Here’s a message from a subscriber named Pierce.

SPONSOR: GotoMeeting Hold your meetings online for just $49/mo. Try GoToMeeting FREE for 30 days.

He asks “is it true that carpenter is the only common English word from a Celtic root?”

I peeked into my Oxford English Dictionary and shot back that carpenter is from Latin via French but that lots of words rubbed off from Germanic or Gaulish roots as the Romans were doing business with European peoples who spoke dialects of these languages.

Celtic and Gaulish are related.

I hadn’t heard the last of Pierce though and he replied saying that his dictionary said that Latin may have gotten carpenter from the Gauls.

Sure enough, when I actually took the time to read what the OED said it proved Pierce right “Latin carpentum was apparently after Old Celtic carpentom.”

The other parts of Pierce’s question were whether carpenter is the only common English word from a Celtic root, and from there, how come if Celtic languages were all over the British Isles they don’t leave many traces in English.

I guess that the OED information shows that Celtic is in the mix for carpenter but it isn’t the only element. I see from The American Heritage Dictionary that the root can be traced further back into Indo-European.

So does that make this a word with a Celtic root specifically?

It’s true that Celtic hasn’t made much impact on English but I see that the word mine—as in: a hole in the ground from which one extracts minerals—is also felt to have Celtic traces to its etymology.

Perhaps less common is another example, the word for the sediment left over after fermentation, the lees.

So carpenter certainly isn’t the only example.

As to why Celtic is so thin on the ground in English, I think it has to do with being conquered a few times over.

About 2000 years ago the Romans marched into Britain and took over. They liked speaking Latin and so the various versions of tribal Celtic languages that were being spoken before their arrival suddenly became second class.

The Romans then shipped out a few hundred years before the Anglo-Saxons shipped in 1500 years ago.  At that point Latin ceased to be an important language in Britain and the Germanic roots set in. Again the Anglo-Saxon culture made the indigenous culture take a back seat.

That’s what Welsh evolved from.

Maybe the earlier Roman domination had something to do with making this possible, maybe not.

So by the time of William the Conqueror 1000 years ago Celtic roots already made up a diminishing fraction of the language stock. The Norman imposition of French watered that minimal influence down even more.

But there are a few interesting points to bring out about the word carpenter.

The OED defines a carpenter as one who does the heavier and stronger work in wood such as the framework of houses or ships and as distinct from a cabinet-maker.

The Latin root of carpenter points to craftsmen who made wagons and chariots since that’s what a carpentum was, a two wheeled vehicle.

You’d like your chariot to be strong and hold together as it bounced over those cobbled Roman roads.

The Indo-European root I mentioned is thought to have been kers meaning “to run” and so fitting into “moving” meaning of chariot.