Edmund Evans Greaves Goodwin 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. 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 operalibretti.
Throughout his life Goodwin would go on to have good working knowledge of sixteen languages and was able to read in several more.
Manx language
Following the decline of Manx as a community language on the Isle of Man during the 19th century, interest in the language was renewed, most notably among educated men in the town of Peel, where it was still common to hear Manx spoken by the fishermen. Goodwin began learning Manx in the autumn of 1893 and although his illness confined him to his bed for much of his life, he nevertheless studied Manx grammar and idiom in great detail with the help of "dictionary and Scriptures". Goodwin began teaching Manx in Peel, where the earliest iterations of First Lessons in Manx "for blackboard use" were written. Along with several other prominent members of the Manx language revival such as J. J. Kneen and Dr John Clague, Goodwin was a founding member of Yn Çheshaght Ghailckagh in 1899. A. W. Moore, the director of the Manx Museum and the first president of Yn Çheshaght Ghailckagh, was not concerned only with the preservation and promotion of the Manx language, but also with all things related to Manx culture:
Though called the Manx Language Society, it should, I think, by no means confine its energies to the promotion of an interest in the language, but extend them to the study of Manx history, the collection of Manx music, ballads, carols, folklore, proverbs, place-names, including the old field names which are rapidly dying out in a word, to the preservation of everything that IS distinctively Manx, and, above all, to the cultivation of a national spirit.
In 1901 his First Lessons in Manx under the Manx name Lessoonyn ayns Çhengey ny Mayrey Ellan Vannin was published to help the small but growing community of learners of the Manx language. The book was serialised in Manx newspaper Mona's Herald and is still in use by Manx students on the Isle of Man today.
