Celtic word in english language

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.

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 14^th 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.

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?

Disclosure: the Amazon link is an affiliate link, so I get a small referral fee if you buy the book through my link.

I’ve already blogged about Latin words in the English language, but now it’s the turn of the Celtic languages such as Gaulish, Scots Gaelic, Irish and Welsh (but let’s also put in a good word for Cornish).

These have contributed to our language on several occasions, according to that old favourite book of mine, The English Language – Grammar, History, Literature by Professor Meiklejohn, printed in 1905. In his day the spelling was Keltic, but I will use the modern spelling.

Meiklejohn said Celtic words entered the language on three occasions:
1) Direct from the ancient Britons who were found in the British Isles when the Angles and Saxons invaded in the fifth century
2) In Gallic/Gaulish words brought over by the Normans when they invaded in 1066
3) Later additions, many of them from literature such as the works of Sir Walter Scott. I would add to this the many words we take on board these days because of the cosmopolitan nature of society.

A word here about the Celts (probably from the ancient Greek Keltoi and Roman Celtae). The earliest Celtic speakers were the Iron Age people of central Europe, around the Danube and Rhine, established there by the sixth century BC.

They then spread over a wide swathe of Europe by the third century BC. This included France and Britain but left the South of Europe to the Mediterranean “Latin” people and Scandinavia to “Germanic” language speakers.

The Romans expanded their empire into France (Gaul) during Julius Caesar’s Gallic wars (58-51BC). Caesar also tackled Britain gradually from 55 BC, but didn’t get very far, so the Roman occupation only started in earnest from around AD 43.

By around 410 the Romans had gone home again, as they fought to save their heartlands from northern Germanic tribes such as the Goths, Visigoths and Vandals. The Romans never had conquered the Celtic people of Scotland and Ireland, although they had made great inroads in Wales. It also seems the Romans took little from the Celtic languages, although they contributed much to the British speech (modern Welsh has many old Latinisms).

The Celtic peoples were driven further to the northern and western edges of the British Isles by the invading Germanic peoples – Angles, Saxons and Jutes – who started to arrive from the fifth century and established the foundations of the English language.

Some Celtic languages are still spoken today. These long ago split into two different branches: Scots and Irish descend from Goidelic Celtic while Welsh and Cornish (and Breton) descend from Brythonic Celtic. To give just one example, “son of” was/is “maqq/mac” in Goidelic but “map/mab” in Brythonic.

But back to those Celtic contributions to the English language…

1) Direct from the ancient Britons encountered by the Germanic invaders

According to Meiklejohn this contribution includes: bannock, clout, crock, taper, darn, drudge, mug, posset, dun (brown), glen, hassock, knob, mattock, pool…

Many of these are very domestic words: “It may be permitted to conjecture that in many cases the Saxon invader married a British wife, who spoke her own language, taught her children to speak their mother tongue, and whose words took firm root in the kitchen of the new English household.”

The names of most rivers, mountains, lakes and hills are Celtic, for they wouldn’t have been changed by the newcomers. You might say they go with the territory… There are two names for rivers found in various forms all over Great Britain. These are Avon and Ex.

The word Avon means simply water – you can imagine Celts near a river simply calling it water. There are 14 Avons in Britain. Ex also means water and there are maybe more than 20 streams with this name.

It’s the Ex in Exeter and morphs into the Ax in Axminster, the Ox in Oxford and the Ux in Uxbridge. It becomes the Ouse in Yorkshire and the East, while it becomes the Usk in Wales and the Esk in Scotland.

The Celtic word for mountain, Pen (Welsh) and Ben (Scottish) are also widespread.

2) Gallic words brought by the Normans in 1066

“The Normans came from Scandinavia early in the tenth century and wrested the valley of the Seine out of the hands of Charles the Simple, the then king of the French. The language spoken by the people of France was a broken-down form of spoken Latin, but retaining many Gaulish words.”

