67 replies to this topic

[LongMa]

But do you know that English language is also a Germanic language?
And AFAIK German language has several dialects, so are even closer to Dutch than main German language we know of.

The English language is not that close to "High German" or the lower dialects.

It is more related to Dutch, specifically Frisian (which is only spoken by a few folks in the modern Netherlands). There is some argument about how English formed and how old it is though. I think if you remove the Norman French words (which English has many) and look at "Middle English" and then read it out loud and compare it to Dutch and Frisian you can see a strong resemblance although all of these languages have evolved in different directions in the last 1,500 years.

The big changes to English came in the introduction of much "Old Norse" from vikings due to "Danelaw" (which was also a Germanic language, but more distant than that spoken on the Dutch coast) and more importantly Norman French. We use far more French words than people in Germany or the Netherlands.


As far as the German population issue.

I would also add one more thing. I believe white Americans tend to promote the exotic ancestry over the English ancestry. English ancestry is mainstream Anglo-Saxonism, which is the foundation of modern American culture. In America, people want to be unique and different. I have found it common that someone who is 3/4 English/Welsh/Protestant Irish will emphasize Native American, German, Dutch, French, etc ancestry more so. I think this is because it is "unusual". I know a guy who is 3/4 English/Scot, and 1/4 Russian who told me he is "Russian" because his grandmother taught him a few sentences and he eats Borscht. lol Other than that he is a typical WASP...nothing unique about his language, appearance, etc.

On this old American tv show, Dog the Bounty Hunter, Dog always says he is "Native American" because his grandmother was Native...or part Native I believe, but she grew up on a reservation. I find this odd, because he did not, he speaks no other language but English and looks like a stereotypical rural white man from the Southwest U.S. I'm pretty sure he marks "Native American" on his census form.

So when people are asked on a survey..."What are you"? I am certain many people like him will say "Russian". Someone else came to this conclusion on another site I read from time to time, by looking at census information. Somehow...English ancestry keeps disappearing in America, every generation. LOL

The proportions above use the white population in the Census as the baseline.

It seems pretty clear here: the "American" group is sucking up many people of British Isles origin. Additionally, I haven't posted it, but there are weird changes in people claiming single or multiple ancestries. This is probably a result of the way in which the question was worded and results tabulated, the balance between single and multiple ancestries shifted a lot among many groups in favor of the former. This obviously doesn't make sense, these are European groups who aren't subject to a great deal of immigration, and have been intermarrying more & more each generation.

Next there is some interesting data from page 38 Ethnic Options:
Consistency between 1972 & 1971
Puerto Rican 96.5
negroid 94.2
Mexican 88.3
Italian 87.8
Cuban 83.3
Polish 79.2
Spanish 78.9
German 66.1
Others 62.5
Russian 62.3
French 62.1
Irish 57.1
English, Scottish, Welsh 44.1
Don't know 34.9


As you can see, British Isles groups tend to be very inconsistent year-by-year in their ethnic affinity. I believe this suggests very weak distinctive self-identification. In part this is probably due to the fact that the immigrant experience is so far back for people whose forebears arrived in North America in the 1600s and 1700s, but, I also believe that it is due to the fact that Anglo-Saxon culture is to some extant the default culture of the United States. The fact that Anglo-Saxon identity is so malleable and shallow in explicit (if not implicit background) terms also suggests one hypothesis for the relatively robusticity of a group like German Americans vs. English Americans over the past 30 years: German ancestry is more memorable, distinctive and "ethnic" than English ancestry. So if someone is 1/4 German and 3/4 "American," one might naturally give "German" as the response when queried about ethnicity because the "American" element is not coded as ethnicity at all. Checking through the Census data it also seems that "American" is tabulated only if no other ethnic groups are given by respondent. This suggests to me that there are many of the people bracketed into German, Irish, etc., probably listed "American" as one of their ethnicities, which itself is probably a proxy for Anglo-Saxon background.

Relying on self-reports is obviously problematic for ethnicity in a nation where a large majority are likely compounds. How can we get a real sense of the distribution of American European ethnicities? Here's an idea: a social scientist could simply go back several generations in the genealogy of 10,000 random white Americans in the family Family Search database. Individual could be more appropriately coded ethnically.

http://www.gnxp.com/...ricans-gone.php

Edited by LongMa, 26 December 2008 - 08:04 AM.

