Page:The ancient language, and the dialect of Cornwall.djvu/42

 22 that volume of glossography, and therefore must defer it till the next." Lhuyd died about the year 1709, two years after his great work was printed, which death, says Pryce, "must have been the greatest loss to this pursuit that it ever had, or ever will meet with, on account of his profound learning and singular attachment to the recovery of our primitive language." Hals, about 1715, took uncommon pains to heap to- gether a mass of words which he entitled ^'Lhadymer ay Kernow, or the Cornish Interpreter." Mr. Tremayne lent this manuscript of Hals to Dr. Pryce, who says of it that '^ it is a most strange hodge-podge of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and British words," but as it contained some words worth notice he selected them for his vocabulary. About the year 1709, Messrs. Tonkin, Keigwin, and Gwavas, with other associates, kept up a correspondence in their native tongue, as well as they could, by collecting all the mottoes, proverbs and idioms, on which they could lay their hands, and Dr. Pryce availed himself of their manu- scripts. The grammar of the ancient Cornish by Pryce con- tains in the first part, "the marrow of 'Mr. Lhuyd's gram- mar, with some additions." The second part contains a Cornish vocabulary of about four thousand words, collected and arranged from the materials already mentioned. The third and last part consists of many Cornish names of places, " with their distinctions of the old and the modern Cornish," As ancient English differs from modern, so does old