ABSTRACT
There are no records of the Celtic language(s) these people spoke, but it may be assumed that what they spoke were the Goidelic-Celtic predecessors of Irish and Scottish Gaelic and Brythonic-Celtic ancestors of Welsh (link: Celtic). Yet Celtic left few traces in English. The rural Celtic population would have been enslaved or otherwise subdued; or they would have been driven off the land, which meant moving westward into Cornwall or Wales or leaving Britain for Brittany in present-day France; in cases in which they lived in unattractive or inaccessible places the Celts would have been ignored. In all three cases they would have had little opportunity to add to the word stock of the Germanic newcomers or to exercise influence on grammar or pronunciation. Among the exceptions were a few items such as the now lost words brat “cloak” or bin “manger” and a small number of survivals in ModE: bannock “small Scottish cake” < OE bannuc “bit, small piece” < Old British/Cornish banna “drop”; brock “badger” < OE brocc < Old British broc ; clock < OE clugge, compare Middle Irish clocc “bell”; curse < OE cursian < Old Irish (OIr) cu¯rsagim “I blame”; dun “dull grayish brown” < OE dunn < OIr donn “dark.” Virtually nothing further in the everyday vocabulary of English testifies to the linguistic presence of the once dominant Celtic-speaking population, and even the words given here are not all accepted as uncontroversially Celtic in origin.