These are some of the words: bag, bargain, barter, barrel, basin, basket, budget, bonnet, car, caul, garter, ribbon, mutton, gown, mitten, motley, rogue, varlet, vassal, truant.

3) Later additions
According to Meiklejohn these are comparatively few.
From Scots Gaelic we have: clan, claymore (a sword), ptarmigan, brogue (in the sense of a shoe), plaid, pibroch (bagpipe war-music), slogan (a war-cry) and whisky.

And from Irish we have shamrock, gag, log, clog and brogue (in the sense of a mode of speech).

Since Meiklejohn’s day I’m sure we have been continuing to take on these words and I know there is at least one word of Welsh in modern English – corgi, meaning dwarf dog. I suppose this word only became common after the current British Royal Family became interested in the breed.

A more obscure Welsh word in English is cock-a-bondy, a fly used in angling. It is from the Welsh “coch a bon ddu”, meaning red with a black stem.

As you would expect, Wikipedia has a section on words from Celtic, some of the suggestions a bit dubious, but here are a few of their more interesting ones not mentioned above…

Ambassador comes to us via Latin and Old French from the Gaulish word “ambactos”, meaning “servant”, “henchman”, or “one who goes about”. Embassy comes from the same root but by way of Old Provencal, Italian and Middle French.

Galore, as in Whisky Galore, comes from the Scots Gaelic “gu leor”, meaning “enough”, and ceilidh is the Gaelic for an evening of folk song, story and dance.

From Irish we also have shillelagh (a cudgel) and shebeen (an unlicensed drinking house) and those creatures of folklore such as banshee, leprechaun, and the Puck of Shakespeare’s A midsummer Night’s Dream.

The word penguin is possibly from pen gwyn, Welsh for “white head” and originally applied to the great auk. But it may also be derived from Breton, which is closely related…

Long-time followers of my blog may remember my post on the origins of English. The language tree in that post shows that English is largely derived from Germanic, specifically Anglo-Frisian.

So, where are the Celts? Are there no Celtic words in English?

As several of Quora answers explain, there are several – but far fewer than might be expected. Take one of my favorite British English colloquialisms, “smashing,” which is used to mean “really rather good.” Smashing may actually be an Anglicization of the Scottish Gaelic phrase is math sin, “that is good” (although some linguists question that).

The English word “twig” in the sense of suddenly catch on, and the hippy word “dig,” meaning to be really involved in, both come from Scots Gaelic tuig, understand.

Then there are several irish, Celtic, and Cymraeg (Welsh) words that have made their way into modern English, such as smithereens (smidrín), bog, galore (go leor), spree, slew, brogue (a type of shoe; brogue means shoe). Or banshee, breeches, whisky (uisce), clan, lug (ear), slob (slab), phony (fáinne), slogan (sluagh-ghairm), and gob (mouth). Or how about snug from snog, “good.”

And of course, hooligans (Ó hUallacháin), and putting the kaibosh on things are both Irish Gaelic. Then, penguin (pen-gwyn = white head), flannel (gwlannen = wool cloth), cwm (=valley), druid (derwydd = one who knows the oak-tree), crumpet (crempog = pancake), adder (neidr = snake), bard (bardd = poet), bow (bwa = bow), crockery (crochan = cauldron/bowl), gull (gwylan = seagull), iron (haearn), lawn (llan = grassy clearing), Cromlech (crom = curved/bent + llech = stone), and avon.

So, any hooligan bards among you who ever went on a whisky spree on your lawn and smashed a plastic penguin to smithereens with your brogue, while screaming like a banshee, congratulations: you have put your Celtic language heritage to good use.

Enter Politics

So why isn’t Celtic more prominent in English? Well, Celtic languages were often victims of politics.

Four hundred years of Roman occupation of Britannia pretty much eradicated Celtic from the area that would later become England. Celtic speakers were pushed to the peripheries by the borders of Roman Britain.

