Given that the Anglo-Saxons were, at that point, pagan, this is 100% the diametric opposite of the truth.

That is amazing. As Gabriel writes, that is 180 degrees arse about face. Now remind me why British civilisation itself would collapse without the taxfunded BBC?

If the BBC could make such a blunder over the status of religion in the later Roman empire, I wonder how on earth it can make any sense about the Pope's speech regarding Constantinople.

I suppose one should feel glad that the BBC "presenter" didn't make a cutting remark about the Angles and Saxons failing to include a proper proportion of Muslims in their invasion force, in 450 AD.

I feel offended and outraged at this ahistorical and anti-christian propaganda. Would somebody write up the BBC for their insensitivity?

I guess they could plead incompetence as a defence but that doesn't do much for their chances at renewal of the license fee next time around, does it.

You people can naysay all you want, but without the peaceful ways of the vikings and assorted German tribes we'd still be worshipping Thor and Odin like those barbaric, pagan Romans did.

We Druids, over by here
in the corner
Will brood
But say nothing for now
As to had and had not
That 'ol time religion!

Ok, I got one for you.

A couple of weeks ago I heard a documentary on the ABC, the BBC's Australian neice, which stated that even after 400 years of Roman occupation of Britain, Latin had made very little impression on English.

I think they may be right on that score, Chris. As far as I'm aware, most of the Latinate words that English has acquired were picked up after the Norman invasion when we also got our infusion of French.

Just looking at something like Beowulf, where there really isn't a Latinate word to be found and the language looks like a dialect of Dutch or German should show that.

Hank before the Angles and Saxons arrived people were speaking variations on Brytonic , be they irish welsh or scots, and Latin.
The Latin certainly got into Welsh .The Welsh word for window is damn near the same in Welsh ,French and Latin.
Then the Germanic and Nordic types turned up and thats where you gets your English proper.

Hank,

English evolved after the Germanic invasion, which didn't occur until after the legions were withdrawn.

Understood, RAB, but Gaelic and Welsh aren't even close to English in either diction or grammar. The amount of Gaelic/Welsh/Briton words in our vocabulary is profoundly tiny.

I assumed that what ABC was saying was that any Latin absorbed by the Romanized Britons prior to the Anglo Saxon invasion didn't get passed on, which is correct. We didn't adopt our Latin vocabulary until after the invasion of William the Conquerer.

Hank,

This was a few weeks ago, I was driving and don't have a clear memory of precisely the words used. However, that was the gist of it and the context was clearly implying that Latin and English co-existed in Britain during the occupation.

This thread raises another issue, and that is the changes in these broadcasters.

A generation ago neither of these howlers would have occured. Other howlers may have, but not these.

There was once a time when the ABC and the BBC were staffed by people who were graduates in history, classics, politics, English literature et al. These guys were ignorant of science and technology, but at least they had studied real subjects and SOMEONE on the floor would have picked up these nonsensenses.

These days? They graduated in media studies and journalism, leaving them with no great knowledge in any topic outside their own hothoused cocoons. These guys now need to rely on experts for interpretation of the world, without knowing enough to question what they are told.

As these people move up the career ladder what effect will this have on the quality of information we are fed?

Given the left’s love of historicism, it is mildly amusing that their disregard for historical facts is so evident.

Did they really miss out the whole of Byzantine Christianity? Surely not!

I think there's a more recent historical misunderstanding going on here too. For more than a decade, the main broadcasters have been commissioning houses - they no longer make many programmes, so the educational background of their staff has little effect on the quality of programmes. Though the BBC still has plenty of bureaucracy, it does thing like channel promotions, management training and health and safety, rather than interefering with programmes.

HRG - not in the slightest: historicism generally takes grand theory to be more important than mere evidence.

Talking about "English" as a language during the Roman occupation is meaningless. It didn't absorb Latin because it simply wasn't there at the time.

It's interesting to see how words are absorbed into language though. There are astonishingly few words from Gaelic languages in English, for example.

I just finished reading Melvyn Bragg's The Adventure Of English, which to be honest didn't tell me much I didn't know, and had some astonishingly anti-Catholic rants in it too, but was otherwise generally enjoyable. Not a patch on Bill Bryson though, in either Mother Tongue or Made In America.

"The Latin certainly got into Welsh .The Welsh word for window is damn near the same in Welsh ,French and Latin. "

the irish for window is "fuinneog", which is not far off the latin "fenestra" ("fuinneog" is pronounced
"fwen - ooh- -ge")

however, this infusion of latin into the Gaelic languages, could be not only because of Roman Brittainia, but could also be because of the Latin used by the early Christian monks. Remember that Latin was the language of the Bible in the pre-reformation era.

