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Re: CHAT National toponyms (was: OT Caution!! IRA funding)

From:Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>
Date:Thursday, September 16, 2004, 18:15
On Thu, 16 Sep 2004 13:53:18 -0400, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
wrote:

> the island of Great Britain (why the adjective, btw? Is or was there > a Not-so-great Britain?),
There was indeed. When the Angles and Saxons came, Britons fled to France (as well as Wales, Cumbria, Scotland, et al), and set up Little Britain, that is to say Brittany, and their language was (or became?) Breton. Interestingly, when the Normans invaded, many Bretons were among their number, and apparently considered themselves an army of justice, returning Britain to British hands, and removing the Anglo-Saxons, oppressors of their Celtic brethren. The fact that they set themselves up as an oppressive ruling class, dominating an almost entirely Anglo-Saxon peasant class (the Britons having been displaced pretty much to their modern homelands) is somewhat of an amusing irony. Paul