Edmund Goodwin
manx language scholar
Edmund Evans Greaves Goodwin (24 August 1844 – 3 January 1925) was a Manx language scholar, linguist, and teacher. He is best known for his work First Lessons in Manx that he wrote to accompany the classes he taught in Peel.
Early life
Goodwin was born on 24 August 1844 at Castle Street, Peel to Englishman George Goodwin and his Manx wife Alice Morrison. In his early childhood, Goodwin contracted an illness that left him unable to walk, and he was an invalid for the rest of his life. Despite his disability, he was devoted to music and helped to support himself by teaching singing and piano to the music students of Peel and the surrounding areas. One of his best known students was Sophie Morrison, the Manx cultural activist, folklore collector and author. Under Goodwin's tuition, she received honours from Trinity College of Music, Morrison was the first person on the island to pass a music college examination.
Even as a youth, Goodwin was noted for his aptitude for learning languages:At the age of twelve I picked up my first knowledge of German and French from old books which had belonged to my father. My first inducement to learn Latin and Italian was to be able to understand the words of Mozart’s Masses and Italian opera libretti.Throughout his life Goodwin would go on to have "good working knowledge" of sixteen languages and was able to read in several more.
Anglo-Manx dialect
Goodwin was interested in the dialect of English spoken on the Isle of Man, that was heavily influenced by the Manx language.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edmund Goodwin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.