[Taran ap Dafydd]

Source: http://en.wikipedia..../White_american

I was interested in ancestry history of white Americans and founded an article in Wikipedia. It seems that the largest ethnic group for white americans have ancestry originated from Germany, which was the largest group followed by Anglo-Irish group. However, today white americans are really mixed.

I even read a history that there were even 'discrimination' policy during the 19th century, when large number of german immigrants migrated to US. There was even a time when German was to be adopted as US national language. Was this true? Can someone verify this history?

I did not go through the entire thread, so I beg your pardon if my points have already been discussed...

If Germany is not the source for the plurality of white immigrants, then they're certainly in a very tight running for that title. It really isn't that important, though...

All Americans are really quite mixed. Most of those modern "white" Americans have at least 1 or 2 or more other ethnicities mixed in. I, for example, look as white as an Eastern European (my father's ancestry) can possibly be, but that doesn't show the American Indian (Souix and Apache), both from my mother's side, nor the Middle Eastern that is a few gens back on my father's side.

There would be even less distinction between these historical ethnicities in the USA if certain groups of people would stop whining so much about the colour of peoples' skin and quit this dangerous "Celebrate our Differences" stuff. All Americans are Americans. THAT is our ethnicity.

Yes, there was a policy of immigration discrimination until the middle of the 20th Century. I want to say it was LBJ who ended that policy, but I can't be certain. It was a sound policy implemented for very specific reasons and its removal has had some very distinct disadvantages. It was designed to aid assimilation. Then again, it hasn't been all bad, either.

German never did get made into the National Language. It was discussed and even argued in Congress, but it failed. English was also proposed to be the National Language, but likewise failed (a severe mistake with significant downsides and so far no upsides at all).

Apologies for the intrusion of politics, but a few points raised by the OP were political.

[LongMa]

There would be even less distinction between these historical ethnicities in the USA if certain groups of people would stop whining so much about the colour of peoples' skin and quit this dangerous "Celebrate our Differences" stuff. All Americans are Americans. THAT is our ethnicity.

I agree, I would like to see "one nationality, a true nationality known as American" but that was never up to the minority. The minority never had the power to enforce this on the majority. In fact, if not for the courts I'm not sure how fast any of these things would have changed. I'm also leery of "Celebrating diversity" (which to me means divisions)...the hope is to spread tolerance, but that also leads to a slippery slope because the extent of "tolerance" has never been defined nor has what "American" is been strictly defined. Some do not see it as a ethnicity or nationality but a pledge to adhere to some political norms and rules...that's it. Some see it as a ethnicity or nationality. I think in time (as in hundreds of years) it will likely be seen in the latter. After all, the Englishmen of today do not say they are this percentage Norman, these percentages Jute, Angle, Saxon, Frisian, Norwegian Viking, Celt, etc. They say they are "English". The differences are between the Welsh, Scots, English, Irish...but in reality the English were a plurality until a few hundred years ago, but that has died away. It takes time. Romans were a plurality as well...

This being said, don't go to far, historically it was not due to people "whining about" anything as much as people treating other distinctly different due to the color of their skin, national origin, or religion.

Please tell me how not "whining" would have allowed a black man in 1965 for not being jailed or assaulted for being caught in the wrong county at night (even in many Midwestern states) or entering a restaurant through the front door instead of the back? Please tell me, in your opinion, what level of English speaking ability or standard dress would allow a Hispanic who was born in the U.S. from being forcefully deported along some border areas in the early 1900's or would allow a black person to vote in over a dozen states in the 1950's?

Some minority groups could do more to integrate into society I agree, especially recent immigrants, but many who have a distinctive culture did not voluntarily form one because "they felt like it" it was a result of historic enforced isolation from the mainstream culture, this was often enforced by the state, local, federal governments and culture norms. This is well documented. This largely ended in 1965, even for Jews, there were a reason so many Jews and even Catholics marched in the civil rights movement with blacks, because in many areas they too were discriminated against to varying extents, especially Jews. The Ivy League had a "Jewish Quota" that did not end until the 1960's. Did the quota exist because WASPs were just tired of Jews crying over their religion??

If we count 25 years as a generation, 1965, was not even 2 generations ago. I'm 32 years old and my mother was born in 1952, when she was born America was quite different and there were many states she could not vote in or marry whoever she wanted if she had been an adult. Laws change faster, often, than people's attitudes, there are still pockets of backwardness in America, large pockets. Things have changed quite a bit since my mother was even my age, but lets not delude ourselves in thinking that somehow all of these things are in people's mind and if they just stopped talking about it it would magically disappear or die away.

This to me is like saying..."Well if women stopped wearing short skirts and make up men would stop raping them."

Have you ever lived any place for more than 1 year were you were a visible minority? If you have not, I think you need to. I would advise Japan or better yet, Mainland China. That might change your world view quite a bit.

Edited by LongMa, 30 December 2008 - 09:27 AM.

[Taran ap Dafydd]

Please tell me how not "whining" would have allowed a black man in 1965 for not being jailed or assaulted for being caught in the wrong county at night (even in many Midwestern states) or entering a restaurant through the front door instead of the back? Please tell me, in your opinion, what level of English speaking ability or standard dress would allow a Hispanic who was born in the U.S. from being forcefully deported along some border areas in the early 1900's or would allow a black person to vote in over a dozen states in the 1950's?

That wasn't whining. That was actual issues that people took action to correct.

The whining has been over the last 20 years or so. It has been carried out most publicly by folks like Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and has done more to sow discord and division and Increase racism. Anytime any person of any colour cries "The man is keeping me down!" in this day and age is a whine.
The Whining needs to stop.
Not talking about actual history would be just as bad, if not worse. It would allow what has happened to be forgotten and in being forgotten to be repeated. But demanding "reparations for the slavery of African Americans in the USA" needs to stop and the people perpetrating such fallacies to be laughed out of the public square (or chased out with rotten vegetables, whichever).

Have you ever lived any place for more than 1 year were you were a visible minority? If you have not, I think you need to. I would advise Japan or better yet, Mainland China. That might change your world view quite a bit.

Yes. And been to school there. And while there were legitimate concerns about said school being absolutely bottom of the barrel (they celebrated a combined 554 SAT mean for the school when I was there), those who wanted to DO something with themselves were able to rise above "The System" with ease.
It's amazing what having access to information can do for you...

You know, there's a perfect movie out there that shows off my view on this matter quite clearly, Check out Something New. What is captured in that movie is what goes on in the USA every day.

[ShingenT]

hey guys, chill out

[Taran ap Dafydd]

hey guys, chill out

We took it to PM...

[Mipp]

The English language is not that close to "High German" or the lower dialects.

It is more related to Dutch, specifically Frisian (which is only spoken by a few folks in the modern Netherlands). There is some argument about how English formed and how old it is though. I think if you remove the Norman French words (which English has many) and look at "Middle English" and then read it out loud and compare it to Dutch and Frisian you can see a strong resemblance although all of these languages have evolved in different directions in the last 1,500 years.

You are correct. English is a cousin of German and the Scandinavian languages (Norwegian, Danish, etc.) but it doesn't have many surviving close 'sibling' languages. It's interesting to compare the development of English over time; here's an excerpt from Beowulf from the 8-11th centuries CE:

Hwæt! Wē Gār‐Dena • in geār‐dagum
þēod‐cyninga • þrym gefrūnon,
hū þā æðelingas • ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scēfing • sceaðena þrēatum,
monegum mǣgðum • meodo‐setla oftēah.
Egsode eorl, • syððan ǣrest wearð
fēa‐sceaft funden: • hē þæs frōfre gebād,
wēox under wolcnum, • weorð‐myndum ðāh,
oð þæt him ǣghwylc • þāra ymb‐sittendra
ofer hron‐rāde

You can clearly see how Germanic this is, especially when compared to Das Hildebrandslied, a German epic from a similar time period (9th century):

Ik gihorta dat seggen,
dat sih urhettun ænon muotin:
Hiltibrant enti Hadubrant untar heriun tuem.
sunufatarungo iro saro rihtun,
5 garutun se iro gudhamun, gurtun sih iro suert ana, 5
helidos, ubar hringa, do sie to dero hiltiu ritun.
Hiltibrant gimahalta, Heribrantes sunu,— her uuas heroro man,
ferahes frotoro

A modern English-speaker would be hopelessly lost without a translation of Beowulf into modern English. I don't know how a modern-day German would fare with Das Hildebrandslied. Icelanders can supposedly read the Viking sagas in the original with little effort.

By the 14th century, the era of Chaucer, English has absorbed a lot of French and Latin vocabulary, and a modern-day English-speaker could muddle through at least a couple paragraphs of The Canterbury Tales and get the general gist of the story:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne...

