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The English words dolmen and menhir have been borrowed from French, which took them from Breton. However, this is uncertain: for instance, menhir is peulvan or maen hir ("long stone"), maen sav ("straight stone") (two words: noun + adjective) in Breton. Dolmen is a misconstructed word (it should be taol-vaen).
But OED frowns on this, and there is no evidence of such a word in Celtic unless later words in Irish and Welsh, sometimes counted as borrowings from English, are original. [7] Unknown (OED Online) common beck: Agricultural implement with two hooks. Etymologised in the OED as from a 'Celtic root bacc-' (possibly via French). [8]
Like in most other Indo-European languages, Breton nouns belong to distinct grammatical genders/noun classes: masculine (gourel) and feminine (gwregel).The neuter (nepreizh), which existed in Breton's ancestor, Brittonic, survives in a few words, such as tra (thing), which takes and causes the mutations of a feminine noun but in all other grammatical respects behaves as if it were masculine.
Several words of Cornish origin are still in use in English as mining-related terms, including costean, gunnies, and vug. [ 68 ] Those who argue against the theory of a more significant Brittonic influence than is widely accepted point out that many toponyms have no semantic continuation from the Brittonic language.
These lists of English words of Celtic origin include English words derived from Celtic origins. These are, for example, Common Brittonic , Gaulish , Irish , Scottish Gaelic , Welsh , or other languages.
See as example Category:English words. Pages in category "Breton words and phrases" The following 4 pages are in this category, out of 4 total.
Pen gwyn is identical in Cornish and in Breton. An alternative etymology links the word to Latin pinguis, which means "fat". In Dutch, the alternative word for penguin is "fat-goose" (vetgans see: Dutch wiki or dictionaries under Pinguïn), and would indicate this bird received its name from its appearance. Mither
The percentage of modern English words derived from each language group: Anglo-Norman French, then French: ~29% Latin, including words used only in scientific, medical or legal contexts: ~29% Germanic: ~26% Others: ~16%. The pervasiveness of words of French origin that have been borrowed into English is comparable to that of borrowings from ...