About this text
About this edition
This is a facsimile and transcription of A dictionary in Englyshe and Welshe moche necessary to all suche Welshemen as wil spedly learne the englyshe to[n]gue thought vnto the kynges maiestie very mete to be sette forthe to the vse of his graces subiectes in Wales: wherevnto is p[re]fixed a litle treatyse of the englyshe pronu[n]ciacion of the letters. It is held by the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery.
The transcription was encoded in TEI P5 XML by Llewelyn Hopwood.
Introduction to the text
The Dictionary
Born in Llansannan in Denbighshire , North Wales , William Salesbury ( c . 1520 – c. 1584 ) is the outstanding example of the Welsh Renaissance scholar . His ambitious and tireless career produced influential texts on contemporary topics in the fields of ecclesiastical politics , theological dispute , multilingualism , and even botany . Although the apogee of his career was undoubtedly the translation of the New Testament into Welsh for the first time ( Y Testament Newydd , 1567 ) , Salesbury never ceased to display an avid love for language and languages as part of his determination to bring cultural prosperity to Wales in a new Europe . This is apparent from the very beginnings of his career with his Dictionary in Englyshe and Welshe ( 1547 ) . Not only his first published work , but it was also the first Welsh-English dictionary , and one of the first texts to ever print the Welsh language , appearing only a few months after Sir John Prys / Price laid the groundwork with his Yny lhyvyr hwnn ( In this book , 1546 / 7 ) .
The text that I have transcribed consists of the two prologues to the Dictionary . One is a lavish , grateful and humble dedication to King Henry VIII , along with an explanation of why the text needed to appear , namely , to educate monoglot Welsh speakers for their own sake and for the sake of a healthy kingdom of loving subjects that could communicate using a common language . The second is a section in Welsh briefly explaining the importance of English but more importantly , aware that most of his audience will not have been familiar with this type of workbook , Salesbury conceives of this section as a guide on how to use the dictionary , and how to avoid errors in doing so , e.g. by looking-up mutated forms or assuming that the English word is pronounced how it is written . Absent from this digital edition is the third section of the prefatory material , which gives further instructions in Welsh on how to read English , with sophisticated comments on the different pronunciations of English , and the dictionary proper . The dictionary contains some 7,000 Welsh words and their English equivalents , and this is how it functions , i.e. a Welsh-English dictionary as the introduction explains , not an English-Welsh dictionary as the title might suggest . The clear purpose of the Dictionary , then , was to acquaint those whose first language was Welsh with English .
Although probably the fruit of around two years ’ labour , Salesbury himself later admitted that his Dictionary was written ‘ hastily ’ ( ‘ ar vrys ’ ) , and there are times when there is somewhat of a first-draft nature about the text . For example , some of the English entries are missing ; there are occasional errors in the alphabetical order , e.g. ‘ edyn ’ ( ‘ fowl ’ ) before ‘ ednogyn ’ ( ‘ gnat ’ ) ; Rhetoric and Logic are missing from the seven arts listed ; and words mentioned in the preliminaries don’t always appear in the main body , e.g. ‘ kangen ’ ( ‘ branch ’ ) used to explain the mechanics of initial mutation . Of course , in such a great and pioneering undertaking , these missteps become unremarkable .
A new style and a new Welsh
Many seemingly idiosyncratic features in Salesbury’s writing belong to contemporary Welsh writers ’ anxiety at the perceived diminishing prestige of the Welsh language . This apprehension is apparent in Salesbury’s advocacy for the humanist trend of ‘ copiousness ’ , in which a page would be flooded with glossed alternative spellings , readings and dialectal forms . The text edited contains such glosses and the brief entries in the dictionary proper often note borrowings and variants in dialect and spelling . This is partly an attempt to demonstrate the wealth of the Welsh language and partly due to Salesbury’s linguistic sensitivity that sought comprehensiveness by abstaining from becoming a linguistic arbiter . This trait was one of the hindrances to the reader that was notably absent in William Morgan’s translation of the entire Bible in 1588.
As part of the enhancing of linguistic prestige , Welsh writers would also capitalize on the affinities between Welsh and classical languages . Thus , like Thomas Elyot and Inkhorn advocates , Salesbury did not hesitate to introduce Latinate spellings into Welsh , e.g. Salesbury’s ‘ popol ’ < L. populus ( ModW ‘ pobl ’ , ‘ people ’ ) and ‘ descend ’ < L. descendo ( ModW . ‘ disgyn ’ , ‘ to fall ’ ) . He even imposed invented roots such as ‘ Kambraec ’ ( ModW . ‘ Cymraeg ’ , ‘ Welsh ’ ) , presumably taken analogically from ‘ Cambria ’ , and phonetically impossible spellings like ‘ Iuddew ’ ( ModW . ‘ Iddew ’ , ‘ Jew ’ ) , given that / y / cannot sound between / i / and / ð / .
Syntax was also adapted to imitate classical forms . In the Welsh section , for example , note how variations of the late Middle Welsh ‘ yr hwnn ’ ( lit . ‘ the this ’ ) abound . This new structure appears in order to make up for the lack of a fully inflectional connecting relative pronoun in Welsh , which was not true of Latin , thus allowing for a more Latinate structure and a more periodic , Ciceronian style in contrast to paratactic Middle Welsh .
