Latin contribution?

[Baker, John]

        So, of ordinary words, just "port"?  OED does not agree on the
derivation of tor/torr (which to me is just a literary term) and does
not even list the other three.


John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Robin Hamilton
Sent: Monday, November 16, 2009 5:45 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Latin contribution?

> There are certainly Roman Empire borrowings into Germanic, like
> kitchen, pepper, mint, etc., but I don't know of any into British
> Celtic before the fifth c. that survived the Germanic invasion.
>
> Herb

Baugh, _A History of the English Language_ (1959), p. 93 suggests that
apart
from place names, less than five words result from secondary
transmission of
Latin through Celtic to English.  He lists "ceaster" (Latin "castra", a
camp), "port", "munt" (mountain), "torr" (tower, rock), and "wic"
(village).

In contrast, he says (p. 91), "some fifty words from Latin can be
credited
... to the ancestors of the English in their continental homes."  So
fifty
words in the English lexis are derived from Latin during the Common
Germanic
period, and reach us from there.

Still miles behind the French influence, which Baugh discusses on pp.
200
ff.  In all three cases, we're talking about contact borrowing (would
that
be the correct term?) rather than the sort of literary/literate
borrowing
that occurred from Latin in the Renaissance period.

(I used Baugh's text as an undergraduate at Glasgow many years ago, and
see
I had underlined most of the words.  For some reason.)

Robin Hamilton

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