Only a couple of centuries later, in the 16th century, Shakespeare's works are much more familiar to a modern-day English-speaker. The only difficulty is caused by archaic vocabulary, really. Here's the famous opening to Romeo and Juliet:

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life

[LongMa]

You are correct. English is a cousin of German and the Scandinavian languages (Norwegian, Danish, etc.) but it doesn't have many surviving close 'sibling' languages. It's interesting to compare the development of English over time; here's an excerpt from Beowulf from the 8-11th centuries CE:

I have heard it theorized that during the Danelaw in England...the ANglo-Saxon Kings could speak directly to the Viking leaders, with only minor issues in comprehension. I have only read this once though so I don' t know how true it is, but if so the Germanic Language family diverged quite quickly, more so than the Romance Languages, but then again, I guess Latin served as a unifying role due to shared Catholicism that lasted centuries after Rome fell.

Edited by LongMa, 06 January 2009 - 11:39 AM.

[Mipp]

I have heard it theorized that during the Danelaw in England...the ANglo-Saxon Kings could speak directly to the Viking leaders, with only minor issues in comprehension. I have only read this once though so I don' t know how true it is, but if so the Germanic Language family diverged quite quickly, more so than the Romance Languages, but then again, I guess Latin served as a unifying role due to shared Catholicism that lasted centuries after Rome fell.

There's a poem called The Battle of Maldon from 991 recording a viking attack on Northey Island in Essex, England. The ealdorman of Essex, Byrhtnoth, brought an army to block their advance. The vikings tried to blackmail him into paying them heregeatu, "tribute, inheritance tax" to go away. Byrhtnoth's reply is a pun: he will pay them heregeatu all right, but heregeatu in the sense of "weapons of war" not "tribute". In other words, "You want tribute? I'll give you tribute! I'll give you our spears and swords, pointy end first!"

For that matter, the ancient Celts and the Romans could talk to one another and Gaulish and Latin were very similar (compare Gaulish rix to Latin rex, both meaning "king").

[Taran ap Dafydd]

Anglic itself was a Germanic language. Then you got the Roman invasion and the corruption of Anglic with Latin, at which point, to my knowledge, it became a Romance language.
While trade with the Gauls had already affected the language, it was the invasion of the Normans that really messed up the vocabulary and syntax of what quickly became Old English.

At that point, what had started as simple Celtic and been changed by the Angles, and corrupted by the Gauls and then the Romans finally just gave up and took on a Borg type persona. There wasn't a useful word in any language that proved impossible to adapt and use. If the word or even entire phrase proved simpler or sexier than what was already in use, it was stolen. If it described something for which there Wasn't any other phrase or word, well, that made the decision easier.

mipp, it's Gaelic. Not "Gaulish"
I think we have a language history specialist on this forum. Where is he?

[LongMa]

Anglic itself was a Germanic language. Then you got the Roman invasion and the corruption of Anglic with Latin, at which point, to my knowledge, it became a Romance language.
While trade with the Gauls had already affected the language, it was the invasion of the Normans that really messed up the vocabulary and syntax of what quickly became Old English.

At that point, what had started as simple Celtic and been changed by the Angles, and corrupted by the Gauls and then the Romans finally just gave up and took on a Borg type persona. There wasn't a useful word in any language that proved impossible to adapt and use. If the word or even entire phrase proved simpler or sexier than what was already in use, it was stolen. If it described something for which there Wasn't any other phrase or word, well, that made the decision easier.

mipp, it's Gaelic. Not "Gaulish"
I think we have a language history specialist on this forum. Where is he?

I'm kind of confused here.

When you say "Anglic" are you speaking of the Germanic tribe Angles and there language or are you speaking of people who lived in Roman and post Roman Briton (Brittania)? If you mean what the Angles spoke, it was a Germanic language (no doubt with some Latin loan words though). It is true that Latin was spoken in Brittania, but after the Roman withdrawl and the Germanic invasion...I'm not sure how much of it survived, I would think if it did in large quantity it would be infused with present day Welsh. Afterall, "King Arthur) was a Welsh legend concerning a king in the time of the Roman withdrawal who fought against the Germanic tribes.

I think mipp was speaking specifically about the Gaelic language spoken in Gaul (France) which was referred to as Gaulic by the Romans. I believe Gaulic was though to be more closely related to Welsh than to Irish/Scottish Gaels...but not 100% sure. Gaelic was spoken from Northern Italy, parts of Iberia, Belgium, Switzerland, all the way to Ireland at one time, some even claim it was spoken just North of ancient Greek as well, so it was the dominant language in much of Central and Western Europe. The Romans and the Germanic tribes pretty much killed Gaelic as a dominant language.

