Welsh Journals

THE CONTRIBUTION OF EDWARD LHUYD TO THE STUDY OF SCOTTISH GAELIC By J. L. CAMPBELL, LL.D. THE letters of Edward Lhuyd, not all of which are printed in volume XIV of Early Science at Oxford, show that his Scottish tour began in the autumn of 1699 when he landed in Kintyre from some port in Antrim, and ended late in January 1700 when he returned the same way after having been storm-stayed for five weeks at Campbeltown. During the autumn of 1699 he travelled through Kintyre, Knapdale, and Lome, crossing over to Mull and visiting Iona. He returned to the mainland, visiting Inveraray, and then went on to visit Glasgow and Edinburgh and other places in the Lowlands, returning to Campbeltown by sea from Greenock late in December 1699. Argyllshire is rich in archaeological remains, and had Lhuyd's journals survived, it is likely that their interest would have exceeded that of the Hebridean writings of Dr. Johnson and Boswell. Fortunately, a considerable amount of linguistic material collected by Lhuyd on this journey, or from Scottish Highlanders he met later in Ireland and at Oxford, has survived and has been discovered and prepared for publication by the writer and Mr. Derick Thomson, M.A., and will shortly be published by the Clarendon Press under the title of Edward Lhuyd in the Scottish Highlands. This will also contain reproductions of copies of sketches made by Lhuyd of antiquities in Argyllshire, including Iona, which were discovered by Mr. William O'Sullivan in Stowe MSS. 1023 and 1024 of the British Museum. This is, of course, additional to the material he printed in Archaeologia Britannica, where his Irish-English dictionary is followed by a Scottish Gaelic supplement consisting of words supplied by correspondents, and where a few Scottish Gaelic dialect forms are recorded in his etymological appendix (p. 290), which, it now turns out, come from one of these recently-discovered sources, his translation of Ray's Dictionariolum Trilingue. These sources are all amongst the Gaelic manuscripts collected or written by Lhuyd and presented to Trinity College, Dublin, by Sir John Sebright in 1786. The Scottish Gaelic material in them is as follows:- MS. H. 4. 28. This is nearly entirely devoted to Scottish Gaelic. It contains- (a) a list of Highland place-names. 1 There are letters of Lhuyd's printed in Maidment's Analecta Scotica, and also unpublished letters (originals or copies) in the libraries of Edinburgh University and Trinity College, Dublin.