I HAVE TO SHOW YOU THIS!

I have to show you this. It’s one of my prized possessions… and it - or they - cost me £18 back in 2011 from a bookshop in Aberystwyth.
Daniel Silvan Evans’ English-Welsh dictionary was published between 1852 and 1853 and came in 2 volumes. The tomes are uniform half-calf overcloth, and include gilt tooling and titles. They both feature red marbled endpapers and the internals are laid out in two columns per page. The English title reads: “in which the English words are deduced from their originals, and explained by their synonyms in the Welsh language.”
At the time of its publishing, Welsh was spoken as a majority language in most of Wales except for some border areas and southern Pembrokeshire.
Daniel Silvan Evans was one of the pioneers in ensuring the Welsh language was documented as meticulously as possible.
His dictionary came at an important time for the language - with an influx of English monoglots into Wales in the decades following Evans’ publication starting a quick decline of the language. Due to the timing of his work, most comprehensive modern dictionaries are seen as direct decendants; maintaining the purity of the language from a time when it was still the dominant tongue.
There are plenty of interesting features in the books, not least on the title page where ‘Saesneg’ (English) is referred to as ‘Saesoneg’.
There are plenty of examples that show how Welsh has evolved over the last couple of centuries, notable how PH is used where we’d use FF nowadays. Also, double-M no longer exists in Welsh, but was commonplace in the mid-nineteenth century.
I found ‘telephone’ as ‘pellseinyr’ - literally ‘far-sounder’ - but there’s no sign of ‘television’ for obvious reasons.
One awesome entry is TELYNEG (= lyric) which, according to Thomas Parry, was coined by Evans himself.
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