The myth of Anglo-Saxon cleansing

[authun]

Well, that shopuld be telling enough - or are we sudenly declaring all British to have been German?

The Oppenheimer book claims that english split from continental germanic very early and was present in Britain apparently from around 1000 BC. He claims the belgic tribes were germanic and that they brought the language here well before the romans did. Celtic languages are supposed to have arrived at around the same time and the two language groups developed independently.

He cites works by Kortlandt, Gray and Atkinson, Dyen, McMahon and Forster and Toth to support his claim that insular germanic arrived in Britain around a millennium before the romans. However, having read the above, I don't see that they make these claims at all.

The techniques used to date language splits are interesting, using mathematical algorithms developed to predict genetic polymorphisms and reverse equations of radioactive decay. A table for the dating of the development of the IE languages by Gray and Atkinson can be seen at:

http://www.psych.auckland.ac.nz/Psych/r ... on2003.pdf

but, as you can see, english develops after the north/west germanic split around 250 AD.

Interestingly, the Forster Toth paper used only english to represent the entire germanic language group:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/100/15/9079

best

authun