Cornish language: Encyclopedia II - Cornish language - History

Cornish language - History

The proto-Cornish language came into being after the Southwest Britons of Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall became geographically separated from the West Britons of later Wales after the Battle of Deorham in about 577. The area controlled by the Southwest Britons was progressively reduced by the expansion of Wessex over the next few centuries. Around 930, Cornwall was finally conquered by the Saxon king Athelstan. However, the Cornish language continued to flourish well through the Middle Ages, reaching a peak of about 38,000 speakers (estimated by Ken George) in the 13th century.

At the time of the Prayer Book rebellion of 1549, which was a reaction to Parliament passing the first Act of Uniformity, people in many areas of Cornwall did not speak or understand English. (The intention of the Act was to replace worship in Latin with worship in English, which was assumed, by the lawmakers, to be universally spoken throughout England. Instead of simply banning Latin, however, the Act was framed so as to enforce English.) In 1549, this imposition of a new language was sometimes a matter of life and death: many Cornish people protesting against the imposition of an English Prayer book were massacred by the King's army. Their leaders were executed and the people suffered numerous reprisals.

Early Modern Cornish was the subject of a study by the Welsh linguist Edward Lhuyd in 1700, and differs from the mediaeval language in having a simpler structure and grammar. By this time the language was already arguably in decline from its earlier heyday, and the situation worsened over the course of the next century. It is often claimed that the last native speaker of Cornish was the Mousehole resident Dolly Pentreath, who died in 1777. Notwithstanding her supposed last words, "Me ne vidn cewsel Sawznek!" ("I don't want to speak English!"), she spoke at least some English as well as Cornish. The last monoglot Cornish speaker is believed to have been Chesten Marchant, who died in 1676 at Gwithian. It does, however, appear to be true that Dolly Pentreath spoke Cornish fluently and may have been the last to do so before the revival of the language in the 20th century. There is evidence that Cornish continued, albeit in limited usage by a handful of speakers, throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th century. In 1875 six speakers all in their sixties were discovered. Fishermen, for example, were counting fish in the Cornish language into the 1940s. It has been suggested by Cornish linguist Richard Gendall that some dialects of English spoken in Cornwall (especially the dialect of West Penwith, where traditional Cornish was last spoken) display strong lexical and prosodic influences from the Cornish language that almost certainly go back several centuries.

Cornish language - Revival

The first successful attempt to revive Cornish was largely the work of Henry Jenner and Robert Morton Nance in the early part of the twentieth century. This system was called Unified Cornish (Kernewek Unyes) and was based mainly on Middle Cornish (the language of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — a high point for Cornish literature), with a standardised spelling and an extended vocabulary based largely on Breton and Welsh. For many years, this was the modern Cornish language, and many people still use it today.

Shortcomings in Unified Cornish had to do in part with the stiff and archaising literary style Nance had employed, and in part with a realisation that Nance's phonology lacked some distinctions which must have obtained in traditional Cornish. In the 1970s, Tim Saunders raised a number of issues of communicative efficiency, but his initiative had no influence and later developments are entirely independent.

In the early 1980s, Richard Gendall, who had worked with Nance, published a new system based on the meagre prose works of Nicholas Boson and John Boson. This system, called Modern Cornish (Curnoack Nowedga) by its proponents, differs from Unified Cornish in using the English-based orthographies of the 17th and 18th centuries, though there are also differences of vocabulary and grammar. Gendall was not the first to perceive that the Unified Cornish standard did have some serious deficiencies, but his anglicised spelling was particularly unpopular, and his frequent revisions discouraged potential supporters.

In 1986 Ken George developed a revised orthography (and phonology) for Revived Cornish, which became known as Kernewek Kemmyn (lit. Common Cornish). It was subsequently adopted by the Cornish Language Board as their preferred system. It retained a Middle Cornish base but made the spelling more systematic by applying phonemic orthographic theory, and for the first time set out clear rules relating spelling to pronunciation. The revised system was taken up enthusiastically by the majority of Cornish speakers and learners, and was especially welcomed by teachers. Nevertheless, a minority chose to continue using Unified Cornish. Despite later criticism by Nicholas Williams (see below), Kernewek Kemmyn has retained the support of perhaps 80% of active Cornish speakers. (McKinnon Report, 2000, Table 3.2).

In 1995 Nicholas Williams proposed an alternative revision of Unified Cornish known as as Unified Cornish Revised or UCR (Kernowek Unys Amendys). This version adapted the spelling to fit a phonology reconstructed on the basis of Dr. Williams' theories, while keeping as close as possible to the orthographic practices of the medieval scribes. In common with Kernewek Kemmyn, it makes full use of Tudor and Late Cornish prose materials unavailable to Nance. Williams published his English-Cornish Dictionary in this orthography in 2000. Like the other orthographies, UCR also has its adherents and its detractors. It has not however become the standard for all users of Cornish, as its supporters had hoped.

In practice these different written forms do not prevent Cornish-speakers from communicating with each other effectively. Cornish has been successfully revived as a viable language for communication. Nevertheless there is still much scope for improving the standard and accuracy of the spoken language.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki