Did the English language get much Latin influence from the Roman occupation or is it more from 1066?
Sources vary, but tend to agree that well over half of the current English words are of Latin origin. For that large fraction, there were two main conduits – Norman French and later borrowings directly from Latin. The residual Latin from the Roman occupation of the island was virually nothing. The map was about the only place where Latin survived. All those English places ending in ‘-chester’ got that from Latin ‘castra’ – they were places Romans had built a military camp, called ‘castra’ in Latin. Again, sources vary, but a typical assessment of sources of Latin-based words would be something like 60% from Norman French, 30% from later borrowings, and 10% from all other sources combined. That last 10% would include later borrowings from French, borrowings from Spanish, Italian, and the other Romance languages, and even a few words that came into the original Anglo Saxon from Latin before the move to Britain.
