Despite being spoken by an overwhelming majority of the population, and despite preceding the Germanic invasion and creating an admired civilisation, the Celtic language left little mark on English. It has been calculated that no more than two dozen words were recruited to the conquering tongue. These are often words describing particular landscape features. In the mountainous Lake District of England where I live, for instance, there is still “tor” and “pen,” meaning hill or hill-top, as in village and town names such as Torpenhow and Penrith; there’s “crag” as in Friar’s Crag in Keswick,
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