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Showing posts from December, 2016

WoM: Kerne and the Celtic languages

Over the last few months, our blog posts have focused on loan words in Anglo-Norman - from Greek, from Italian, from Mongolian ... This month and the next, we are going to have a look at some Anglo-Norman words borrowed from Celtic languages. Medieval Britain was a multilingual environment, and it is clear that there was a high level of contact between Anglo-Norman, Middle English and Medieval Latin, resulting in a high level of loan words between the languages. But these were not the only languages used at this period in the Anglo-Norman regnum, which also included Ireland, Wales and Scotland. It is perhaps surprising then that relatively few words in the AND are tagged as deriving from either Welsh or Irish and no borrowings seem to have come from Scots Gaelic. This is a phenomenon that bears a closer look, suggestive of a very different contact situation in the Celtic countries than in England. Can the pattern and frequency of borrowings offer insights into the use of Anglo-Nor