Modern scientific analyses of the name must account for the origins of the different forms found in early sources Latin (usually Londinium), Old English (usually Lunden), and Welsh (usually Llundein), with reference to the known 
developments over time of sounds in those different languages. It is agreed that the name came into these languages from British Celtic; recent work tends to reconstruct the lost Celtic form of the name as * or something similar. This was adapted into Latin as Londinium and borrowed into West Germanic, the ancestor-language of English, already before English had become widely spoken in Britain.However, the etymology and original meaning of the British Celtic form is much debated. A prominent explanation was Richard Coates's 1998 argument that the name derived from pre-Celtic Old European *(p)lowonida, meaning "river too wide to ford". Coates suggested that this was a name given to the part of the River Thames which flows through London; from this, the settlement gained the Celtic form of its name, *Lowonidonjon. However, most work has accepted a Celtic origin for the name, and recent studies have favoured an explanation along the lines of a Celtic derivative of an proto-Indo-European root *lendh- ('sink, cause to sink'), combined with the Celtic suffix *-injo- or *-onjo- (used to form place-names). Peter Schrijver has specifically suggested, on these grounds, that the name originally meant 'place that floods (periodically, tidally)'.
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