Acquisition of English
The acquisition of English at the heart of the Dictionary continued to be a primary concern for Salesbury throughout his early output , and indeed in 4 of his 7 printed texts . This may seem an unusual endeavour , a contradiction even , for such a wary advocate of the Welsh language . Furthermore , as noted in the editorial glosses , the Dictionary ’sdedication to the King demonstrates tremendous gratitude for the so-called ‘ Acts of Union ’ of 1536 and 1542. However , many , including Salesbury , welcomed the newly formed Anglo-Welsh nation as something that established order and provided a pathway to new opportunities for commerce and learning at a time when Wales was finally beginning to show the signs of economic improvement after the turbulent centuries of the Glyndŵr rebellion , the Hundred Years War , and the Wars of the Roses . Moreover , following the trends of Tyndale’s Bible , Salesbury , a fervent Protestant who denounced his Roman Catholic upbringing as ‘ the trespaces and synnes of my former evil life ’ , was , of course , a firm believer in the mass-dissemination of Scripture . Whilst Welsh-language material was being prepared , perhaps Salesbury believed that the quickest way to gain direct access to God in the meantime was to acquire this neighbouring language which was already abounding in such material . And finally , Salesbury’s love of language and learning meant that he must have relished at the opportunity to comprehensively study a language and present it to a new audience . Note too , however , that this polyglot was not encouraging the acquisition of English at the expense of Welsh ; his championing of multilingualism continued with A Briefe And A Playne Introduction , Teachyng How To Pronounce The Letters In The British Tonge ( 1550 ) , in which he provides a phonetic guide to Welsh to English-speakers .
The Dictionary in Englyshe and Welsh is the product of a Jack-of-all-trades within Welsh humanist activity , and seemingly a master of many , whose intellectual capability and inherent ambition sought to keep Wales up-to-date with the dynamic academic developments of sixteenth-century Europe .
Availability
Publication: Taylor Institution Library, one of the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford, 2020. XML files are available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License 
. Images produced by ProQuest® as part of Early English Books Online. www.proquest.com .
Source edition
Salesbury, William A dictionary in Englyshe and Welshe moche necessary to all suche Welshemen as wil spedly learne the englyshe to[n]gue thought vnto the kynges maiestie very mete to be sette forthe to the vse of his graces subiectes in Wales: wherevnto is p[re]fixed a litle treatyse of the englyshe pronu[n]ciacion of the letters [Imprynted at London : [By N. Hill] in Foster lane, by [i.e. for] me Iohn̄ Waley, (1547).Editorial principles
Created by encoding transcription from printed text.
This is a diplomatic transcription of the original text.
Typographic variations have been recorded as they appear in the original, including the distinction between ‘u’ and ‘v’, and the use of ‘i’ where ‘j’ would be expected in modern English. The exceptions are the distinctions made between long ‘s’ and the two different forms of miniscule round ‘s’ (see ‘ddangos’ on p.a3r and ‘subiectes’ on p.a1v), the two different types of ‘r’ (see ‘grace’ and ‘Prynce’ on p.a1v), and the two different types of ‘w’ (see ‘wiala’ and ‘gwiail’ p.a4v), which have all been regularized to small case ‘s’, ‘r’ and ‘w’ respectively. A typographic peculiarity to note is that there are two types of ‘v’: one in the English section and one in the Welsh. In the latter, ‘v’ looks confusingly similar to ‘b’, although they are distinct – compared to the ‘b’ minim, the ‘v’ leans left and is more rounded resulting in a wider hook – and have been transcribed as such. Abbreviations have been expanded. These include nasal bars (noted in square brackets), the Tironian sign ‘et’ (expanded as English ‘and’), and the singular uses of ‘yͭ’ for the relative pronoun ‘that’ and ‘p̄’ for ‘pre-’.
Biblical references have been expanded in the footnotes using the New International Version and, on one occasion, Salesbury’s own 1567 Welsh translation of the New Testament in order to ease comparison between the author’s rendering of the same verse in 1547 and in 1567.
The original languages have not been updated in the transcription, though an English translation has been provided for the Welsh. My translation is more literal and faithful than previous, now somewhat out-dated translations (e.g. those found in Gabriele Stein, The English Dictionary before Cawdrey (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1985), pp. 157–164 and Alexander John Ellis, On Early English Pronunciation, with Especial Reference to Shakspere and Chaucer (London: published for the Philological Society by Asher Co. and for the Early English Text Society, and the Chaucer Society by Trübner Co, 1869–89) 5 vols, III, pp. 770–5). In the cases where different translations lead to significantly different meanings, alternative translations have been given in footnotes.
Capital letters and punctuation have been kept as in the original, including the most notable use, namely the seemingly erratic employment of forward slashes serving variously as quotation marks, brackets, hyphens, and sentence and clause dividers. This is one way in which my diplomatic transcription differs from the most widely-used critical edition: Rhagymadroddion: 1547–1659, ed. by Garfield H. Hughes (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1976), pp. 5–8. However, in the English translation provided, capital letters, punctuation, and sentence division has been sympathetically updated. In both the transcription and the translation, I have kept catchwords and word divisions over page breaks (with or without hyphens as they appear in the original) but not over line breaks.
The only aspects of the original text that have been changed are printing errors. While early or idiosyncratic spellings have been kept, errors such as missing or duplicate letters and letters capitalized in the middle of words have been corrected, though the original is also given. Issues such as these are mostly in the Welsh section and are likely to have arisen due to Welsh being an unfamiliar language to the English printers, demonstrating the teething problems and practical difficulties of printing the Welsh language for the very first time.
At one point, the author gives Welsh examples in order to instruct the reader on how to use the dictionary. My translation includes these in their original Welsh with translations in the footnotes. Similarly, in one section, Salesbury writes the phonetic realisation of certain English words in order to caution the reader on the discrepancies between English spelling and pronunciation. In order to preserve this Welsh-speaking polyglot’s attempt to render the sounds of English in an orthography that is readable to literate, monoglot Welsh speakers, I decided to keep these English words in their original ‘Welsh’ spelling, with English translations in the footnotes (e.g. ‘kro’ purportedly representing how ‘crow’ was pronounced).
