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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

It's a lively and interesting piece IMO.

>"In schools, Our Island Story starts with Roman Britain, [...]" //

I'd have thought that was because Britain wasn't a thing until the Roman conquest. AFAICT prior to Roman occupation there wasn't a Britain, there were different tribes, but they weren't united in to a nation, they weren't even a loose affiliation.

When it notes that some Iceni tried to revolt, that tells you exactly why British history is started there. Otherwise it would be "some Britons tried to revolt".

What's he doing in the imagined prose when he gives French words in parentheticals, I don't get it. And shouldn't it be "knows [savait]" rather than connaisait?

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The same was true for the Gauls, pre-Roman conquest.

> And shouldn't it be "knows [savait]" rather than connaisait?

No, connaître is the right word. If you took French class, you probably learned that you "savoir" a thing or skill and you "connaître" a person, but that's not the correct dichotomy. Instead, "savoir" is more for knowing concrete, particular facts, while "connaître" is a weaker, vaguer familiarity, almost more like "to know about" or "to know of" rather than "to know". In this usage, Vercingetorix isn't implied to have had these skills themselves but rather to know of them.

It's also true that you can't « savoir » a person or object.

Both senses of 'to know' from Latin's cognoscere and sapere similarly flow through to other Romance languages including Portuguese (conhecer/saber) Italian (conoscere/sapere) and Spanish (conocer/saber).

Not just in schooling, but in Duolingo, and in Collins dictionary they say savoir faire for knowing how to do qch.

... on re-reading the OP I see I misunderstood the English, when the writer says "come to know the skill", I thought he meant Vercingetorix had become skilled -- and that this was hyperbole intended to highlight the ludicrous stretches of imagination possible with passé présomptif. Rather the writer means Vercingetorix came to know of the skills others possessed. Ah! Maintenant, je le comprends.

> What's he doing in the imagined prose when he gives French words in parentheticals, I don't get it.

That's not imagined prose. That's an excerpt from the book in translation, with the original French verb used in brackets.

Britain was somewhat united under Roman rule (although Scotland wasn't), but as a province of subordinate tribes. After Roman influence collapsed the Saxons smashed Roman Britain to pieces. It took several hundred years for England to be reunited under the Anglo-Saxon king Alfred I and five hundred more for Wales.

The modern British nation is culturally descended from the post-Roman Anglo-Saxons, not the Celtic Britons who inhabited Roman Britain.

> The modern British nation is culturally descended from the post-Roman Anglo-Saxons, not the Celtic Britons who inhabited Roman Britain.

Whoa, that's controversial!

Some English people consider themselves Celts, and some consider themselves Anglo-Saxons. I'm not sure whether it's political or more like being a dog person or a cat person.

The Celtic faction got quite a boost in the nineteenth century, which is when a lot of things that people today think of as Celtic ("Celtic art", for example) were rediscovered, or perhaps, in some cases, some would claim, invented.

Celtic influence in the English language has perhaps been rather ignored: English words that seem almost identical in form and meaning to Welsh or Cornish words have had their etymologies given in dictionaries as "unknown" or "obscure". The distinction between present and present continuous ("I eat" versus "I am eating") is perhaps an example of Celtic influence in English, and it suggests that English was at some point widely spoken by people whose native language was Celtic.

(The Americans' failure to distinguish correctly - from the British point of view - between "I ate" and "I have eaten" is likewise arguably due to American English being at one point widely spoken by people whose native language was German.)

Could you explain further please? American English most definitely has a distinction between "I ate" and "I have eaten".

I don't know enough about American English to "explain", unfortunately. I just notice that American speakers sometimes use one form when the other would be required in British English. For all I know, from an American point of view, perhaps British speakers are failing to make a distinction. However, something seems to have happened to those verb forms, and I think the change must have happened in colloquial American English because in this particular respect it's colloquial American that is different, while formal American, formal British and informal British all seem to agree with each other, as far as I can tell.

I wonder if you're referring to what's described in the first section of this article: http://www.onestopenglish.com/grammar/grammar-reference/amer...

As a lifelong American, I don't think that this is 100% widespread, many of the supposed Americanisms sound borderline "wrong" to me, and the only one I would favor is "She just left" instead of "She's just left".

And, having a German family history myself, I have trouble seeing this as a particularly German phenomenon.

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