The names used are confusing. Academics dispute everything,
it is after all how they make a living, but to clarify my current
understanding, I would summarise by saying
1. The inhabitants of the island of Britain before the
Romans came were the Pritani - (hence the modern Welsh Prydain for Britain ) In
English they are simply Britons.
2 The Romans called the Britons Brittones but restricted that name to those tribes within their
zone of control. Those Britons to the north of Roman control, they called
Picts. The Welsh call these un-Romanised Britons, Prydyn, a continuation of the
original Celtic name for the whole population, but themselves they call
Brythoniaid, which comes from the Latin Brittones.
3. The language the ancient Britons spoke was called
British, refreshingly simple. However, academics differentiate British from its
daughter language Brittonic, which was the much changed language spoken by the
Britons by the time the Romans departed in 410. Brittonic is an academic
Anglicisation of the Welsh Brythoneg.
4. The Britons were then subject to invasion by the Germanic
tribes, who became the English. The English conquests separated the Brittonic
speaking area into three - Cornwall, Wales, and greater Cumbria, with a fourth
group leaving for Armorica over the English Channel and making that land into
Brittany.
Because Cumbric left no written records we guess (often
intelligently and with good reasoning) at its differences from Welsh, but we
don't know. This is why you will also
see the language of the Cumbrians, or the Men of the North, described as Old
Welsh.
Woolf makes the point that Cumbrians was probably the normal
term of the Northumbrian English to describe the Britons in the North, no
matter whose rule they were under [8].
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