In a recent Langfocus video I talked about Celtic influence on English, inspired by John McWhorter’s book “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue”. In the video I mentioned that while English has a couple of grammatical peculiarities that resemble Celtic languages, it doesn’t have many Celtic loanwords stemming from the early contact between the Anglo-Saxons and the Celtic-speaking Britons.
In the comments on that video, many people pointed out additional Celtic words in English that I didn’t mention. There is a significant number of such Celtic words that have entered English over the centuries since that early period of contact.
Gaelic Vocabulary in English
Lots of of these words entered English from the Goidelic (or Gaelic) languages: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx, all of which developed from Old Irish. One example is the word “slew” meaning “a large number”. The man committed a slew of armed robberies. Slew comes from Irish sluagh “an army, crowd, multitude.” It entered English in the mid-1800s.
The word slogan also stems partly from the same word. sluagh-ghairm is a Gaelic term (either Irish or Scottish Gaelic) meaning “battle cry,” referring to battle cries used by Scottish and Irish clans. As we saw above, one meaning of sluagh is “army,” and ghairm means “cry.” This term was first used in English in the 1510s, in the form slogorne. Interestingly enough, that means it entered English earlier than “slew.” Obviously the English word no longer refers to a literal battle cry, but has the meaning of a phrase representing a group or movement.
One unsurprising contribution is the word whiskey! It comes from Gaelic uisge beatha which literally means “water of life”.
Another is bog – an area of soft, wet land formed of decomposing plant matter. This word entered Middle English from Gaelic bogach, with bog meaning soft and moist.
As is often the case with etymology, some words entered English after a long journey through several different languages. This is the case with the word clock. This word is thought to have originated with the Old Irish word clocc, which then spread to Medieval Latin via Irish missionaries, then to Old North French cloque, then to Middle Dutch clocke, then to English clokke in the 14th century. Isn’t it amazing how a word can go on an epic journey like this through several different languages before it ends up in your own? This etymology is sometimes disputed, though, as many are.
Some other words of Gaelic origin include: trousers, brat, clan, shindig, smashing (as in “wonderful”), plaid, pet, and more.
Welsh Vocabulary in English
There are also words that entered English from Welsh, though many are disputed or uncertain. One is penguin, which may come from Welsh pen gwyn, which means “white head”.
The word gull, referring to a type of bird, comes from Welsh gwylan, Cornish guilan, or perhaps from a Brythonic precursor of those words.
Words From Gaulish, via French
English also has some loanwords from French that probably trace back too Gaulish, a Celtic language that had an influence on French. One such word is lawn, from Old French lande. The Gaulish form isn’t exactly known, but it would be cognate with the Breton word “lann” meaning “heath.”
Another example is change, which comes from Old French changier, which traces back to late Latin cambiare, earlier Latin cambire (meaning “to barter or exchange”) – a word of Gaulish origin.
Celtic Place Names in English
Though I don’t really consider place names vocabulary per se, it’s also worth pointing out that there are many Celtic place names in England. Let’s leave aside Cornwall, because that’s too obvious. In Cumbria (where the Celtic language Cumbric used to be spoken): there’s Blencathra hill and Helvellyn mountain range; River Ehen, and River Cocker.
Numerous place names throughout England include an element deriving from Brythonic iksa meaning “water”. For example: Eskeleth, North Yorkshire, and the River Axe is Dorset, Somerset and Devon.
Many names incorporate Brythonic penn~ meaning “’hill, top, head, chief’. For example: Penge in Greater London; Pendlebury in Greater Manchester, etc. There are numerous other such topographic words from Celtic languages that appear in English place names.
I could go on and on, but you get the point: Celtic vocabulary in English goes beyond the handful of words that English absorbed from Brythonic languages during the initial Anglo-Saxon settlement. The Celtic languages have had many centuries since then to leave their mark on the English language.
Do you know any other Celtic words in English?
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