Page:An Irish-English dictionary, being a thesaurus of words, phrases and idioms of the modern Irish language, with explanations in English.djvu/15

Rh are established in the written language, being used by good authors, or words in everyday conversational use, should find a place in a dictionary, from whatever source they may be derived. The lexicographer may deplore the introduction of loan words, but he is bound to recognise their existence. Of course, words not well established or not widely used, have not the same claim to recognition. In the following pages I have in general given those loan words which have a footing in the spoken or written language, especially when they have acquired a new shade of meaning. In writing the language, words only recently borrowed and for which there are Irish equivalents, should be sparingly used. It is otherwise with words that have already a life of a couple of hundred years in the language. Every tongue borrows from other tongues, and it is a sign of health and vigour when a language can assimilate a crop of foreign words and reduce them to subjection by the rigorous application of its own syntax and of its own inflexional forms.

Want of space prevented my treating of the derivation of the bulk of the words in the dictionary, or of tracing their relationship to words in kindred tongues. It need scarcely be stated here that modern Irish is substantially the same language as Scotch Gaelic and as Manx, that it bears to the Welsh and Breton languages a kinship similar to that which exists between modern English and modern German, that it is a development of a language which was cognate to the earlier forms of the great family of languages spoken and written in modern Europe, that though its vocabulary has been considerably influenced by Latin within historic times, and by English within the last three centuries, it has preserved