Recovering lost elements from Cregeen’s Dictionary of the Manks Language Max W. Wheeler January 2018 Archibald Cregeen’s Dictionary of the Manks Language of 1835 has been republished four times in the 20th and 21st centuries.1 In 1910 J. J. Kneen, on behalf of the Manx Language Society, edited a reprint, with a brief new preface, that reset the text. It included translations into English of Cregeen’s Manx proverbs, and an English-Manx index (Kneen 1910). In 1969 Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh published a photographic reprint of the 1835 edition, entitled Fockleyr ny Gaelgey chaglit liorish Archibald Cregeen, with a preface in Manx by R. L. Thomson (Thomson 1969). Then in 1984 Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh published a photographic reprint of the 1910 edition, again entitled Fockleyr ny Gaelgey chaglit liorish Archibald Cregeen, without Kneen’s preface, but with a brief preface in English by R. L. Thomson (Thomson 1984). Finally, in 2015 I published online a reordering of Cregeen’s 1835 Dictionary, with the entries grouped not strictly alphabetically, as previously, but with formally related items grouped under headwords; my edition was entitled Fockleyr Chregeen Aa-orderit (Wheeler 2015). It incorporated the texts, in Manx and English of the Biblical and other passages that Cregeen cited as illustrations of usage. All of these editions purported to reproduce the original text of the 1835 Dictionary. At the respective times of publication, the editors were evidently unaware that there was, in fact, more than one version of the ‘first edition’, and that the texts they had all chosen to reproduce were inferior to the ‘true’ first edition, that was dated 1835, but actually appeared in May 1837.2 In his preface to the 1969 reprint, Thomson says, ‘Tra hie eh er cur magh yn nah cheayrt dy moghey ’sy lhing shoh, va’n obbyr-phrental ooilley jeant ass y noa, as er y fa shen ghow ny fir-aarlee yn caa dy yannoo caghlaaghyn ayns y lioar raad erbee er lhieu dy row feme. Agh y cheayrt shoh ta’n lioar er ny cur magh er aght elley, trooid jalloo-phrental, as shen y fa ta shin er ngholl er ash gys y chied ockleyr, as ta ny t’ayd ayns dty laue ny yalloo firrinagh jeh’n lioar shen myr haink ee magh ec y toshiaght’ [When it was published for the second time early in the present century, all the typesetting was re-done, and thus the editors took the opportunity to make changes in the book wherever they thought necessary.3 But this time the book is published in a different way, through facsimile-printing, and for that reason we have returned to the first dictionary, and what you have in your hands is a true facsimile of the book as it was originally published.] And in his preface to Thomson (1984) he speaks of the 1910 edition ‘now reproduced in facsimile as being slightly more correct and legible than the first edition.’ Yet the fact that there was more than one variant of the ‘first’ edition was not a secret. In his Bibliotheca Monensis (Manx Society vol. VIII, 1861), under the heading ‘Archibald Cregeen, 1 I am very grateful to Phil Kelly, Christopher Lewin, and Nicola Tooms for their help with bibliography at the start of this investigation. 2 Advertisement in Mona’s Herald, 9 May 1837. I shall continue to refer to the first edition as the ‘1835 edition’ since that is the date on the title page, which has itself been reproduced photographically or in facsimile in all the 20th- and 21st-century editions. 3 Thomson seems rather disingenuous here. Other than supplying translations of Cregeen’s proverbs, Kneen and his fellow editors made absolutely minimal changes to the text of the dictionary. They corrected some of the misprints, introduced as many more, reproducing most of the 1835 misprints unchanged. 1 1835. A Dictionary of the Manks Language’ (p. 126), William Harrison tells us ‘The Author of this Account [i.e. William Harrison himself] purchased the sheets left on hand, from which some Copies were afterwards made up; some little difference is observable, arising from the few sheets reprinted being in a larger type, when some few words were unavoidably omitted.’4 These variant copies must have been made some time between 1842, when Harrison came to live in the Isle of Man, and 1861, when Bibliotheca Monensis was first published. William Cubbon (1865-1955), as an activist in The Manx Language Society, was one of those listed by J. J. Kneen in his preface as having assisted in the reedition of Cregeen’s dictionary in 1910. In 1922 he became Librarian of the Manx Museum, and Director of the Museum in 1932. In the 2nd volume of his A Bibliographical Account