ABSTRACT
Celtic influence on English has probably been continuous over the last fifteen hundred years but may have been greatest:
1 when the Angles, Saxons and Jutes first arrived in Britain during the fifth century and
2 during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries when large numbers of Celts moved into the cities and into London in particular
Because the Celts have been in an inferior position to the Germanic peoples who settled in Britain, much of the influence from Cornish, Irish and Scots Gaelic and from Welsh has either been denied or underestimated by scholars. Wrenn is fairly typical of English scholars in his claim (1958):
Celtic influences have been sporadic and almost negligible…
and the following extract from the Oxford English Dictionary vol. 2, p. 592 illustrates the too-easy dismissal of Celtic influences:
Cog sb. 2 [ME cogge, found from 13th c.: the Sw.kugge, Norw.kug, pl.kugger, in same sense, are evidently cognate; but the relations between them are not determined. The Celtic words, Ir., Gael.cog, Welsh cocas, uncritically cited as the prob. source, are (as usual in such cases) from English.]
In the case of cog sb. 2, the OED editors may be correct in dismissing the Celtic etymology, but the bracketed parenthesis is indicative of an attitude that tends to see all influence from the English-Celtic contact as one-way traffic.
