Romano-Britains repulse the Saxon invasions

Brunaburh

Gone Fishin'
Hmm, the case endings part seems overstated but then I don't have any pre Danelaw experience of Northumbrian Anglian. Post Danelaw there was certainly a large amount of case dropping, which I had attributed to creolist influence of Old Danish so I can see that the Cumbric/North Brittonic dialects would have similar if lesser impact .

The problem is that creolisation is not thought to have occurred between Norse and OE, two highly inflected and mutually intelligible languages in contact do not produce an uninflected language. On the other hand, this is a very probable result in a situation where an inflected language has an uninflected substrata.

There is an excellent article on this by Tristram and another by White. White, in fact, lists no less than 52 Brittonic influenced features in English, none of them present in Germanic. I don't completely buy all of them, but a good 30 are hard to dispute.
 
The problem is that creolisation is not thought to have occurred between Norse and OE, two highly inflected and mutually intelligible languages in contact do not produce an uninflected language. On the other hand, this is a very probable result in a situation where an inflected language has an uninflected substrata.
So the Norse-English mix as a substantial cause of the reduction in declension is no longer prominent?
While I can see an argument for case reduction as a result of contact with Brittonic I don't see that being the sole cause of the case reduction. A two whammy effect of Brittonic and Norse seems a more reasonable view to me.

There is an excellent article on this by Tristram and another by White. White, in fact, lists no less than 52 Brittonic influenced features in English, none of them present in Germanic. I don't completely buy all of them, but a good 30 are hard to dispute.
Understandable.
A big question would be are these present in preDanelaw Northumbrian, Mercian, etc?
 

Brunaburh

Gone Fishin'
So the Norse-English mix as a substantial cause of the reduction in declension is no longer prominent?
While I can see an argument for case reduction as a result of contact with Brittonic I don't see that being the sole cause of the case reduction. A two whammy effect of Brittonic and Norse seems a more reasonable view to me.


Understandable.
A big question would be are these present in preDanelaw Northumbrian, Mercian, etc?

The Norse-only model is still prominent in general among English anglicists, though it is more asserted than studied. But it doesn't satisfactorily explain why the "Northern Simplification Package" didn't occur in East Anglia and the East Midlands. The hypothesis that the Celtic Hypothesis school work on is that pre-Norse Western Mercian, Northumbrian and Wessex elites spoke varieties partially affected by Brittonic, with it-clefting, slightly simplified inflections and declensions, the Northern Subject Rule and other features attested in OE. Meanwhile, the peasantry of these areas was currently or recently bilingual and spoke OE varieties which already contained the much more substantial Celtic influence found in Middle English. In Northumbria, the Norse domination replaced most of the indigenous elite, and the process of contact between the 3 varieties resulted in a strong simplification outcome, whereas in East Anglia, where conditions were identical, except for the absence of Brittonic influence, no simplification occurred. This is why the Celtic innovations can be seen to spread from the North, with some never making it to standard English.

Meanwhile, in the Southwest, the standard Old English spoken by the elite continued to be hegemonic until its disappearance post-conquest unleashed a seemingly instantaneous wave of innovations, which were actually features used by non-elites much earlier. Some of these then spread into standard English, though again, others were restricted to Southwestern dialects. We can see from the Peterborough chronicle's sudden change of language that by 1066 literary Old English was already very different from what people actually spoke, so these models make a certain amount of sense, especially in light of copious historical evidence for contact.
 

Brunaburh

Gone Fishin'
Would Brittonic Latin be effected by the consonant and vowel mutations otl gaelic and brittonic had?

Consonant mutations, almost certainly not. Perhaps it occurred when weakly bilingual Brittonic speakers spoke Latin badly. The Latin loanwords we have in Welsh have nothing weird about them, but we wouldn't really be able to tell how they were pronounced by British Latin speakers. I would be very surprised, though, if British Latin didn't have some vowel and prosodic qualities that displayed a distinct "British Accent", though I suspect it might be similar to that of northern Gaul. Perhaps they would be as similar as Southern Hemisphere Englishes are today.
 
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