The English and the Celts - no genocide?

[Robert Vermaat]

Both slaughter of Britons by Anglo-Saxons and failure of them to adopt British words into English are symptoms of hostility towards Britons by Anglo-Saxons. Do you see? 8) What you say, above, merely replaces one paradigm for understanding the hostility from anglo-Saxons towards Britons with another. It doesn't matter whether you choose to say that Anglo-Saxons slaughtered Britons or refused to speak Brittonic. Either way, they were hostile to Britons.

Oh I see, but that’s your point of view, which you are entitled to have. But I have mine, and your arguments have not convinced me on this point. Your main cause for the extremely low number is the hostility of the Anglo-Saxons towards the Britons. Surely they did not come for High Tea! But I’m more with Coates here, when he offers that Anglo-Saxons had less of a need for Celtic new words.

Coates argues that the Romans wouldn't have seen anything new in Gaul, either. I'm afraid that this argument reduces to zero, on this point, Robert - see above. Yet Romans still adopted ten times as many words from Gauls, didn't they. :lol:

You’re wrong there Mike. I for sure don’t know all the Celtic words that entered Latin, but Philip Rance wrote an article about at least one that survived into Byzantine times, a technical word used in horse training. The Romans did learn from the Celts, which is nothing new.
(Btw we’re not speaking about Gallic words here, from what I read: these Celtic words could have come from the Italic Celts, the Gauls, the Celtiberians or the British Celts for all I know).

Given that the situation is equal for both Romans and Anglo-Saxons in this regard - why do Anglo-Saxons so conspicuously choose not to speak any British.

Your guess is as good as my guess, I guess .
You say hostility, some say an empty landscape, some say Apartheid, some say no linguistic reason.
My guess would be all of these and maybe others.

That vague? Of course, I wasn’t there. But I don’t the signs of an empty landscape and enough remains to suggest hostility was not the rule.
My hypothesis is that once more words did exist in English but they vanished over time.

The main difference is that while the Romans’ (like the Anglo-Saxons) first contact with almost every Celtic group was one of conquest, but that afterwards, for centuries, that relationship was neutral to benevolent. The Anglo-Saxons fought the British/Welsh until this very day.

Hostile? Of course! I agree with you! (Again? I must be ill ). But unlike you (I think at least that’s your position) this hostility did not start on day one – I see too many signs of co-operation and living next-to each to assume that. I just don’t think the Saxons all arrived on some beach, guns blazing, leaving burning farms behind them, and the relation never got better. In my view, the big split between Us English/You Welsh did not develop until later, 6th-7th c.