When did the English discover the Anglo-Saxons? (2018)
etymonline.com
etymonline.com
We also seem to have forgotten that quite a few other languages have been lost in the UK and far more recently. Cumbric and Cornish for starters. Both are Brythonic ie like Welsh, Scottish and Irish. Cumbric was spoken in Cumbria ie top left of England and Cornish in Kernow - Cornwall - bottom left, next door to Devon. It's not quite that simple but good enough. Cornish is being revived, Cumbric not so much although I'm sure I read somewhere that shepherds still count in Cumbric - someting like yan, tan, tithera, methera.
You have to be careful when you pin languages into your display cabinets. Unlike insects the bloody things persist to get up and tell you to piss off in a variety of amusing ways. Sadly what seemed routine and boring to our forebears was often not documented or obliterated and ultimately lost. Painstaking research gets us some of the way but it is absolutely that: painstaking.
What we are talking about here is context and history. Please share where you lot are from and some examples of how slang has changed for you. I might not understand it but I will appreciate it and it gets documented somewhere.
There is a really good reason for the Internet Archive to exist. It remembers stuff. We've lost so much already but future generations will have rather a lot of data to pick over.
Small correction: Welsh is indeed Brythonic, as are Cornish and Breton, as they derive from the Celtic languages spoken in pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain. Scottish Gaelic and Irish, on the other hand, are Goidelic, as they come from the Celtic spoken in Ireland.
Interesting, is this 17th century German fandom the basis of Tolkien's work? His Middle Earth was so fleshed out, I guess it would make sense.
> By 1720 intellectual interest in England had turned to Druidry, Celtic heritage, Stonehenge, and the imaginary world of Phoenician Druids bringing the Abrahamic religion to Britain, complete with chariot races around Stonehenge.
Reminds me, of the Hindu Nationalists view of history. Maybe not in form but in motivation. State/Church wanting to found its origins in itself.
Take Offa's Dyke for instance, very little is known about its purpose from historical records (though we can guess). A structure which ran the length of what is now the English and Welsh border.
In the generations after, only the manuscripts that impressed, or writings that were the most celebrated as literature, were preserved or duplicated. Those not held in high regard were sometimes recycled for paper, or ultimately lost when the last copy fell apart. Cultural biases play a role too. There wasn't much interest in preserving pagan legends in newly Christianized England, and so much of the Anglo-Saxon literature we do have is from the later period and usually utilitarian or Christian in nature.
The scale of the loss is clearer further south. We have book lists from the Roman and Greek classical era. The playwright Aeschylus is thought to have written about 100 plays, of which 6 survive. Julius Caesar and Aristotle were prolific authors, and celebrated individuals almost continuously since their deaths, and yet the majority of their works did not survive.
Gutenberg's revolution hinged not only on moveable type, but on rag-based paper (wood pulp wasn't widely used until the 19th century), and reduced the cost of a book by about an order of magnitude, possibly two. Far less expensive than before, but still phenomenally expensive contrasted with a paperback or digital download.
That said, yes, the production, reproduction, preservation, and distribution of books was very highly limited. Much official practice relied strongly on individual memory and recollection, with minimal recordkeeping via media. See the use of tally-sticks used for recording and reconciliation of debts (and the burning down of Parliament, eventually), as an example.
As with most works of antiquity, a large part of the present ascribed value is due to the failure of most such works to survive.
There's also the historiography of early records, and how and in what form(s) early documents did survive, where and when they did. Often it's only through quotations or citations that any record exists at all.
I've found it delightfully ironic that one of the more tedious forms of online debate, popular with top-quoting users of Usenet and email lists, of citing passages and responding to them directly in-line, was apparently pioneered thousands of years ago, and that it is often the harshest and most strident critics of earlier works who are to be credited with even a partial survival of them, by virtue of their anacronistic Fisking.
Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy podcast addresses these aspects in several episodes, largely on earlier philosophers.
By which I mean to say that humanity sees the value of these cultural artifacts mostly in retrospect.