Alkincoats Woodland Local Nature Reserve

The Celtic word *kaitos is one of the Celtic words appearing most widely in British place-names, and those names are correspondingly important to understanding the phonological history of the Brittonic languages, and how Brittonic words have been borrowed into English and Gaelic. Despite its frequency in English place-names, the word seems never to have been borrowed into English as a common noun. Although in 2000, Richard Coates and Andrew Breeze commented that "the representation of this element in English names needs further careful study", its evidence for both the history of /k/ and /t/ has since been assessed in some detail. Place-names containing *kaitos are a particularly important source of evidence for understanding the process of palatalisation and affrication of /k/ in Old English; the consequent palatal diphthongisation of /eː/ after /k/ in Old English; the phonological development of the Indo-European diphthong /ai/ in the Brittonic languages; and for dialectal variation

Location

Pendle