“…Nor is it stated that the period of principal influence of Latin on Welsh and subsequently Irish was during the Christianisation of these realms in the 5th and 6th centuries, post‐dating the Roman occupation of Britain (but not Ireland) and independently of the incursions of the Anglo‐Saxons from the continent. In a discussion of the quite narrow semantics of many of the above words, having, as they do, the exclusive meaning ‘sail’ as opposed to significations pointing to other applications of textiles, the author calls attention to ‘the use of Irish séol for “veil”, as opposed to the more common fíal “veil”, an earlier loan from Latin velum , which had a much wider range of textile‐related senses’ (Thier, 2003: 183). Here it would have been useful to explain that alternance between initial f‐ and s‐ in Old Irish is quite common as a result of lenition, and affected early loan words, as for example when Latin furnus ‘oven’ is found in Irish as sorn ‘furnace, oven, kiln’ and, in a rare technological transfer from the Celtic lands to the northern world, is found in Faroese and Norwegian as a term for a grain‐drying kiln (on Old Irish phonology, see Thurneysen, 1946: 571–72; for sorn in Irish, Dictionary of Old Irish , 1913–76, s.v.…”