Sorry, Max, I didn't read much past the title and the first couple of paragraphs. Now that I read it more carefully, Dr Oppenheimer sure does have some peculiar notions. I'd like to see his write up.
Dr. Oppenheimer has relied on work by Peter Forster, a geneticist at Anglia Ruskin University, to argue that Celtic is a much more ancient language than supposed, and that Celtic speakers could have brought knowledge of agriculture to Ireland, where it first appeared. He also adopts Dr. Forster’s argument, based on a statistical analysis of vocabulary, that English is an ancient, fourth branch of the Germanic language tree, and was spoken in England before the Roman invasion.
English is usually assumed to have developed in England, from the language of the Angles and Saxons, about 1,500 years ago. But Dr. Forster argues that the Angles and the Saxons were both really Viking peoples who began raiding Britain ahead of the accepted historical schedule. They did not bring their language to England because English, in his view, was already spoken there, probably introduced before the arrival of the Romans by tribes such as the Belgae, whom Julius Caesar describes as being present on both sides of the Channel.
He seems a little confused here. English has been considered Germanic by most linguists for hundreds of years. You don't need any statistical method to figure that out. I'm not sure how he can prove that English arrived before the Romans using DNA.
And on to the Basque:
That has not stopped the attempt. Stephen Oppenheimer, a medical geneticist at the University of Oxford, says the historians’ account is wrong in almost every detail. In Dr. Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of events, the principal ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived from Spain about 16,000 years ago, speaking a language related to Basque.
Medical geneticist = linguistic historian?
Re: Medical geneticist = linguistic historian?
