Page:Alexander Macbain - An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language.djvu/18

 x. with which dictionaries like those of Shaw and Armstrong swarm. Shaw, in 1780, plundered unscrupulously from Lhuyd (1707) and O'Brien (1758), and subsequent dictionary-makers accepted too many of Shaw's Irish words. Another trouble has been the getting of genuine Irish words, for O'Reilly (1823) simply incorporated Shaw's Dictionary and M'Farlane's Scotch Gaelic Vocabulary (1815) into his own. For genuine modern Irish words I have had to trust to Lhuyd, O'Brien, Coneys, and Foley. For early Irish, I have relied mainly on Windisch, Ascoli, and Atkinson, supplementing them by the numerous vocabularies added by modern editors to the Irish texts published by them.

For the etymologies, I am especially indebted to Dr Whitley Stokes' various works, and more particularly to his lately published Urkeltischer Sprachschatz. I have, however, searched far and wide, and I trust I have not missed anything in the way of Celtic etymology that has been done for the last twenty or thirty years here or on the Continent. In form the book follows the example of Mr Wharton's excellent works on Latin and Greek philology, the Etyma Latina and the Etyma Grœca, and, more especially, the fuller method of Prellwitz' Etymolgisches Wörterbuch der Griechischen Sprache.

The vocabulary of names and surnames does not profess to be complete. That errors have crept into the work is doubtless too true. I am sorry that I was unable, being so far always from the University centres, to get learned friends to look over my proofs and make suggestions as the work proceeded; and I hope the reader will, therefore, be all the more indulgent towards such mistakes as he may meet with.

, 13th January, 1896.