Highly thought stirring!

In his writings, Dr. Peter Forster has put forth that English may not be an off-shoot of the West Germanic branch, but might be a 4th North Sea Germanic branch unto itself. Dr. Forster estimates that Germanic split into its four branches some 2,000 to 6,000 years ago. If he's right, the ‘Celtic’ tongue (thought to be spoken in England before the Anglo-Saxons came) may, in truth, be a branch of the Germanic language tree after all.

"I am not won over to the onlook that most of the population now have more than 50% German blood."

Likely in East Anglia...

"Passion is found in OE c805 ... nearly 300 hundred years before the Norman-French takeover, yet most etyms are "ME from French." ... "

I wonder why the Anglo-Saxons allowed for the word 'passion' in 805 or thereabouts? We still have 'thro(w)e [O.E. þrōwian or, maybe, O.E. þrea],' in English today. English also still has "thole" [O.E. þolian "to bear, suffer, undergo"]

"Seventy beds keeps he there teeming mothers are wont that they lie for to thole and bring forth bairns hale so God’s angel to Mary quoth."--1922, James Joyce, Ulysses

@jayles: "As a Brit then naturally our roots are Celtic..."

Should I take 'Brit' here to mean someone Welsh or Cornish...not English?

"My problem with Norman French language influence is not its dominance asserted by natural demographic distribution of d'oil folk, but its elitist fueled tinkering of the English language." Yes! Hear,hear!

"But shouldn't they toss out all the Frankish words too?" Yes, but the French don't know, don't acknowledge,and/or shroud the true roots of these words. Some wordlorists have guessed that 10% of today's French wordstock is know to have Germanic roots. I have found that many French wordbooks do what English wordbooks do--they stop short of the first roots of many words, markedly Germanic words. If the French wordbook writer finds that the French word is from Vulgar/Low Latin, they seek no more beyond that. A good byspell: We did not find out that FARM or FOREST was a Germanic word until the latter-day.

"If this is true then we should be sticking up for Welsh not English."

No, we should look to the bringing back of Cymraeg (Welsh tongue) as a way forward. We should learn how this tongue, along with Hebrew, Belarusian, Cornish, Manx, and Wampanoag (an Indian tongue of the U.S.), among others, is making a comeback.

"My point was that we should not impose an exclusively Saxon/Norse/Dane tongue on them all when their heritage is so mixed, any more than we should impose Norman-French or Latin."

Well, I do not have an abiding thought about that yet. Most of the Latin/French/Greek words did not come into English without heavy burden. We know this. The same cannot be altogether said about English.

If we listen to Oppenheimer, and others, an English-like, Germanic tongue may have already been spoken before Hengist and Horsa came over in about the year 449. The overstepping Germanic folk coming from over seas may have frankly strengthened and bolstered the tongue already there. No one can truly say.

As I have always said, Norman-French before 1066 is mostly okay with me (they were gallicized Vikings that could at least say the Germanic -W-, and mixed Norse words, uttering, and Germanic stæfcræft/ stæfwrītere into their French after all); Latin as it was begotten from trade; Most Greek words are okay, too. As long as the fremd word isn't an inkhorn word, abounding or overmuch, and the fremd word hadn't bereaved the English word from the tongue by some political/government falderal, I'm good with it.

"Americans use "expiration date" for the British sell-by date"

I saw "sell-by-date" in U.S. supermarkets all the time.

@jayles:

Your writing about "British" DNA is old, and has been undone with new findings. Anyway, DNA does not mean anything about folkways. But, let's look about, since you brought up the addled World of DNA.... Which of these "smart folks" are we to believe?

1. University College London academics studied a segment of the Y chromosome that appears in almost all Danish and north German men. They found that half of British men also have the segment.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2005829/Half-Britons-German-blood-geneticists-reveal.html

2. In 2002, Dr Mark Thomas, of the Centre for Genetic Anthropology at UCL, found that The English and Frisians studied had almost identical genetic make-up but the English and Welsh were very different.

3. Bryan Sykes says that only 10 per cent of men “now living in the south of England are the patrilineal descendants of Saxons or Danes… that figure rising to 15 per cent north of the Danelaw and 20 per cent in East Anglia”

4. Stephen Oppenheimer has put forth that 68 per cent of English DNA was on the island before the first farmers in the 4th millennium BC, and that most of the British forefathers arrived from Iberia. He also seems to think English was already spoken in England before the year 450.

5. "Britain's DNA" says 32 per cent of British men are descended from the original Britons, 12 per cent from ancient Germanic lines, 11 per cent are hunter gatherers and 7 per cent are ancient Irish.

6. This Summer (2012), Professor Peter Donnelly, a professor of statistical science at Oxford University and director of the Wellcome Trust centre for human genetics, said from south and north Wales genetically have "fairly large similarities with the ancestry of people from Ireland on the one hand and France on the other. Further, he also said that "modern people from central and southern England had many genetic similarities to modern people in Denmark and Germany". He said further that the Welsh could be the oldest Britons in Britain.

7. In 2003, Cristian Capelli did a study called 'A Y Chromosome Census of the British Isles.' He and his fellow scientists found that Orkney and Shetland have significant Norwegian input and little to no German/Danish input, that the English and Scottish sites all have German/Danish influence, and that the Western Isles and Isle of Man have German/Danish influence, presumably due to English immigration.

And, there is much more than this out there! Who is right? It was found in a study called "The Genetic Legacy of the Vikings in Northwest England" that the following places in Britain had huge Scandinavian background: Isle of Man (39%), Orkey (40%), Shetlands (42.5%), Wirral (47%), West Lancashire (51%).

It is odd to mark that Archaeologists after the Second World War rejected the traditionally held view that an Anglo-Saxon invasion pushed the indigenous Celtic Britons to the fringes of Britain. Any guesses why? ;-)

Here is a thought stirring link that indeed will get the one thinking: http://www.englandandenglishhistory.com/origins-of-ethnic-english

And another one here: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/06/britons-english-germans-and-collective-action/

From the writ you linked..."The most visible British genetic marker is red hair..." Now, how did Tacitus talk about the way the Germans looked? "All have fierce blue eyes, red hair, huge frames..."

Do we truly know that those folks that spoke a "Celtic tongue" are not genetic kin to the folks that spoke a Germanic/Teutonic tongue? I mean, the genetic marker R1b is both found in Celtic tongued folks, and in Germanic (Anglo-Saxon/Frisian) folks.

Again, genes have nothing to do with folkways.Aren't we all from East Africa anyway? ;-)

"jobseeker allowance" >> "Jobless/Workless Pay". Job-Seeker hints at someone that is truly looking for work. Odd that this word would be noted to mean "someone out of work, without a job/work, down & out, jobless, workless, on the dole." It doesn't seem to fit, does it?

Instead of "vagabond" > Enlish has landloper, loafer (*landloafer; see G. Landläufer)

G. werben "to advertise, to woo, to recruit" (many meanings) = O.E. hweorfan/ hwearf/ ġehworden "to turn, to travel, to roam, to wander"

1. "Hwiðer hweorfað wé" (whither shall we turn)
2. "Ðú hweorfest of hénþum in gehyld godes" (thou shalt pass from humiliations into the favour of God)

Today's G. werben is akin to Today's E. wharf, but sadly, I do not think that the work-word (verb) made it out of O.E. I will have to look through some of my books.