There is certainly room for Celtic to have influenced Old English. The problem with dictionaries is that with etymologies, they tend to stop once they get back to Latin, Greek, Old English or other ancient languages, or something that looks like an Indo-European root, when no doubt it could have gone back much further or taken another path before going all the way back to I-E. I don’t think the Anglo-Saxons could have displaced the Celts so entirely… the Celtic Empire was huge and I think it is safe to assume that it was also quite powerful. Since they also adopted their national names (i.e. Britain) and many of their personal names, it seems more like assimilation, though I could be wrong.
My theory is that the Anglo-Saxon speakers literally displaced the Celtic speakers; they were either killed or ran off to places like Wales and Scotland. This is sheer conjecture on my part, though. I don’t know enough about that part of history to be sure.
This was the standard theory until recently but apparently new studies have shown that there was much more continuity in the population than was previously thought. The book I was reading about this is at home and I’m at work so I’ll get more info tonight.
Most of the acknowledged Celtic-derived words in English are placenames and words for topographical features. Avon, tor, lough, and so on. Again, my list is at home.
And where do the Celtic languages come from? I assume that there was a heavy Viking influence, but I don’t even know that for sure.
In the beginning (well not quite but close enough) there was Indo-European, probably spoken in what is now the Ukraine or Southern Russia. With migrations, conquests and so on Indo-European broke up to form other languages, just as the Romance languages developed out of Latin. One branch became Sanskrit and the languages of Northern India. Another branch became Iranian. Another branch became Greek. Another branch became the Italic languages, including Latin. Another branch became the Germanic languages (including eventually Old English, Old High and Low German, Old Norse, Gothic, and so on), and another branch became the Celtic languages.
The earliest Celts we know of lived on the Danube in the 5th century BC but spread out into most of what is now Western Europe. The Romans knew them as Galli (Gauls). Italy north of the Po was called Cisalpine Gaul (Gaul this-side-of-the-Alps). In the third century BC Gauls were used as mercenary troops by some of the Successor Kings who fought over Alexander the Great’s empire. Some of these troops settled in parts of modern Turkey and were known as Galatians (hence Paul’s letter to the Galatians). There seem to have been two main migrations of Celtic speakers into Britain. The first wave (4th century BC?) reached Scotland, the Isle of Man, and Ireland. Gaelic, Erse, and Manx developed from the language of this wave. A second wave settled in Southern England and Wales. Their language later developed into Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. The Romans conquered the Gauls. As the Germanic tribes took over the Western Roman empire in the 5th century, they took over the Gauls as well. In continental Europe the Celtic languages died out except in what is now Brittany, where the Celtic language was kept going by refugees from Britain (the similarity of name is no coincidence). As I said above, there seems to have been some continuity of population, but the Celtic languages have only really kept going in the far west.
The Vikings spoke Scandinavian languages, which are part of the Germanic branch of Indo-European. Starting from the 8th century AD, Vikings from Denmark, Norway and Sweden moved out raiding and trading everywhere their boats could carry them. One lot, the Rus, went down the rivers from the Baltic to found Russia. Another lot came to N. France to found Normandy (North Man dy). Many Vikings settled in Eastern England (the Danelaw) and this had a huge impact on the English language. There is one theory that says that this is when and why Old English started losing its inflections. The stems were similar enough in Old English and the Viking languages, but the grammatical subtleties of inflections were too different, and so the two groups had to find other ways of making themselves understood.
Then came 1066. The Normans (Vikings) who had settled in N. France had taken to using the local French dialect rather than keeping their own language. So that was what they brought over to England with them, resulting in the Germanic-Romance hybrid we know and love today.
May I have the name of this book? I’d be interested in reading it sometime.
You’re not saying that Slavic languages descended from Old Norse, are you??
The Anglo-Saxons edited by James Campbell. It stresses continuity between Romano-Celtic Britain and AS England, and then AS England and Norman England. I have also seen on TV a programme about genetic population studies which backed up this idea of continuity of population. I forget the name of the programme, though.
No, that was just an aside because I thought it was mildly interesting that Rus was originally the name of a Viking group. Does anyone know what traces this left on the Russian language?
First of all, thanks to Bingley for that incredible and informative post!! 
Wow!
Let’s see what I can add to this discussion. Not too long ago, I saw a PBS program on the Vikings which had some interesting information on this very subject. The show was stressing the culture of the Vikings, as opposed to the traditional burn-and-loot idea of the Vikings. As the show said, most of the written history of the Vikings was kept by the monks the Vikings were burning and looting, and they weren’t really the best people to record the Vikings’ better side. 
The show gave the usual bit about the Viking raids on England and the Vikings in North America, all things that I learned about in school years ago, but it went farther and spoke of the Vikings actually establishing trade routes all through northwestern Russia, right through the center, and all the way to Constantinople and the Turkish empire. Apparently, according to this program (and you may know differently than I do) the Vikings, who had an excellent culture of their own, had a heavy influence on Russian languages, customs and artifacts. I don’t remember exactly which way it worked, if the name Russia came from the Viking Rus or the Viking Rus came from a word the people in what is now Russia used to describe the Vikings, but I do remember a relation being drawn between the two. Unfortunately, the show was on a couple of months ago, and my memory is rather hazy…we may have taped it, actually, as part of our schooling, and if we still have it hanging around, I’ll watch it again and see what else I can glean. 
