Texts
Vocabulary of the Irish dialect spoken by the Highlanders of Scotland (Robert Kirk)
Incoming data
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A Scottish Gaelic-English vocabulary compiled by Robert Kirk (d. 1692), minister of Aberfoyle, who based its structure and contents on twelve sections from John Ray’s Dictionariolum trilingue. It was first printed, with annotations by Edward Lhuyd, in William Nicolson’s The Scottish historical library (1702).
Manuscript witnesses
Text
Dublin, Trinity College, MS 1369
rubric: Mr. Robert Kirke's small Highland vocabulary Extracts (7 pp.).
MS
Dublin, Trinity College, MS 1369
Extracts.
Sources
Primary sources Text editions and/or modern translations – in whole or in part – along with publications containing additions and corrections, if known. Diplomatic editions, facsimiles and digital image reproductions of the manuscripts are not always listed here but may be found in entries for the relevant manuscripts. For historical purposes, early editions, transcriptions and translations are not excluded, even if their reliability does not meet modern standards.
[ed.] Kirk, Robert, and Edward Lhwyd [annotations], “A vocabulary of the Irish dialect, spoken by the Highlanders of Scotland”, in: William Nicolson, The Scottish historical library: containing a short view and character of most of the writers, records, registers, law-books, &c., which may be serviceable to the undertakers of a general history of Scotland, down to the union of the two kingdoms in K. James the VI, London: printed for T. Childe, 1702. 334–346.
Google Books: <link>
Secondary sources (select)
Considine, John, Small dictionaries and curiosity: lexicography and fieldwork in post-medieval Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Includes chapters on Edward Lhuyd and his Glossography (1707).
abstract:
Small dictionaries and curiosity is a contribution to the history of lexicography, which gives an account of the first European dictionaries and wordlists of minority languages and dialects, from the end of the Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century. These wordlists were collected by people who were curious about the unrecorded or little-known languages they heard around them. They come from the whole of Europe, from the British Isles to the Ottoman Empire, and from the Basque country to the eastern parts of European Russia. Between them, they document more than forty language varieties. The book gives an account of about ninety of these dictionaries and wordlists, some of them single-page jottings and some of them full-sized printed books, paying attention to their content and their context alike. Its perspective is not only that of the history of linguistics, but that of the cultural history and the intellectual history of Europe.
Campbell, J. F., “Scottish Gaelic translations of John Ray’s Dictionariolum trilingue”, Scottish Gaelic Studies 9:1 (1961, 1962): 89–90.
