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expressed with a verb-noun progressive, while in English’s Mary is singing progressive, singing is not a verb-noun but a participle. However, the participle is just a latter-day morphing of what started as a verb-noun. Just as with meaningless do , what English does now is a drifting from what first was even more like Celtic.
    It went like this. In Old English one could say “I am on hunting” to mean that you were hunting. This was, obviously, just like the Welsh “Mary is in singing.” Then in Middle English, the on started wearing down and one might say “I am a-hunting,” just as we now say “Let’s go” instead of “Let us go.”
    Then before long, the a - was gone completely—as in the way we casually say “ ‘Tsgo” for “Let’s go”—and hence, just “I am hunting.” Ladies and gentlemen, the birth of a present participle. Celtic was English’s deistic God—it set things spinning and then left them to develop on their own. But that first spin— I am on hunting —was key. It was just like Welsh.
    And it’s not just Welsh. Cornish down south has the same kinks about do and - ing . The way to say I love is:
     
    Mi a wra cara.
I at do love
     
    Sort of an Elvisesque “I’m a-doing loving,” except it is a perfectly normal sentence in Cornish, and its do is used the same way with negative sentences and in questions:
     
    Gwra cara?
do-you love
    Then it has the same mysterious drive to use verb-nouns for the present tense. Here is She is buying vegetables , in which the word for buy is a verb-noun:
     
    Yma hi ow prena hy losow.
is she at buying her vegetables
     
    So: the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes brought a language to Britain in which a sentence like Did you see what he is doing ? would have sounded absurd. The people already living in Britain spoke some of the very, very few languages in the world—and possibly the only ones—where that sentence would sound perfectly normal. After a while, that kind of sentence was being used in English as well.
    And yet specialists in the history of English sincerely believe that English started using do and - ing by itself, and that it is irrelevant, or virtually so, that Welsh and Cornish have the same features. You can page through countless books and articles on The History of English, and even on specifically the history of meaningless do or the - ing present, and find Celtic either not mentioned at all, actively dismissed, or, at best, mentioned in passing as “a possible influence” (read: of no significant bearing upon the issue).
    There is clearly something strange about this, but it is not that legions of scholars are incompetent, stubborn, bigoted against Celts, or anything else of the sort. Rather, they come at the issue with certain established assumptions, reasonable in themselves, which if held, understandably leave one comfortable treating such close correspondences between English and Celtic as accidents.
    Those assumptions, however, are mistaken.

Assumption Number One: The Celts All Just Died
    The first assumption is that after their arrival in England in A.D. 449, the Germanic invaders routed the Celts in more or less a genocide, leaving mere remnants huddling on the southwesterly fringes of the island. From here, it has traditionally been concluded that Celtic languages could not have had any impact on English for the simple reason that no Celtic speakers survived the genocide to influence the language.
    But the truth is that the genocide of an entire society inhabiting vast expanses of territory is possible only with modern technology. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes did not possess anything we would consider modern technology. How, precisely, were they to kill practically every Celt outside of Wales and Cornwall—that is, in an area about the size of New England? With swords? How many people can you get at? Remember, there weren’t even guns yet. And even when Dutch and English colonists in South Africa had guns, African