Nope, I meant what I said. Rome did not conquer England. It conquered the area that later became England, but that was irrelevant to Latin borrowings in English. As far as I know, no Latin-derived word in English comes from the fact that what’s now England used to be the Roman province of Britannia. (There are people who are under the wrong impression on this matter, so I want to emphasize it.)
The earliest Latin borrowings in English actually pre-date the Anglo-Saxon migration to the island. There’s a small number that were borrowed into German during the Empire. After that, the next Latin borrowings were church-related words from the time the English were Christianized. But the Angles and Saxons by-and-large displaced the Latin and Celtic speakers from Britannia and didn’t borrow any words from them. Placenames, yes, but not words.
Whoa, whoa, WHOA!!! Then what do we call La Celestina? De Hita’s Libro del Buen Amor? Infante Juan Manuel’s Libro de los Ejemplos aka El Conde Lucanor? Heck, the oldest written copies of El Cantar del Cid are from the 1300s and they are NOT in Mozárabe, they’re very much in Castillian. Middle Castillian, mind you, hard to understand if you don’t know what you’re looking at, but then so’s Chaucer. What are today Asturias, Cantabria, and Catalonia were either never, or only very briefly, Arab-controlled, and the northernmost parts of Castille and Leon were independent as of the 1000s.
The first standardized gramar of Castillian, Nebrija’s, was published around 1492. By 1600, Cervantes could even already be said to be writing in Spanish.
[return to original subject]
One of my worst “Huh?” moments in Braveheart was when Princess Isabella and her handmaid were talking in French to avoid being understood by any English courtiers who might happen to overhear …
