John Sampson

John Sampson (1862–1931) was an Irish linguist, literary scholar and librarian. As a scholar he is best known for The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales (1926), an authoritative grammar of the Welsh Romani language. Early life He was born in Schull, County Cork, Ireland, the son of James Sampson (1813-c. 1871), a chemist and engineer, and his wife Sarah Anne Macdermott; he was brother to Ralph Allen Sampson (1866-1939). James Sampson left Ireland after losing all his money in a bank failure. The family with four sons moved to Liverpool in 1871. John Sampson, the eldest, left school at the age of 14, after his father's death, and was apprenticed to the engraver and lithographer Alexander MacGregor. MacGregor retired when Sampson was aged 22, and from 1888 he ran his own printing business, in Liverpool's Corn Exchange. Sampson became librarian at University College, Liverpool in 1892, largely self-taught. His printing business had failed that year, and his application was supported by Kuno Meyer. In 1894, on a camping trip with others from the College, he encountered the musician Edward Wood, near Bala. The Wood family to which he belonged, descendants of Abram Wood (died 1799), were noted as speakers of Welsh-Romani, a quite pure inflected Romani dialect, which was to become Sampson's major study, and which earned him the sobriquet Romano rai ("Romany Lord", Gypsy scholar), or just "the Rai". They were also musicians, twenty-six harpists being noted from the 18th century. In 1896, through Lloyd Roberts, a harpist and Edward Wood's brother-in-law, Sampson found Matthew Wood, on Cader Idris, who moved shortly to Abergynolwyn. He was brother to Edward, and with his four sons more fluent in Welsh Romani, in which they told folk tales. Sampson spent vacations with them, and began a thirty-year lexicographical and philological project on the language. Matthew Wood, however, abruptly disappeared some three years later.