My two-penn'orth: I see no reason to believe anyone in Britain was speaking
Latin natively in the 5th century. It was a second, administrative
language, operating like English in Nigeria or India, say, with few if any
native speakers. Most speakers of Latin would have been speaking it with a
Brittonic accent (though I admit we don't know much about the families of
settled discharged soldiers who stayed when the legions left). No
Latin-origin place-names in Britain preclude transmission to the English by
speakers of Brittonic, with 2 very special exceptions: Binchester, Co.
Durham (Smith, Nomina 4 (1980), < Vinovia, -um, ?as spoken by a cohort of
Vettones stationed here: their pronunciation may have had /b/ for /w/, cf.
the plant-name betony which derives from the tribal name - really clever
stuff by Smith here); and Verulamium, St Albans, for intensely technical
reasons I set out in a forthcoming article, where there are special reasons
that make the continuation of spoken Latin credible (John Baker's PhD
thesis, Birmingham 2001).
Richard
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Richard Coates
HoD, Dept of Linguistics and English Language
Room Arts B135
School of Humanities
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK
Phone +44 (0)1273 678522
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