Thank you. Come to think of it, I heard something about an ancient man’s remains that were found preserved in England, and DNA was able to be obtained. They actually proved that a man in the local area had a large number of the same genetic markers.
Maybe the difference is in the number of people who migrate, and the extent to which they isolate themselves. If the Anglo-Saxons intermarried heavily with the Celts, then assuming they were the dominant “race” in the area, it would stand to reason that the Anglo-Saxon language would start to displace the Celtic. However, if the conquering people set themselves up as “nobles”, as the Normans did, and don’t marry “beneath their station”, then it would seem more logical that the languages wouldn’t mix so much. Also it would obviously depend on numbers; how many Normans were there relative to the Anglo-Saxons? How many Anglo-Saxons relative to Celts?
OK, I thought you were saying there was a direct genetic link, which seemed a stretch to me.
I have read (in J.P. Mallory’s In Search of the Indo-Europeans, in case your interested) that the influence was mostly in loanwords. For example, the Russian word for bread is “xleb”, where “x” is a guttural. I don’t know Old Norse, but the Old English word for bread is “hlaf”, where I believe the “h” is also somewhat guttural. And since “b” is a voiced “p”, and since a “f” is a sort of aspirated “p”, it’s not to hard to imagine something like “hlaf” becoming “xleb”.
More possibly interesting trivia about “hlaf”. A cognate for “hlaf” is Modern English is “loaf”. Combine “daege” (cognate with “dough”), or “kneader”, with “hlaf”, and you get “hlafdaege”, which becomes “hlafdige”. By Middle English, this became “lady”. Add “weard”, which is “ward” or “guardian”, and you get “hlafweard”, or “hlaford”, which eventually became “lord”. Also, for you Christians out there, “hlafmaesse” or “loafmass”, became “Lammas” (which, of course, has no linguistic relationship to “llamas”. ).
Dunno how britannian would sound, but maybe you would like to make it up?
http://www.zompist.com/kit.html
<Kalailan knows that this link doesn’t have much of a connection to the topic, but nevertheless want to share it>
Neat site! I have my own ways of working out my languages, but it’s neat to look through, even so.
And, Lex-a fascinating discourse on word-word whats? Mutations? Reverse geneaologies? Anyway, it was neat! I just love studying where words came from and the histories and relationships of languages!
Etymology?
Yeah, I love that stuff too. It’s useless, as far as I can tell, but quite fascinating. Maybe the uselessness is a plus; it’s something that takes you completely away from day-to-day tedium.
Oh, BTW, I was reviewing that chapter in the Indo-European book that I mentioned earlier, and it was the Goths who it is believed introduced Germanic loan words to Slavic (or Proto-Slavic), not the Old Norse (although the Vikings might very well have been responsble for the word “rus”, for all I know).
Etymology! That’s the word. Thanks! 
There’s nothing like a completely useless course of study to relax one’s mind. But studying where words came from helps you to understand them better, I think, which is always a good thing.
Nice posts, Bingley
Keesa, Many linguists would say that celtic and italic form a group. As Bingley has shown, the Celtic languages aren’t classified as Germanic languages.
The issue of the Celts’ genetics with comparison to those of the Germanic tribes, especially those who entered England, is much more complicated. Some have even suggested that the Romans called the Germans germanus because they were the pure Celts!
I guess someday I’ll have to research that. It’s definitely a subject that interests me, that’s for sure.
How do you think English pronounciation would be different now if there had been a direct and extended Roman influence? Do you think it would have changed at all?
British pronunciation of vowels is not really so different from Latin and the consonants are not a great deal different from the Romance languages. So, I would imagine that pronunciation would not be much different except for maybe some of the strange English sounds might have disappeared or diminished (i.e. the SH-sound) not to mention that if Romans had been here there would have never been Norman invasions.
I don’t know. I have trouble pronouncing it. I find a lot of the sounds to be different from the way I’m used to pronouncing them. I think I just must speak with a strange accent or something…either that, or everyone else does.
Rather than put the Latin influence on English further back, this site examines the question of what would English have been like without the Norman conquest.
http://www.geocities.com/wordwulf/niw_englisc.htm
Quote:
This is the home page of the NIW ENGLISC language, a project designed to reconstruct a native dialect of the English language using its Anglo-Saxon roots. The project begins with the living language, the surviving elements of Old English, and goes on to reconstruct as much of the lost vocabulary as possible, but with the pronunciation it might have had if spoken today.
WOW! That is so neat… How do you come up with all these websites, Bingley? You must spend most of your life just browsing the Internet!
That’s very cool! 
No, I can’t take the credit for this one. It was mentioned on another board I frequent.
But I do spend waaaaaaaaay too much time on the internet, yes.