More detail: say some invading monolingual Anglo-Saxons were assigned to control a particular Celtic-speaking village, and a bilingual official of their king told them that its native name was (say) Kokko-magno-magos (= "Red Rock Field"), or whatever its pronunciation had changed to by then due to Celtic lenition etc, they might remember it as "Cock-something" and for daily use replace the incomprehensible part by something in their own language.
An example is York: its Anglo-Saxon form Eoforwi_c = "wild-boar dairy-farm" seems a sufficient explanation, except that in that case we happen to know its Roman-period name Eboracum, which has been interpreted as Celtic for "place of yew trees".
Likewise placenames starting "Cat-": cats? or hiding a Celtic name starting "katu-" = "battle" referring to some old battle there, or named after a Celtic landowner whose name started "Katu-"?
(To stray across the English Channel: the fighting at Caen in Normandy in 1944 was likely not the first battle there: old forms of the name seem to point to Gaulish Celtic Katu-magos = "battle field".)
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Anthony Appleyard wrote:
When an OE placename starts with "Cock-", it is usually explained as 'cocc-' which is explained as "cocks (= males) of wild birds" or similar. But in many British wild birds the males and the females look much the same and live in the same habitats. Could some 'cocc-' in OE placenames have been influenced by a previous Celtic placename starting with Celtic 'kokko-' = "red"?, referring perhaps to red soil caused by underlying sandstone rock, or to an incident of bloodshed there; compare modern Welsh "coch".
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