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elucidated by good Gaelic scholars, and no labour lias
been spared to make the work as complete and reliable
as possible.
Some have found fault with my explanations
here and there as being too full but I have always
purposely inclined to being too explicit rather than too
vague, because while one reader may be far beyond any
assistance a certain explanation gives, the next may find
in it an elucidation of a difficulty that he has been trying
to get explained for months. This has been
brought home vividly to me by some of
my proof-readers
making such remarks as, "unnecessary," u self-evident,"
&c. beside explanations I have given of difficulties that
had puzzled me considerably when a beginner, and the
full understanding of which I had imperceptibly acquired
as I attained increased fluency in speaking the language.
Some scholars object to some of the words given in
other Dictionaries as being Irish and not Scottish Gaelic,
but many of these so-called Irish words are in daily use
in Cantyre and appear in the Scottish Gaelic Bible, and
the close similarity the Gaelic speech of the West of
Scotland has to that of the North of Ireland (much closer
than the native English of places not farther removed from
one another and with no sea between them) makes the
interchange of words easy and often convenient. Many
of those who condemn the use of what they call " Irish "
words, have no scruple in introducing English and Doric
words, which they try to pronounce and write according
to Gaelic rules, apparently to make their identity somewhat
obscure, when there are already two or three native
Gaelic words much more to the point.
A few correspondents have complained that the work
is too crowded, in places, with obsolete or English words,
but only those given in other Gaelic Dictionaries figure
here, although more prominence has been given to the
character of Anglicisms. Words marked obsolete in.
some Dictionaries, may often have been obsolete for a long
period in the districts in which the compilers of those