Originally posted by Geoff: Do we have any pre-Roman words in current use?
I see what you mean, Geoff. I'm looking at modern English as a direct descendent of Anglo-Saxon, which is a direct descendent of West Germanic. So in that sense, Anglo-Saxon words are pre-Roman. (From that perspective Latin and French are pre-Roman too.)
But if you're counting from the time people set foot on the island, then I suppose Celtic words like "slogan", "banshee", "cwm", "whiskey", and "brogue" might be pre-Roman.
As goofy says, there are very few pre-Roman words (mainly place-names or words describing a geographical feature) still existing in English. "Cwm" is one of the few I recall; the others he mentions, such as "slogan", "banshee" and so on are really Irish or Scottish Celtic words. They might have had equivalents in the Celtic languages spoken at the time in England I suppose, though.
There are also very few Latin words in English that date back to the Roman invasion, either. Many Latin words arrived when the country was converted to Christianity several centuries later. A lot more followed after the Norman invasion, many of them of course Old French words descended from Latin.
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
According to the OED "cwm" dates from 1859 and "slogan" from 1513. If we're talking about when the word was borrowed, "butter" was borrowed from Latin possibly before the Anglo-Saxon invasion.
But many words weren't borrowed; many words, much more than 1% of our wordstock today, were brought with the Angles and the Saxons.
I'm amazed at the late citation for "cwm". Perhaps it's the way it is spelled. In this area there are lots of steep-sided valleys running down to the river Thames. They are called "coombs" or "coombes" and definitely pre-date 1859, as I've seen C16 maps showing them.
