Watson, A. 2012. “The Essential Gaelic-English, English-Gaelic Dictionary”, Edinburgh: Birlinn, xiv + 510 pp (hb). ISBN 978-1-84158-367-9, rrp £25. Reviewed by Fergus Cannan, Associate Curator, “Object of Devotion: Medieval English Alabaster Sculpture from the Victoria and Albert Museum”

   “The Essential Gaelic-English,
English-Gaelic Dictionary”

‘Every other author,’ wrote Samuel Johnson, ‘may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.’ Johnson knew what he was talking about, given that he had undertaken the mammoth task of assembling a dictionary of the English language. But what of Gaelic dictionaries? Yes there has been Edward Dwelly (1864-1939), the great, even obsessive, collector and recorder of Gaelic words. But the bald truth is that the Gaelic language has not been so well served as English when it comes to the compiling of reliable, thorough and discursive dictionaries. Part of the problem is that many Scots seem to take no interest in the Gaelic language; Dwelly, despite his evocative pseudonym of Ewen MacDonald, was born not in the Highlands but in Twickenham.

Given this, it is good news that Angus Watson has compiled a modern critical dictionary of Gaelic. The author of Gaelic short stories, Watson is, like Dwelly, a man who is evidently highly dedicated to his work. Watson previously produced two separate volumes of Gaelic for Birlinn. One was a Gaelic-English dictionary, the other an English-Gaelic dictionary. Now these two volumes have been made into one, and some revisions have been made. In short, this is the best Gaelic dictionary in print.

Ideal for beginners and experts alike, this is an extremely useful dictionary. It is reliable, it is well researched, and it is thorough. As a historian, I would have liked some notes on the origin and changing meaning of words; but Watson is clear that this is a book about Gaelic as a living language today and not a history book. As Watson says at the start of his book, ‘a dictionary has to embrace a language as it is’ (p. x). Yet there is something slightly comic about some of the newer Gaelic words like, say, inneal facsa for fax machine. Why comic? Perhaps it is because in its heyday Gaelic was never really a language of precise, ‘scientific’ terminologies, which is why it is so pointless for historians to argue over the ‘true’ meaning of a older Gaelic word like ‘claymore’. To search for precision where it probably never existed is to miss the point about what the Gaelic language was really like – and indeed what most languages were like not so very long ago. As it happens, Watson defines claidheamh-mòr (that is, claymore) as a two-handed sword, adding that the same weapon can also, though less ‘properly’, be called a claidheamh-dà-làimh (p. 60, also p. 280). The evidence for this is not great. True, we can today call a Highland two-handed sword a claidheamh-mòr and look scholarly and clever, but I somehow doubt the term meant anything so precise in the late Middle Ages.

Yet Gaelic, in order to survive as a living language, has, of course, had to adapt and incorporate many new words, and devise precise words for fax machines, two-handed swords and everything else. It is not a language which people should associate only with a remote past, with bagpipes and tartan, with the tragedies of Culloden and the Clearances: Gaelic is a language which lives. For compiling this smart-looking dictionary, and guiding us through the Gaelic language, Watson should not only escape reproach, he should also receive plenty of praise. Watson has done the Gaelic language proud.

Fergus Cannan, Associate Curator, “Object of Devotion: Medieval English Alabaster Sculpture from the Victoria and Albert Museum”, touring US museums 2010-14.
http://www.asiexhibitions.org/Object-of-Devotion.html