The English and the Celts - no genocide?

[ambrosius]

Certain Gallic words remaining in Frankish (French) are ~120
Certain Gallic words remaining in Latin are ~40
Certain British words remaining in English are... 3

Exactly! Well, if fact Coates brings up some more, but the number is not a large one even then.

Coates mentions the twenty or so English words which have, at various times since the 1920s, been considered as possibly being of Brittonic origin. But most of these are now rejected. That's why I used the word 'certain' to prefix all the above categories. There are only three
certain Brittonic words in English, as I understand it. And as I
also understand it, the point Coates is making is the relative
adoption of Celtic words by these three invading cultures. You can
see that Franks were more open to adopting Gallic words than were Romans. And you can also see that Anglo-Saxons were, apparently,
totally disinterested in speaking Brittonic.

But let’s compare the numbers. Would you classify the position of the Gallic tribes in respect to the conquering Romans as similar to the Romano-Britons in respect to the conquering Anglo-Saxons, as Coates does? Invisible, enslaved, insignificant?

Perhaps initially, yes. Certainly moreso under Caesar than Augustus.
But by the time of Claudius, you see him wanting to introduce Gallic
senators, to widen the enfranchisement of the Empire. You can hardly
claim to see the same kind of evidence of enfranchisement being
extended from Anglo-Saxon kings towards native Britons, certainly
not within a century of the initial conquest, c. 450. English-Welsh
mutual cultural and linguistic hostility continues even today, and for
several centuries the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms remained hostile
to native Britons and vice-versa. Why, even in 1066, Harold II, the
Saxon king of England, had been busy beating-up on the Welsh only
a few months before turning his attention towards Hastings. :lol:

I for sure can't see the Gauls having disappeared as some today would have the Britons disappear. of course not! The Gauls became valued Gallo-Romans and kept speaking Celtic. And even so, only about 40 Celtic words 'rubbed off' of the language of the dominating victors.

Well I'm not sure if Coates actually argued for a disappearance of
Gauls. Certianly, they did not, in any case. Why do you think that
5th c. natives of Gaul are termed 'Gallo-Romans', by historians.
And actually, the ration of 3:40 implies that Gallic was ten times
more interesting to Romans as Brittonic was to Anglo-Saxons. :wink:

Vortigern Studies\\n[quote]Yet Coates argues:
“If a Brittonic population had redefined itself as English through being “absorbed by degrees into the population of the English settlementsâ€