Thomas Wilson Manx Sermons 1–12 edited by Christopher Lewin and Max W. Wheeler January 2018 Sources Sharmaneyn liorish Thomase Wilson, D.D. ... chyndait veih Bayrl gys Gailck. Lioar I. Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1783, pp. 1-270. Works of ... Thomas Wilson, D.D. Volume II. Bath: C. and R. Cruttwell, 1781, Sermons 1-10, 15, 16, 18, pp. 1-69, 97-106, 113-119. Introduction 1 A volume of twenty-two translations of Bishop Wilson’s sermons was printed at Bath in 1783. The title page has Lioar 1, but it seems that only one volume was published. An additional thirteen unbound printed sermons have recently come to light, apparently proofs for a second volume. According to Cubbon (1933: 343), ‘The sermons were translated into Manx by the Rev. T. Corlett, vicar of Kirk Christ, Lezayre. The volume was printed at the expense of the son of Bishop Wilson, Dr Thomas Wilson of London, in honour of the Bishop’s memory’. There are four volumes of Wilson’s sermons in English; the Manx volume is a selection from the first three English volumes. The English sermons were also printed in volume 2 of Works of ... Thomas Wilson, printed in 1781, and it is this text which is reproduced here. Sermon 10 has been edited by Christopher Lewin with linguistic commentary in Scottish Gaelic Studies, vol. 28 (2011). The sermons constitute a significant body of Manx prose (amounting to almost 500 printed pages in the published volume). Thomson (1988: 15) notes that ‘[b]oth of these works [the sermons and Wilson’s Short and Plain Introduction for the better understanding of the Lord’s Supper] follow the standard Bible spelling, and both are good translations, the sermons particularly offering a good deal of material not found elsewhere’. In fact, there are some minor variations from the Bible spelling, such as the use of yh for eh ‘it’, and na for both na ‘than’ and ny ‘or’. In this edition printing errors have been corrected: omitted letters are restored in italic within roman text and in roman within italic text. Other editorial modifications are provided in square brackets. While it is true that there is a considerable amount of vocabulary and idiom in the sermons seldom attested elsewhere, the translation is perhaps not of as high a standard as the Bible or Yn Fer-raauee Creestee (Thomson 1998). In general, native idiom and grammar are used appropriately, but English influence shows itself particularly at the level of sentence structure and style, as well as in the vocabulary, with items such as consideral, explaynal, plain, history and text being frequent, and there are some unnatural calques in the syntax, such as the sporadic use of quoi ‘who’ as a relative pronoun. The overall impression is of a translator with 1 Adapted from Lewin (2011).