Nicholas Williams (Celticist)

Nicholas Jonathan Anselm Williams (born October 1942 in Walthamstow, Essex), sometimes credited as N. J.

As Peter Berresford Ellis points out, Williams was the first professional Celtic scholar to study revived Cornish in depth.

[1] In 1990 Williams published an article "A problem in Cornish phonology", demonstrating that the phonemes represented by the graphemes ⟨tj⟩ and ⟨dj⟩ had never been part of the language and should therefore be removed from Kernewek Kemmyn.

Williams together with Graham Thomas edited the Middle Cornish play Bewnans Ke, which had been donated to the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 2000.

Their edition was published by Exeter University Press in association with the National Library of Wales in October 2006.

Williams's "Ancow Arthur", a translation of Tennyson’s "Morte D'Arthur", published in Delyow Derow 15 (1996) is an example of his verse.

Nicholas Williams is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and was awarded honorary membership of the Irish Translators' and Interpreters' Association[2] for his Cornish New Testament.