We published seven pages of Manx this week. The alphabet and how to pronounce it. Greetings. Numbers. Days. Family. Colours. A hub that ties them together.
Every entry gives you the Manx word, how it sounds, and the book it comes from. Where no source records a pronunciation, the page says so rather than guessing.
That standard is the point of the whole thing, and it cost us three published entries to hold.
How to say hello, count, and name the days in Manx
Say good morning. Moghrey mie. Say good night. Oie vie. Count to ten. Name the days. Ask how someone is.
Start with The Manx Alphabet and Pronunciation, because Manx spelling will lie to you if you let it. Then Greetings. The rest is Numbers, Days, Family, Colours.
One warning before you go looking elsewhere. Search for how to say hello in Manx and you will find pages that answer with sláinte. That is Irish. Manx, Irish and Scottish Gaelic are three languages, not three accents. Anyone who flattens them is guessing.
What happened to Manx in 1974
The chain broke.
Ned Maddrell died in 1974. He was the last man who learned Manx the way you learn a first language, from people who had it from their own parents, back through every generation that lived on that island. When he went, nobody was left who had it that way.
That is not the same as a language dying. Manx is spoken today. There are children on the Isle of Man being raised in it. But the unbroken line is gone, and it is not coming back.
So when you build a Manx reference you face a question that does not come up in Irish. For any given word, is this old, or did somebody reconstruct it after 1974?
Both are legitimate. A revived word that people use is a real word. But you have to know which is which, and you have to tell the reader. Presenting a modern coinage as ancient is a lie, even a small one, and small lies are what rot a reference.
So we tag every entry. [H] means we found it in the historical record. [R] means revived or modern standard. We do not guess.
The two dictionaries behind every entry
The record for Manx is thinner than for Irish, but it exists, and it is free.
Archibald Cregeen spent years making a dictionary of Manx and published it in 1835, at a time when educated opinion could not see the point. John Kelly made another; the Manx Society printed it in 1866. Both men are long dead. Both books are public domain. We hold full copies of both.
That is the supply line. Everything on those seven pages traces back to one of them, or to Christopher Lewin’s 2020 study of Manx phonology out of Edinburgh, which is open access and which is why we can give you pronunciation at all.
Then we checked our own work against the second dictionary. Three entries did not survive it.
Three Manx words the dictionaries corrected
Husband. We had it as dooinney, or sheshey. Both wrong. Dooinney on its own just means man. Sheshey is a companion, a partner, a fellow, an equal, and Kelly’s sheshey-ben means wife. The word for husband is dooinney-poost. A married man.
Grandfather. We had shennayr, tagged as modern. Wrong twice over. Kelly gives shennayr as a forefather, a predecessor. An ancestor, not a grandparent. It is genuinely old, just not for what we said. Grandfather is jishag mooar. Big daddy. Cregeen and Kelly agree on it.
Welcome. This one is the one that matters.
We had failt ort tagged as revived. The reasoning looked solid. Cregeen 1835 lists failt only as hired, bound to service, the past participle of failley, to hire. No welcome anywhere in it. So we concluded the greeting was modern, tagged it [R], and wrote it up on the site as our worked example of the method.
Then we opened Kelly. Page after the entry for hired:
Failt ort signifies success to thee, welcome.
And on the English side of the same book, under Welcome: failt ort.
It was old the whole time. We had published the opposite.
Why one dictionary is never enough
We corrected it. The page says so now, and so does the hub, because burying a correction is worse than making the mistake.
The error is worth dissecting, because it was not carelessness. We used a real dictionary and read it correctly. Cregeen genuinely does not contain the welcome sense.
The mistake was in the inference. We treated absence from one book as evidence the word was modern. That is not evidence. That is a gap in one man’s dictionary, compiled by one person, in one decade, on one island.
So the rule changed. Absence from a source proves nothing. If we tag something as revived, we now need positive evidence that somebody coined it, not just a blank where we looked.
Three errors, one habit: trusting a single source. A second dictionary caught all three inside an hour. That check is now standard on every entry we publish.
Why some Manx pronunciations are still missing
Every pronunciation on these pages comes from a named source. Sixteen entries do not have one yet, and those say so.
That is a deliberate standard, and it is worth knowing what sits behind it. Cregeen and Kelly are dictionaries of meaning; neither records how a word sounds. Wiktionary carries phonetics for a handful of Manx words and we have taken all of it. Fockleyreen looked like the answer and is not: it is a translation dictionary with no phonetics in it at all. We checked.
Two routes remain. Kneen’s English-Manx Pronouncing Dictionary of 1938, and the recordings of native speakers held in the Manx Corpus and by Culture Vannin. We are pursuing both.
We could fill those sixteen gaps this afternoon by reading the spelling and writing down what it looks like. That is what most sites do. Manx spelling misleads more reliably than almost any language in Europe, which is why we built a whole page explaining how it misleads. An inferred pronunciation is a guess in a costume, and a guess is worth less than an admitted gap.
Why Manx is worth getting right
Manx went all the way to the bottom. UNESCO called it extinct in 2009. Schoolchildren on the island wrote to them, in Manx, to point out the problem. UNESCO moved it off the list.
A language that came back from that deserves a reference built to a real standard. Two dictionaries on every word. A pronunciation from a named source or an honest blank. Corrections published where the error was made.
That is the standard. Seven pages, two dead lexicographers, and every word traceable to one of them.
Manx Words & Grammar is free and will stay free. Start at the hub, or read how Manx came back from the dead. Found an error? Tell us, and we will publish the fix.