of Works relating to the Isle of Man (1939), p. 818, he provides the following information about Cregeen’s Dictionary: ‘The book is met with in two forms, variety A and variety B. The first and original is easily recognised by its having a list of subscribers at the end, and by being uniform in type throughout. Variety B is not only without the list, but is not complete as regards the vocabulary itself. The latter copies were made up by William Harrison, compiler of ‘Bibliotheca Monensis,’ from sheets purchased by him at the sale of Quiggin the printer’s stock.5 These sheets, however, were not complete, and the missing ones had to be supplied; for the reprint, type of the original size was not available, and an average of eight lines were dropped out, owing to the type used being larger. — G. W. Wood. ‘Archdeacon Kewley adds the following: “In the last decade of the 19th century, William Watterson, farmer, moved to the house at Colby in which Archibald Cregeen had lived. Sometime after he settled in he told me that among old rubbish in the house there was a quantity of papers printed in the Manx language which he burned. ... From his description I was satisfied they were the sheets (one section) of the Manx dictionary which Mr Harrison had to get reprinted for the second edition.”6 28/5/27.’ One of the copies of Cregeen’s 1835 Dictionary in the Manx Museum library (H.140/N7) contains the carbon copy of a letter, possibly from William Cubbon himself, to Rev. E[rnest] U[rmston] Savage (1879-1939), another of the group that had assisted J. J. Kneen in the preparation of the 1910 reprint. The letter reads as follows: ‘P2/2/C 16th September, 1938 Dear Mr Savage, You are right about the curious differences in the printing of the Cregeen Dictionary. The sheets D (1) 21-24; H. 41-44; L. 53-8; W. 97-100; 2C. 121-124. From my experience as a printer,7 I feel sure the reason for the difference in type is that five sheets of four pp. were missing, all had to be reset. The printer whoever he was who had to print these sheets had not the Nonpareil type in which 4 This information is repeated in the second edition of Bibliotheca Monensis (Harrison 1876: 144-145). 5 This cannot, however, refer to the sale of the stock and business after Mrs. Quiggin’s death, which did not take place till 1863. 6 Kewley must mean ‘sheets of the first edition A version that somehow had got separated from the remainder’; what did he mean by ‘one section’, though? 7 If Cubbon is the author, he was joint owner of the Manx Sun between 1900 and 1912. 2 the bulk of the work had been done by Quiggin. He used the next in size larger which was called Minion.8 In order to bring the matter within the compass of 4 pp. William Harrison, the man responsible, had to eliminate several lines. The whole story is very interesting, and shows what an enthusiastic figure Harrison was. We owe him much, and I hope some day to write a brief biography of him for the journal. I am a bit ‘throng’, so I close with my expression of good wishes, dy firrinagh, Rev. E.U. Savage, Fell Close, Staveley, KENDAL’ Following Cubbon, I refer to the complete version, including the subscribers’ list, of Cregeen’s 1835 Dictionary as version A, using B to indicate any version with replacement pages. The sheets in question that were reprinted for B are bifolia, that is, sheets of paper folded once, to make two leaves, or four printed pages.9 All the signatures10 in A are bifolia, except the first, unnumbered, and third, C, which have 8 pages.11 The abbreviation by Harrison’s printer in the reset pages often consists of shortening, or omitting, the conjugation information for verbs, such as, on p. 24, for ‘basht, v. baptize, christen’, where the abbreviated references to conjugation patterns ‘-ee, 80; -in, 83; -ins, 84; -ym, 86; -yms, 87; -ys, 88’ are omitted. But several more interesting elements were excised also, such as, on the same page 24, the entry ‘beealeragh, v. babbling, talking too much’, the entries ‘bee’m, v. I will be; -s, id. em.’, ‘beggey, a. pl. little, small’, and, under the heading ‘beill s. pl. mouths, the plural of beeal’, the Bible citation ‘Mat. xxi. 16’. A significant number of entries were omitted altogether, as were also a significant number of citations. One proverb was omitted, and was thus not picked up by subsequent collectors of Manx proverbs, s.v. chredj* or chredjys: “T’eh feer dunnal chredjys çhaghter balloo.” [It’s a very brave man who trusts a dumb messenger.] I give in Appendix 1 all the information, apart from the verb paradigm abbreviations, that is in the A text but was absent from Kneen (1910) and other subsequent editions.