Edward Lhuyd - Welsh scholar and his Cornish dictionary

Edward Lhuyd

Edward Lhuyd was born in 1660 and was educated at Oswestry Grammar School before going to study law at Jesus College, Oxford in 1682. Lhuyd had a great interest in antiquities, botany and geology and shortly after going to college he turned his attention to the experimental scientific work that was conducted at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He left the college before graduating and he was appointed as one of the vice-curators of the Museum in 1687 and then as curator in 1691.

In 1707, Lhuyd published the first volume of his 'Archaeologia Britannica: an Account of the Languages, Histories and Customs of Great Britain, from Travels through Wales, Cornwall, Bas-Bretagne, Ireland and Scotland'.

His intention was to include the Geirlyer Kyrnẁeig in the projected second volume of his work, and he announced his intention in the first volume (p. 253):

"I find first that I must recal the promise made of a Cornish-English Vocabulary. I have one by me, written about six years since, and have lately improv’d it whith what additions I could; But there being no room for it in this volume…it must be deferred to the next."

Unfortunately, Lhuyd died suddenly in 1709 before he had the opportunity to prepare the second volume for the press.

Geirlyer Kyrnẁeig

In 1702 Lhuyd spent around 4 months in Cornwall traveling from parish to parish in order to gather material for the Geirlyer Kyrnẁeig. During this time he talked to the natives of the region and recorded their vocabularies in a notebook. That, in its essence, is the content of the Geirlyer Kyrnẁeig, namely a Cornish glossary with corresponding meanings in English.

As to its size, the Geirlyer Kyrnẁeig is a small notebook of 172 pages, with the glossary filling 162 of those pages. It was written in black and red ink in Lhuyd’s own handwriting. It contains a large number of corrections and several words have been crossed out.

At the end of the volume, on page 164, an elegy in the Cornish language to King William III, who died in 1702, has been added, together with a Latin translation.

Years after Lhuyd’s untimely death in 1709, the manuscript became part of the personal collection of Sir John Williams, the main benefactor of the National Library. He presented the volume among his collection to the Library in 1909.

By today, Lhuyd is considered to be one of the most versatile scholars that Wales has ever seen. He is respected for all the research work that he undertook to collect information about the Celtic languages and their interrelationship, and his work on the Cornish language is one of the few studies of the language that was undertaken at that time.

Read the original Geirlyer Kyrnẁeig online here:

https://www.library.wales/discover/digital-gallery/manuscripts/early-mod...

Kernow bys vyken!