It's true that vulgar Latin (spoken Latin) absorbed German, Celtic, Greek, etc. Written Latin was more pure however...and it diverged quiet a bit from what people actually spoke in different areas of the Empire.

Yeah Norman was a deathblow to Old English...the infusion of Norman French and more Latin caused a rapid divergence away from German, but English is still considered a Germanic language, and is still far more similar to Dutch than to French grammatically.

English also underwent a sound shift in vowels that was different from what occurred in some other Germanic languages...

http://en.wikipedia....eat_Vowel_Shift


THis shows the % breakdown of influence in what makes up modern English:
http://en.wikipedia....ge#Word_origins

French is dominant, but this is vocabulary, typically in any language vocab is the first to change, grammar the last thing to change.

Edited by LongMa, 06 January 2009 - 04:16 PM.

[Mipp]

Anglic itself was a Germanic language. Then you got the Roman invasion and the corruption of Anglic with Latin, at which point, to my knowledge, it became a Romance language.
While trade with the Gauls had already affected the language, it was the invasion of the Normans that really messed up the vocabulary and syntax of what quickly became Old English.

At that point, what had started as simple Celtic and been changed by the Angles, and corrupted by the Gauls and then the Romans finally just gave up and took on a Borg type persona. There wasn't a useful word in any language that proved impossible to adapt and use. If the word or even entire phrase proved simpler or sexier than what was already in use, it was stolen. If it described something for which there Wasn't any other phrase or word, well, that made the decision easier.

mipp, it's Gaelic. Not "Gaulish"
I think we have a language history specialist on this forum. Where is he?

Taran, English is NOT and has NEVER been a Romance language. It is Germanic. It is true English has absorbed Latin (and Norman-French, and Greek, and many others) vocabulary, but that does not make it a Romance language, nor does that make it a Creole or a pidgin.

Here's an analogy: if I, a white American woman, were to put on a Japanese kimono, that would not make me a Japanese woman. I would be a white American woman wearing a kimono. Likewise, English is a Germanic language dressed up in some Latin/French/Greek vocabulary. Nor has English EVER been Celtic. The language spoken by the Britons was wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons, who imported Englisc, their own tongue. The Scots and Irish Celts and the Welsh continued speaking Celtic languages, but English never was a Celtic language, and in fact, barely absorbed any Celtic/Gaelic vocabulary whatsoever. You need to study linguistics before you come into a thread talking about how English 'started as simple Celtic'. Go pick up any book about the evolution of the English language, there are many available that will dispell these notions that English was ever a Celtic language 'corrupted by Gauls' and then somehow magically transformed into a Romance language.

Btw, there WAS a language called Gaulish. You might factcheck before telling someone else what's what.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaulish
indoeuro.bizland.com/tree/celt/gaulish.html
http://www.answers.com/gaulish

[Mipp]

I'm kind of confused here.

When you say "Anglic" are you speaking of the Germanic tribe Angles and there language or are you speaking of people who lived in Roman and post Roman Briton (Brittania)? If you mean what the Angles spoke, it was a Germanic language (no doubt with some Latin loan words though). It is true that Latin was spoken in Brittania, but after the Roman withdrawl and the Germanic invasion...I'm not sure how much of it survived, I would think if it did in large quantity it would be infused with present day Welsh. Afterall, "King Arthur) was a Welsh legend concerning a king in the time of the Roman withdrawal who fought against the Germanic tribes.

Taran has his history backwards. The last Roman legions were withdrawn from Britain in 410. The Anglo-Saxon invasion didn't begin in earnest until about forty years later. So how in the world did the "Roman invasion and the corruption of Anglic with Latin" work? The Romans were long gone by the time the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes started running roughshod over the island. So how did Latin 'corrupt' 'Anglic'? It is true that the Brythonic languages of the Britons had gotten vocabulary from Latin, but it's also true that English barely picked up any vocabulary from the Celtic languages it supplanted, and got it's Latin vocabulary through other means. There are only about five or six words of Celtic origin widely used in English. They are bucket, peat, crock, noggin, and nook. Not exactly a bounty.

