Abstract :
Present-day historians of English arewidely agreed that, throughout its recorded history,
the English language has absorbed linguistic influences from other languages, most
notably Latin, Scandinavian, and French. What may give rise to differing views is the
nature and extent of these influences, not the existence of them. Against the backdrop
of this unanimity, it seems remarkable that there is one group of languages for which no
such consensus exists, despite a close coexistence between English and these languages
in the British Isles spanning more than one and a half millennia. This group is, of
course, the Insular Celtic languages, comprising the Brittonic subgroup of Welsh
and Cornish and the Goidelic one comprising Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic. The
standard wisdom, repeated in textbooks on the history of English such as Baugh and
Cable (1993), Pyles & Algeo (1993), and Strang (1970), holds that contact influences
from Celtic have always been minimal and are mainly limited to Celtic-origin place
names and river names and a mere handful of other words. Thus, Baugh & Cable
(1993: 85) state that ‘outside of place-names the influence of Celtic upon the English
language is almost negligible’; in a similar vein, Strang (1970) writes that ‘the extensive
influence of Celtic can only be traced in place-names’ (1970: 391).
