Cornish

[Gulliver]

One of my recent fleeting interests has been the Cornish language. It has an interesting history; it never really died out but did have some long patches when it was unlikely that two native speakers were in a room together.

Jenner's handbook gives a bit of background, and is worth reading because he's a good writer and more or less writes off several of his predecessors in amusing ways (one he claims basically could not understand that Cornish but was very enthusiastic and another who was Welsh and used to drift between the two language indifferently, so was pretty unreliable as a reference).

From what I gather, revival attempts have been moderately successful, but have been hampered by bickering about the spelling system. Historically, it was written using the an approximation of English spelling system at that time, and is fantastically inconsistent. Jenner seemed to find that all rather fun, but obviously people nowadays think differently.

Has anyone here studied it at all? How do the Welsh speakers among us find reading (or indeed, hearing) it?

[Yng]

It sounds like learner-language spoken incompetently by farmers. It's not too hard to read, once you get used to the weird word order and recognise some of the less obvious sound correspondences.

[Shrdlu]

Dew(god) - cognate to "deus" is the only one I can remember. I think I spotted an other one, too.

^Edit: It was "Bewa" (to live), which is similar to Spanish "vivo" but with a few changes.

[Bristel]

Does anyone get the feeling that Cornish looks a bit like a Zompist lang?

[Shrdlu]

Does anyone get the feeling that Cornish looks a bit like a Zompist lang?

I haven't really done a good job now, but I can't spot any defining feature(something similar to the Welsh /w/ which is all over the place in that language) other than /y/ with an diacritic, so I am partly leaning to a "yes".


^edit2: some text I found on the wiki

Code: Select all

    Yma pub den genys frank hag equal yn dynyta hag yn gwyryow. Ymons y enduys gans reson ha keskans hag y tal dhedhans omdhon an eyl orth y gela yn sperys a vredereth.
    —Article I of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Looks like Welsh with /w/ changed to /y/

also spotted an other Latin cognate, silver: "arghans", which is similar to "argentum", though some versions choose to spell it without /g/ for some unobvious reason.

[jmcd]

Uh that's <w> and <y> because they're the written forms, not the phonemes.

[Gulliver]

also spotted an other Latin cognate, silver: "arghans", which is similar to "argentum", though some versions choose to spell it without /g/ for some unobvious reason.

/h/, /x/ and /ɣ/ were all commonly written <h> so <gh> and <h> were used somewhat interchangeably.

[Nortaneous]

I never realized how much Kannow looks like Cornish with grave accents until now. Welp.

[Dewrad]

Nans yw adro dhe bemdhek bledhen, me a wrug dalleth studhya an yeth kernowek. Mes, soweth, me ny wra cowsel an yeth yn freth.
About fifteen years ago, I began studying Cornish. Unfortunately, however, I don't speak the language fluently.

In honesty, as a Welsh speaker with a reasonable knowledge of Middle Welsh and the other older stages of the Celtic languages, Modern Revived Cornish sounds to me like mediaeval Welsh spoken with a pronounced English accent. It's kinda cute. Structurally, the two are extremely similar, which isn't really to be wondered at, given that the revived language is based on an idiom which was contempraneous with Middle Welsh. On the other hand, most of the original high mediaeval literature is pretty boring. There's no Cornish Mabinogi or similar, just mystery plays and sermons.

I've never really been "involved" with the revival movement, but I have always been an interested onlooker, as some of the catfights and personality politics generated by "bickering over spelling" are highly entertaining. They have, with the adoption of a new "truth and reconciliation" orthography, died down somewhat recently though. Now it's just traditionalist blowhards maintaining that their preferred (and now defunct) orthography is still the one that's used "by the majority of Cornish speakers", that with the process of coming up with a single written form "they were robbed, guv" etc. The most entertaining part about the orthography bickering is that they all speak in pretty much the same way anyway.

[dunomapuka]

Does anyone get the feeling that Cornish looks a bit like a Zompist lang?

Yeah, specifically Flaidish