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Page:Skeealyn Aesop a Selection of Aesops Fables Translated Into Manx-Gaelic Together with a Few Poems.djvu/12

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The Island has another attraction. It is a Celtic country, just like Wales, the Highlands, and Ireland; only that the Welshman talks "Cymric," and the others give you "Goidelic" speech. It will fare with Mann as it has done with Cornwall: the language is overridden and ousted by English; the schoolmaster is abroad, and the native tongue is fading, and slowly dying, and only spoken now by the old in the central, western, and northern secluded upland farms, in the small creeks of the sea fringe, by fishermen and farmers, in their confidential talk amongst themselves. The more curious visitor, if he gets into their good graces, will carry away a few scraps of idiomatic phrases or words, too guttural and unutterable for English mouths; to imbibe or retain. But still it is a most engaging language. The sacred Scriptures are preserved in it by great Bishop Wilson. Milton's "Paradise Lost" exists in Manx dress, and the Manx population owe to it one of the most mellow versions of Watts's hymn-book. For the dialect-hunter their language is like what the heather blossom is to the bee. The Anglo-Manx has a native aroma. It is engrafted on the Lancashire dialect as spoken in the Fylde, and its peculiar Celtic-English ring — strange blend as it is — takes quick possession of you.

There is no practical vernacular Manx grammar or reading book in the language to help the visitor to a comprehension of the language.