This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on William J. Watson is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
Professor William J. Watson, 1865-1948, was a toponymist, one of the greatest Scottish scholars of the 20th century, and was the first scholar to place the study of Scottish place names on a firm linguistic basis.
Watson was a native Gaelic-speaker, born in Milntown of New Tarbat (Milton, Highland), Easter Ross. He was the son of Hugh Watson, a blacksmith. He received his initial education from his uncle, James Watson. William became well grounded in Gaelic studies and in the Classics. William went to the University of Aberdeen and the University of Oxford.
First a school teacher in Glasgow, Inverness and then Edinburgh, it was while teaching in Inverness that be began to contribute to the Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness and the Celtic Review. He married Ella Carmichael daughter of Alexander Carmichael. He took the chair of Celtic at the University of Edinburgh in 1914, despite holding no prior university position. He remained in this prestigious position until making way for his son James Carmichael Watson in 1938. William died aged 83 on March 9, 1948
He is best known for his The Celtic Place-names of Scotland (1926), based on 30 years of work. Watson's work, eight decades later, is still the primary scholarly reference guide on the subject. The book is based on extensive notes taken by Watson, which are unpublished and held by Edinburgh University. Watson's great work was recently republished by Birlinn (2004) .
Select bibliography
- Place-Names of Ross and Cromarty (Inverness, 1904)
- Prints of the Past around Inverness (Inverness, 1909; 2nd revised edition Inverness, 1925)
- Rosg Gàidhlig (Inverness, 1915; 2nd edition Glasgow, 1929)
- Bàrdachd Gàidhlig (Inverness, 1915)
- The Picts: their original position in Scotland (Inverness, 1921)
- Ross and Cromarty (Cambridge, 1924)
- The History of the Celtic Place-Names of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1926)
- Scottish Verse in the Book of the Dean of Lismore (Edinburgh, 1937)
References and further reading
- Savage, Steve, William J Watson: Scottish Place-Name Papers, (London, 2002)
- Watson, W. J., , History of the Celtic Place-Names of Scotland, (Edinburgh, 1926), reprinted, with an Introduction, full Watson bibliography and corrigenda by Simon Taylor (Edinburgh, 2004).
 |
This Scottish biographical article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
 |
This biography of a United Kingdom academic is a stub. You can help by expanding it. |
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 19 October 2008, at 21:48.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "William J. Watson".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.