Angol nyelvi ismeretek II. [antikvár]

The mixture which is British The English are Anglo-Saxon in origin, but the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish are not. They are Celts, descendants of the ancient people who ha,d crossed over from Europe to the British Isles centuries before the Roman invasion. It v/as these people whom the Germanic Angles and Saxons conquered in the fifth and sixth centuries. A.D. The Anglo-Saxons, however, could not penetrate to the remote parts of Wales, Scotland and Ireland so various dialects of Celtic have here survived. Welsh is spoken in Wales, Gaelic in Scotland and Erse in Ireland. These Germanic tribes gave England its name - 'Angle' land. They were conquered in turn Toy the Normsin French, when V/illiam of Normandjr landed nea.r Hastings in 1066. It was from the union of the Ilorman conquerors and the defes-ted Anglo-Saxons that the English people and the English language were born. The Danes, or Vikings, who invaded Britain in the eighth "cantury s'trrxip^d thcdr influonco on --iio pec^^jle '".nd thu language. The Welsh Wales lies on the edge of the United Kingdom. This semiisolation helped to make the Welsh feci out off and neglected. It also had serious effects on their industrial prosperity, for the main roads which led to their chief markets in England and Scotland were quite unsuited to heavy coim.'iercial traffic. Now motorways and a great suspension bridge across the River Severn linlc South Wales with all the most important cities in Britain. There are more than 2 1/2 million people in Wales and over 500,000 - mostly in the North - speak Welsh, although only about 32,000 speak no English at all. The English conquest of Wales in the 13th century united the different Welsh tribes continually fighting one another, but another consequence .vas that the native tongue of the pcpula" - 3 -