The Angles and Saxons that came after the fall of Rome would have encountered very few Celtic speakers in what would later become England, the population instead speaking British Vulgar Latin.

Then, the Vikings came and threw some Old Norse into the mix, which is why Old English is far more akin to German than modern English.

After the Vikings, the Normans invaded, adding French to the milieu. French was the language of court and Latin of religion and learning and permeated the legal system. Also, the Normans despised Old English because it sounded to their ears harsh and guttural. So, it’s no surprise that within a couple of centuries it had all but gone.

Adding to the pressure was the fact that during less enlightened times, the speaking of Gaelic in Scotland and Irish in Ireland was actively discouraged to the point that children could be beaten at school for speaking the language they spoke at home. The act of union also discouraged the use of Welsh (Henry VIII) and around this time – and for many decades after – the Welsh people were thought to be uneducated and uncouth. While Gaelic was not actually made illegal, an 1847 report into the state of education in Wales implied that the Welsh language should be removed and Welsh was banned from courts, therefore further diminishing its use.

By the 1950s, only a handful of native speakers were in the six Celtic countries. A subsequent revival has raised the numbers once more and there is a primary school (Bunscoill Ghaelgagh) at St John’s Isle of Man, that teaches through the Manx language.

As a result, Celtic-derived words in Old or Middle English are pretty rare and the only common Celtic place-name element in England, outside Cumbria and the West Country, is “-co(o)mb(e)”, meaning “valley.”

What About Grammar?

Interestingly enough, and despite the lack of Celtic words in English vocabulary, there may be a subtle Celtic grammatical influence on English, since there are certain grammatical features in English that are shared with the Celtic languages, particularly Welsh, but which are rare or absent in the other Germanic languages.

For example, Celtic and English have formal identity between intensifier and reflexive pronoun. They share this feature only with Maltese, Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian in Europe. In Middle English, the old intensifier “self” was replaced by a fusion of pronoun + “self” which is now used in a communication to emphasize the object in question; e.g. “A woman who is conspicuously generous to others less fortunate than herself.”

So it’s possible that the ancient Brittonic language spoken in what’s now England left a bigger impression on English than you’d think just from the rather small contribution to English vocabulary.

As for me and my continued fascination with English, the fact that it is essentially a mongrel language that continues to evolve to this day is a big part of its appeal!

When the
Germanic tribes migrated to Britain in the 5^th
century A.D. they confronted Celts and waged merciless wars with
them. As a result of this the Celts were defeated and they retreated
to Scotland, Cornwall, Wales and the peninsula of Brittany, which now
belongs to France. The language of Celts dropped out of usage, only
some words penetrated into Old English: binn
(MnE
bin
“a
receptacle for corn”, рус. ларь),
dūn
(MnE
down
“a
hill”), dunn
(MnE
dun
“grayish-brownish
colour”).

The words
cradle
“a
bed for an infant”, bannock
“a
round flat loaf” (рус. пресная
лепёшка),
glen
“a
narrow valley”, bard
“a
minstrel, a poet”, druid
“a
member of the priesthood among the Celts”, loch
“lake” (used in Scottish dialects) and some geographical names
(Kent,
Dover, the
rivers Esk
and
Avon)
are also of Celtic origin.

The name of
the British capital London
originates from the Celtic compound noun Llyndūn
meaning “a fortress on the hill over the river” (Celtic llyn,
“a river”
+ dūn, “a
fortified hill”).

3.3. Scandinavian borrowings

The period
between the 8^th
and the 11^th
centuries was marked by several invasions of Scandinavian Vikings who
founded extensive settlements in the North and North-East of Britain.
In the course of nearly 300 years half of England was overrun by the
invaders. Naturally, Scandinavian ways and people left an important
mark on the land. As both the languages belonged to the Germanic
group and were closely related the process of borrowing went very
easily.

