[lupatus]

Part of the explanation is the convoluted history of the people who lived in the British isles.

Originally, it was inhabited by gaelic-speaking Celts. Some of their words that are still used today ():

plaide -> plaid

tàrmachan -> ptarmigan

triubhas -> trousers

peata -> pet

Then, it was conquered by the Romans. Latin words that found their way into English (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_words_with_Engli...):

honor -> honor

imbecillus -> imbecile

inferus -> inferior

vulgus -> vulgar

Then, after the fall of the Romans, Britain was conquered by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who brought the old German words mentioned below.

After this, the area was Christianized, and the priests and proselytizers brought even more latin with them because that was the language of the Church.

After this, large portions of England were conquered by the Vikings, who introduced more Scandinavian-origin words that others have mentioned here. In fact, King Canute was once simultaneously king of England, Denmark, and Norway.

After the Vikings, England was conquered by the Normans by William the Conqueror in the Battle of Hastings. The Normans were Viking raiders who settled in northwestern France and who had turned in francophones. They introduce french-origin words like:

boef -> beef

mouton -> mutton

veal -> veal

porc -> pork

After which, all these language influences congealed, vaguely, into the English we know and love today.

For this graphed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Origins_of_English_PieCha...

Edited for formatting.

[aetherson]

Somebody once pointed out to me that you can see class distinctions written into the language this way. The words for farm animals tend to be Germanic (the conquered Germanic people were the farmers). So German kuh -> English cow. German schwein -> English swine. German huhn -> English hen.

But the words for prepared foods tend to be French in origin (the French conquerers were the ones who needed fancy terms for their food). So, as you pointed out, beef, mutton, veal, and pork are all French words.

[henderson101]

I think you'll find that the majority of the British isles, including some of what is now Scotland, was populated by one of two peoples - pre Celts (Picts traditionally being named as one of those peoples) and P-Celtic speakers. The P-Celtic languages are the forefathers of Welsh, Breton and Cornish. Gaelic is not directly related to these languages[1], and indeed the Gaelic speakers in Scotland mostly migrated from Ireland - Scottish and Irish Gaelic being extremely closely related. Your list of "loan words" is therefore pretty late in acquisition. You can probably list the amount of actual P-Celtic loan words in regular use on 10 fingers. There's a massive body of evidence that the P-Celtic languages took a while to die out. A Celtic language was spoken in Cumbria (Cumbria itself coming from the same Celtic root word as Cymru, the Welsh name for the country "Wales"), and the traditional Shepherd counting systems[2] based on the P-Celtic counting system are still used even today to a certain extent.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_languages [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_tan_tethera