Edward Lhuyd's Researches into the Cornish Language

The Celtic philologist, Edward Lhuyd (1660 - 1709) was possibly the first qualified scholar to make a serious study of the Cornish language. In fact he spent four months in Cornwall, in 1700, learning Cornish. Lhuyd had originally intended to include a Cornish-English vocabulary in his Archaeologia Britannica. However, since the book turned out to be longer than he had expected, he postponed the publication of his Cornish vocabulary, Geirlyfr Kyrnweig, until the second volume. Unfortunately this second volume never appeared, due to Lhuyd's tragic death at the Ashmolean Museum in 1709. Nevertheless Volume I of Archaeologia Britannica contains "A Comparative Etymology" and "A Comparative Vocabulary of the Original Languages of Britain and Ireland". The "Comparative Etymology" includes "Parallel Observations relating to the Origin of Dialects, the Affinity of the British with other Languages, and their Correspondence to one another." In the "Comparative Etymology" Lhuyd notes the semantic differences between cognates of the various Celtic languages. An important feature of Lhuyd's work is his orthography. He devised his own phonetic script, based on an extended Latin alphabet and use of diacritics. After his death, Lhuyd's manuscripts disappeared. Several years later, however, his Geirlyfr Kyrnweig was discovered in the National Library of Wales. This consists of a small notebook, presumably the one he used during his stay in Cornwall. According to Lhuyd, he obtained most of his knowledge of Cornish from manuscripts of the dramas, provided by Sir Jonathan Trelawny, Bishop of Exeter. The Vocabularium Cornicum, identified by Lhuyd as Cornish, provided him with another source; and words taken from the Vocabularium Cornicum are marked with a dagger symbol. A third source were his field notes made during his stay in Cornwall