The
borrowings were simple words of everyday use. The borrowed nouns
are: sky,
law, husband, skin, wing, anger, egg, window, fellow, gate, seat;
adjectives:
low,
ill, ugly, weak, loose, odd, wrong, happy; verbs:
cast,
die, hit, lift, call, take, want. Some
pronouns
were
borrowed: they,
them, their (instead
of OE hie,
him, hiera),
both
and
same
and one preposition
– till.

Some of the
Scandinavian borrowings can be distinguished by the initial sound
cluster [sk]: sky,
skill, skin, skirt, ski, skull.
Another distinctive feature is the sound [g] before front vowels:
give,
get.

Borrowing
from Scandinavian continued till the middle of the 11^th
century when another invasion took place in the history of English
people.

3.4. French borrowings

This time
the whole of the country was conquered by the Normans. After winning
in the year of 1066 the battle of Hastings and defeating the English
troops the duke of Normandy William, who later came to be called
William the Conqueror, became King of England.

The Norman
Conquest influenced the life of English people and their language
more than any other event in their history. For more than two
centuries England became a bilingual country. Norman French gradually
began to be used in all governmental offices, in the court, in the
church, in the army, at school. Much of the literature was written in
French, translated from French, or strongly influenced by French
models. All the key positions in government were held by the Normans
and those Anglo-Saxon lords who stayed alive after the conquest had
to adjust themselves to the French ways of life if they wanted to
remain part of the ruling class.

English
came to be used only in the speech of poor townsfolk, craftsmen and
peasants. But, nevertheless, the poor people formed the majority of
the population and in the 13^th
and 14^th
centuries the practice of English was re-established and French began
to be gradually ousted from schools, courts of justice, governmental
institutions and everyday communication. But the English language was
replenished by a great number of French words.

All French
borrowings of the Norman dialect can be arranged according to several
semantic groups:

1. administrative
   words: state,
   government, parliament, chancellor, council, power, country, county,
   nation, people;

2. legal
   terms: court,
   judge, justice, jury, crime, prison, to accuse, to plead, damage,
   fraud, slander, attorney, solicitor;

3. military
   terms: army,
   war, soldier, officer, enemy, battle, peace, regiment, retreat,
   victory, defence, sergeant, lieutenant, captain,general;

4. educational
   terms: pupil,
   lesson, library, science, pen, pencil;

5. titles and
   words denoting some feudal relations: duke,
   duchess, baron, baroness, count, countess, prince, princess, sir,
   madam, peasant, servant, manor;

6. religious
   terms: religion,
   clergy, parish, prayer, sermon, abbey, saint, vice, virtue, parson,
   chapel;

7. art and
   crafts: art,
   colour, ornament, temple, palace, chamber, architecture, literature,
   prose, story, volume, chapter, poet, choir, design, tower, arch,
   aisle, butcher, carpenter, tailor, painter;

8. medical
   terms: medicine,
   malady, poison, diet;

9. terms of
   kinship: aunt,
   uncle, niece, nephew, cousin;

10. numerous
    words denoting objects and notions of everyday life: table,
    chair, plate, saucer, money, market, leisure, pleasure, journey,
    dinner, supper, dress, costume, luxury, comfort, jewels, river,
    autumn, large, clear, to use, to turn, to catch, to cry, to cover,
    to boil, to fry, to dance and
    lots of others.
    

Norman
French
ceased to be used in Britain in the second half of the 14^th
century, though already in the 13^th
century it was only an official language used in governmental
institutions but not in everyday communication.

Borrowings
from French of the later period, after the 14^th
century, came already from another dialect – Parisian
French.
Especially numerous was the flow of French borrowings in the second
half of the 17^th,
first half of the 18^th
centuries. Unlike Norman French words, Parisian French borrowings
were the result of cultural ties, political and trade relations. The
characteristic feature of loan words of this period is the
preservation of French spelling, pronunciation, stress on the final
syllable: memoir,
bourgeois, camouflage, regime, police, mirage, bomb, marine, ballet,
corps, grotesque, machine, technique, campaign, routine, etc.

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