This is a word of diverse meanings. It pertains to Britain which is
divided into two parts, Great Britain, the major landmass of the
British Isles, and Little Britain or
Brittany, which has been more or less integrated into France. The
British constituted a Celtic people
before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons who spoke P-Celt languages.
These have descended to us as modern Welsh and the various dialects
of Breton. These languages are distinct from the Q-Celt languages
of Ireland, The Isle of Man and the Scottish Highglands. It has
been suggested that this language difference predated the arrival
of the celts in the British Isles.
However a more probable account has emerged from the interaction of
the British with the Africans and Romans
which lead to their language developing in a particular
direction.
At the time of the English invasion the British were removed from most of England,
although settlements such as Walthamstow remained. 'Wal' here has
the same root as 'Welsh' which means foreigner in Anglo-Saxon. Some
British exiles went to Brittany, and
some suggest that the old Celtic language had already died out here
and that they in effect re-introduced it. Cornwall, which means the
'Foreigners of Kernow' remained another bastion of British culture. It was only in the sixteenth
century with the defeat of the Prayer Book Rebellion that English
replaced Cornish as the commonplace language.
Ironically enough this happened with the emergence of a British identity in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Prominent in this was her
magician-cum-astrologer John Dee who first coined the expression
British Empire. Here he was using a lot
of the ideas developed by Dante in his Monarchia. On
Elizabeth's death, James VI of Scotland became James I of England,
and so became the first monarch of Great Britain
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