According to a new book about oddities,

"99 percent of all the words in the “Oxford English Dictionary” do not derive from Old English."

Maybe not from Old British, prior to the Romans, but...

I'd say it was much lower than that.

Do you mean Celtic words, or Anglo-Saxon words, or Latin, or French? Do we have any pre-Roman words in current use?

As far as I know, "Old English" means "Anglo-Saxon". Anglo-Saxon is pre Roman. All of the words in my previous post are Anglo-Saxon.

quote:

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.

OK. I'm sure Crystal cover this in The Stories of English, but I remember nothing anymore.

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.

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.

See Online Etymology Dictionary.

So English "coomb" dates from 770 and is possibly borrowed from Celtic. But English "cwm" was borrowed much later.