Tiberius_1919 t1_ir9zl56 wrote on October 6, 2022 at 1:15 PM

The theory that there was NO Anglo-Saxon migration is extremely fringe, and doesn’t appear to have any sort of wide level of support.

I answered a question on AskHistorians earlier today about why the Anglo-Saxon migrations are so controversial, and what the various theories have been over the decades, which might be useful to you (although I am by no means an expert) https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xwkhb8/can_someone_why_new_evidence_of_a_large_scale/ir9cskt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3

To summarise, the most modern study of Anglo-Saxon remains concluded that there was a large-scale migration from the continental North Sea, however unlike previous theories (and the very dubious primary sources of Gildas and Bede) it doesn’t posit that this took place as a singular event, but rather that it took place from sometime during Roman rule in Britain to as late as the 8th century.

In addition, this video goes into detail over why the evolution of English is not all that unusual. In short, most elite-level (or “high prestige”) languages do not borrow heavily from the lower languages. There are exceptions of course, such as French having quite a lot of Gaulish influence, but the vast majority of the time the conquering language takes very little from the conquered.

MagicRaptor OP t1_ira60u3 wrote on October 6, 2022 at 2:04 PM

That was a good read, thank you! I hope I live long enough to see these questions definitively answered because it's clear that as of right now, SOMETHING is missing. Whether it's a breakthrough in genetic technology, a massive archaeological discovery, a hidden vault of early medieval scrolls unearthed from some church vault, or a revolutionary new way of categorizing and studying languages, I just hope I'm still alive to see it.

Tiberius_1919 t1_ira8slb wrote on October 6, 2022 at 2:23 PM

Me too honestly, I’d love to be able to know for certain but unfortunately a high level of certainty is very unlikely to ever surface.

But who knows, each subsequent study on the Anglo-Saxon migrations have shed more and more light and offered more and more concrete and well-evidenced hypotheses on this era