This book fulfils a keenly-felt need for a modern, comprehensive dictionary of Scottish Gaelic into English. The numerous examples of usage and idiom in this work have been modelled on examples culled from modern literature, and encompass many registers ranging from modern colloquial speech, to more elaborate literary constructions. The main contemporary terms and idiomatic phraseology, often not available in other dictionaries, provide excellent models for easier language learning. In addition to the main dictionary, the volume contains introductory material, providing guidance on using the dictionary, spelling and pronunciation. There are also twelve useful appendices which cover not only the various parts of speech, lenition and proper nouns, but also address the more difficult issues of expressing time, direction and numerals. The clarity of the design and layout of the volume will greatly ease the process of attaining mastery of the Gaelic language.

Provides 8,500 entries, a list of abbreviations and irregular verbs, and a grammar guide.

This book fulfils a keenly-felt need for a modern, comprehensive dictionary of Scottish Gaelic into English. The numerous examples of usage and idiom in this work have been modelled on examples culled from modern literature, and encompass many registers ranging from modern colloquial speech, to more elaborate literary constructions. The main contemporary terms and idiomatic phraseology, often not available in other dictionaries, provide excellent models for easier language learning. In addition to the main dictionary, the volume contains introductory material, providing guidance on using the dictionary, spelling and pronunciation. There are also twelve useful appendices which cover not only the various parts of speech, lenition and proper nouns, but also address the more difficult issues of expressing time, direction and numerals. The clarity of the design and layout of the volume will greatly ease the process of attaining mastery of the Gaelic language.

Small Dictionaries and Curiosity tells a story which has not been told before, that of the first European wordlists of minority and unofficial 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. Between them, they document more than 40 language varieties, from a Basque-Icelandic pidgin of the North Atlantic to the Kalmyk language of the lower Volga. The book gives an account of about 90 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 physical form alike. It explores the kinds of curiosity and imagination by which their makers were moved: the lover of all languages hearing new voices in an inn; the speaker of a dying language recording his linguistic memories; the patriot deploying his lexicographical findings in the service of an emerging nation. It offers an encounter with the diverse voices of the entirety of post-medieval Europe, turning away from the people of the courts and universities whose language was documented in big dictionaries to listen to people who did not speak the languages of power: the people of remote places and dying communities; the illiterate poor, settled or homeless; migrants from the edges of Europe and beyond.