And dont forget that St Patrick was a Romanised Briton.
His pre-English Celtic/Latin language must have been understandable to the Irish he converted.

Saxons INVADED??? Dearie me no! I'm sure the (politically) correct version is that the Romans invited them over for a cake baking contest. After they had judged the cakes, they all sat down together and ate up all the nice cakes and made some nice tea to go with them. Afterwards they sang songs together, just like good pals should.

And the King of the potato people made me say that ...

I'm sending my CV into the B(lair) B(roadcasting) C(ompany) for a chance to air my views.

This is just the normal sloppiness we expect from all public ly funded organisations. The customers will still be paying up next year whatever rubbish they are given, so why bother to take a pride in your work?

Another thing that burns us Welsh up
is the fact that the BBC will bust a gut to pronounce forign names and places correctly (oh and politically correct at that) like Bejing and Mumbae (or however you spell Bombay now) but completely cock up Welsh pronounciations almost every time.
I was listening to BBC 5 live a while back and a snippet of news came on. I will do it phonetically for you.
" A case of meningitus has been confirmed in Inisibble, mid-Glamorgan."
So I'm sat there scratching my head, having been born in Glamorgan, as to where this new town, Inisibble might be.
Then it dawned on me they meant -

YNYSYBWL
Now ok that looks like a Bletchley Park intercept I grant you, but the BEEB has a pronounciation Dept, that manages to get everyone elses names correct, why not the home grown ones?
For those of you who are curious the correct phonetic pronounciation of a "Y" in Welsh is "Uh" So Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas are not pronounced "Dillan" but "Dullan"
so Ynysybwl, becomes phonetically Un-us-uh-bull

I am forced to pay my licence fee. The least the clowns can do is to get the words right.

RAB

You'll get over it when you swap your random collection of consonents for a proper language.

Yakki Dar!

Um Pete-London ! :)
Welsh is a proper language.
It was the first written language in Europe
After the Roman period.
English was centuries behind.
Ah but you may be taking me too seriously!
I have lived in Bristol for thirty years now.
Hardly fervently a Welsh Patriot now am I? (dig the Latin phrasing on that!)
No. I am in fact a deep embedded 5th column agent waiting for the chance to re-take our ancestoral homeland. I.E. England!
Bugger! Too much Brains S.A.
Forget I said the last bit.
You're not supposed to know till it's too late.
(Rather like the Islamists!)

On Guy's point:

Yes, just because someone is a History graduate does not mean that he knows any history.

Ditto other subjects.

For example, Mr David Cameron (leader of the British Conservative party) - has a First Class Degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from the Universtity of Oxford.

How much about philosophy (political philosophy or other branches of philosophy) or economics does he know?

"Given the left’s love of historicism, it is mildly amusing that their disregard for historical facts is so evident. "

I've found that all forms of historicism are only plausible (eve vaguely) when you know absolutely sod all about history.

Yes, well we are talking about the BBC here. The history pages on their website talks about the countries of the UK being Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

OK, who can spot what's missing?

Yes, the country that the BBC does its best to avoid acknowledging - ENGLAND.

Hi All,

Most of the above is all wrong . Check out the latest on the hsitory channel. There was no Germanic invaders of Britain. There is no evidence of an invasion whatsoever or migration of Germans. By examination of the teeth of various generations of people buried within the so called invasion period, they have found that almost everyone in Britain at the time originated in Britain. Also there are no destroyed towns, mass graveyards to evident that a horrible war had occured. Britain had been absorbing a trickle of people from Sweden and Norway for years before the so called german invasion and before the Romans.
In other works we have always been Britons and we never lost to a bunch of germans. The only butchers that invaded were Scots. The presence of Germanic weapons is attributed to the import of such following the Romans leaving, as the country had most weapons removed by the Romans and needed to defend themselves.

The English idea and the invasions and the old Hengist Horsa crap was an invention by Bede (who never left his monastery) to help the Roman catholic church to overwhelm the British church. There never was an Englishman and there never was an England. There has only been Britain.

Your comment does not appear to have been written in Welsh (or Latin) Mr Williams.

The English would have interested to hear that they did not exist. And so would their British enemies such as Gildas (who wrote long before Bede).

As for no destroyed towns - even Canterbury (in Kent where the takeover was, perhaps, more peaceful than in other areas) there are post holes of the huts of the Germanic folk IN THE RUINS OF THE ROMANO-BRITISH BUILDINGS.

As for D.N.A. - there is indeed a lot of pre Germanic D.N.A. in the English (not everyone fled west or was killed over time), but there is also a lot of Germainc D.N.A. (indeed the great MAJORITY) of the English in the eastern counties have Germanic D.N.A..

Bottom line - do not place your trust in television programmes.

By the way was the History Channel programme done by the same bearded moron who used to do shows on on Channel Four?