says they came from the
east (Sacae) and by their conquest of the Baltic Coast would have
separated the two "Odin colonies" in Thuringia and Denmark. They
would have changed their language at that time to the lingua franca
of the area, namely Germanic. As for their ethnic (not linguistic)
composition at the time of Hengist and Horsa, God only knows. Someone
once mentioned in Cybalist that the Afghans you see on TV look like
something you might see on the street of any Western European or
American city. To me they look like our politicians.

Personally, when I travel in England I see people that look like back
home and people that look very different. Usually the natives in
Britain describes those people as "Celtic-looking" (by some strange
coincidence it seemed the casters in the "Lord of the Ring" movie
selected exclusively those types for the inhabitants of the shire).

And BTW, one shouldn't forget that the Angles and Saxons and Jutes
were themselves on the run from Attila and his Huns. A new life in
Britain beckoned, once they got rid of those pesky natives.

As to why the Jutes are dumped from the standard invasin story, the
reasoning is that the present Jutes, being Danes, must be North
Germanic speaking, and there's no trace of North Germanic in te
Hengist and Horsa invasion. Therefore either Danes have usurped the
old land of the Jutes and fraudulently taken their name, or the Jutes
stayed at home. But as I've tried to show on Cybalist, the Jutes
might be counted as speaking something in between the two language
groups.

Torsten