[Taran ap Dafydd]

Okay. Sorry. I got my "invasions of England" out of order. Got the Britons first many thousands of years ago, then the Circaesir about 600-100 BC who split into the Celts and the Picts (Celts in Wales, Picts in Scotland). Then the Romans just a little later. Then the Gaels from Ireland (who were really just misplaced Gauls from the mainland) and then the Angles and Saxons from the mainland who split up into a dozen other, smaller groups. Then, of course the Vikings and then the Normans...

Took me a while to find my bloody books even after Googling the whole bunch of the ancient Brits (from the Celts, to the Picts to the Jutes to the Iceni) reminded me which books to pull off my shelves. And then, of course, I had to browse through them again.



Yes, I do (often) get certain similar events, peoples and items mixed up. Comes from having such a broad (though shallow) base of knowledge. I will agree I got it wrong on English being a Romance language. Don't remember where I read that, I think it was a textbook in Elementary, but then again, I may have just pieced a few things together incorrectly in my memory. Thus the not-so authoritative "to my knowledge" disclaimer on that one.
However, I Was correct in my statement that the language of the day and place was Germanic before the coming of the Romans.


As for "King Arthur was a Welsh myth concerning the aftermath of the Roman withdrawal" Unless some major discovery has been made and not shared, the oldest version of the King Arthur myth we have is Le Morte d'Arthur, a Norman telling of the myth in French and all else is conjecture or fragmentary evidence from many places and centuries.

And, seriously, Wikipedia? That's what you're using?
I'd like to recommend:
The Oxford Companion to British History
The Foundations of England: Or, Twelve Centuries of British History (B.C. 55-A.D. 1154) -- Both volumes
and
History of the Britons
Just for starters.

Edited by Taran ap Dafydd, 07 January 2009 - 01:26 AM.

[LongMa]

No I'm not using Wikipedia.

LOL

Try BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk...ng_arthur.shtml

Whether Arthur was actually a king or merely a warrior, however, is less clear. It is believed that he was the leader of Brythonic forces, and was killed following the battle of Camlann in about 515.

In the earliest mentions of Arthur in Welsh texts, he is never given the title of king. Medieval Welsh texts frequently referred to him as ameraudur (emperor or war leader). There is now a broad consensus that he was a Romano-British warrior leader defending Britain against Anglo Saxon invaders in the late fifth or early sixth century.

It is also true that most of the names of the "knights" of King Author (Round Table) had Gaelic and Germanic names.

The idea of Arthur "Searching for the Holy Grail" and all these other things likely did come from the mainland, likely through France, but that was a merger of preexisting myth (Anglo-Saxon through Welsh) with the new invading Normans. Actually I think those originated during the Victorian Era.

Here is an exert from the Welsh National Museum:

The first mention of Arthur is thought to be a reference in a line from the poem The Gododdin of Aneirin, the earliest known work of literature in Welsh. The poem is from the 6th century, when much of western Britain (Wales, northern England and southern Scotland) spoke Welsh; the earliest surviving written form of the poem dates to the 13th century. The reference to Arthur in this source may be no earlier than the 9th century, but it demonstrates the fame of Arthur among the Welsh at this time.

The most important of the historical texts is the Historia Brittonum, the 'History of the Britons', which gives the earliest written record of Arthur who 'fought against them [the Saxons] with the kings of the Britons but he himself was leader [Duke] of Battles', winning twelve battles. The earliest version of this history is dated about AD829-830.

The Annales Cambriae, or 'Welsh Annals', probably compiled in the mid 10th century, record the date of one battle, the Battle of Badon in AD518, and Arthur's death at Camlann in AD537-9. This suggests that if Arthur was indeed an historical figure, he probably lived in the 6th century.
The Black Book of Carmarthen

Early Welsh literature has many wondrous tales which form an important part of the Arthurian tradition. There are portrayals of Arthur in anonymous Welsh poetry found in 13th and 14th century manuscripts. In one of the poems of the Black Book of Carmarthen, Englynion y Beddau ('The Stanzas of the Graves'), Arthur's grave is described as a great wonder because no one knows where it is located.

The greatest of the Welsh Arthurian prose tales is Culhwch ac Olwen. An English translation of this and eleven other Welsh tales appeared for the first time in the 19th century, publication The Mabinogion. Four other tales in this collection focus on Arthur - the 'romances' of The Lady of the Fountain (or Owain), Peredur, and Geraint son of Erbin, together with the Dream of Rhonabwy which presents a satirical view of Arthur and his world.

http://www.museumwal...r/article/1928/