Working Languages

By way of follow-up to the previous post I should mention the intriguing note on Anglo-Saxon which appears in the OED up to the 1989 second edition but is absent from the (brand-new) draft revision of September 2009:

For these there was apparently at first no collective name; subsequently, the name Englisc (Anglish, English) was extended from the dialect of the Angles (the first to be committed to writing) to all dialects of the vernacular, whether Anglian or Saxon; and Angul-cynn (Angle-kin, gens Anglorum), and later still, during the struggle with the Danes, ‘English’ and ‘Englishman,’ to all speakers of the vernacular in any dialect Angle or Saxon. After the Norman Conquest, the natives and the new incomers were at first distinguished as ‘English’ and ‘French,’ but, as the latter also became in a few generations ‘English’ politically and geographically, men's notions of ‘English’ changed accordingly, so that the 12th c. chroniclers could no longer apply the word distinctively to the people of Edward the Confessor and Harold, for whom therefore they recalled the name ‘Saxon,’ applicable enough to the West Saxon dynasty, but incorrect when extended to the whole Angle-kin over whom they ruled. At the hands of the Latin chroniclers, often foreigners, to whom the historical relations of Saxons and Angles were not very obvious, a similar extension of meaning had been given to Anglo-Saxones. But this name did not reappear in English till after 1600, when, with the revival of OE. learning, historians and philologists again felt the need of distinguishing English ‘Saxon’ from the Saxon of Germany. The modern use dates from Camden, who himself used Anglo-Saxon-es, -icus, in Latin, and English Saxon in his vernacular works. His translator adapted the Lat. as Anglo-Saxon, which gradually displaced ‘English Saxon,’ first as n., and finally as adj. also. But it was applied, as Saxon had been for 500 years erroneously applied, to ‘Old English’ as a whole. This has led in turn to an erroneous analysis of the word, which has been taken as = Angle + Saxon, a union of Angle and Saxon; and in accordance with this mistaken view, modern combinations have been profusely formed in which Anglo- is meant to express ‘English and..’, ‘English in connexion with..’, as ‘the Anglo-Russian war’; whence, on the same analogy, Franco-German, Turko-Russian, etc.

L'animal, long de 82 centimètres, a été découvert par une équipe de chercheurs anglo-saxons

With the next reference to these anglo-saxons (assuming nothing edited out) being this:

Durant les cinq semaines de leur expédition (financée côté britannique par l'université d'Oxford, le zoo de Londres et la BBC, côté américain par la Smithsonian Institution), les naturalistes ont recensé plus de quarante espèces.

So anglo-saxon is being used in the specific sense of Anglo-American i.e. joint British and American, a usage I had not previously observed.

Once upon a time, of course, it was the English who were the Saxons. The memory of that is preserved in the erstwhile vernaculars of their neighbours e.g. Sassenach in Scotland. So how did the change come about? Why are English-speakers Anglophones and not Saxophones?

In The Tribes of Britain, archeologist David Miles suggests it may be the result of a famous papal pun:

In spite of the impression given in many history books, Pope Gregory and Augustine, in AD 597, were not the first to bring Christianity to Britain. They just had the best story. Bede tells the tale – and it may be no more than a tale concocted in Whitby Abbey to appeal to an Anglo-Saxon audience – that Gregory saw some fair-haired boys for sale in the Roman slave market. He was told that they came from Britain, where people were still ignorant heathens: ‘They are called Angles.’ ‘That is appropriate,’ Gregory replied, ‘for they have angelic faces.’ And their province is Deira (Northumberland – Bede’s own). ‘Good,’ said Gregory. ‘They shall indeed be “de ira” [saved from wrath] and called to the meaning of Christ.’ This is a typical piece of Anglo-Saxon wordplay: to see messages in names. It may be partly because of the ‘Angels’ pun and his own origins that Bede entitles his nation ‘English’; to earlier commentators, the Germanic incomers were usually called ‘Saxons’.

Bede's account of an Anglo-Saxon invasion (and Gildas's of an ethnic cleansing of the native Britons) is not supported by the emerging genetic evidence which seems to show that as far as the great majority of the present-day population of England is concerned, it was as stone-age hunter-gatherers that their ancestors arrived (overland!) rather than on board the longships of Horsa and Hengist.