Archibald Cregeen

Archibald Cregeen (baptised 20 November 1774 – 9 April 1841) was a Manx lexicographer and scholar. He is best known for compiling A Dictionary of the Manks Language, which was the first dictionary for the Manx language to be published.

Biography

Archibald Cregeen was born in late October or early November 1774, to Manx William Cregeen and his Irish wife Mary Fairclough in Colby on the Isle of Man. In 1798, he married Jane Crellin, and they had eight children. Shortly after his wedding, he built a small cottage near his father's in Colby and lived there with his family for the rest of his life. Although his father was a cooper by trade, Cregeen became a marble mason, engraving lettering on tombstones.

He was appointed coroner of Rushen Sheading in 1813. Despite this, Cregeen noted the negative attitudes towards it and the low-prestige nature of the language on the Isle of Man in the preface to his dictionary:I am well aware that the utility or the following work will be variously appreciated by my brother Manksmen. Some will be disposed to deride the endeavour to restore vigour to a decaying language. Those who reckon the extirpation of the Manks a necessary step towards that general extension of the English, which they deem essential to the interest of the Isle of Man, will condemn every effort which seems likely to retard its extinction.

Dictionary Cregeen began work on the dictionary in 1814. He did not work completely alone, but was aided by several Manx clergymen, notably Reverend John Edward Harrison, a vicar of the parish of Jurby, who supplied him with additional information. Compiling the dictionary took Cregeen over 20 years of meticulous research, travelling throughout the island, visiting farms and cottages and collecting words, phrases, and proverbs from the people he met. It is worth noting that Cregeen was not the first person to attempt to write a dictionary for the Manx language. Reverend John Kelly had attempted to do so in his A Triglot Dictionary of the Celtic Language, as spoken in Man, Scotland, and Ireland together with the English, but much of this was destroyed in a fire during publishing. Cregeen would not have been aware of this as although Kelly's dictionary was partially extant in manuscript form, it was not published until decades later in 1866. In 1939, a commemorative plaque was erected over the door of the house that Cregeen himself built in Colby.