I was just wondering how the Cornish went about rebuilding/reconstructing the language after it had died out? Was it all based around a certain point in time in documentation, or an academic 'theorising' of use between different points? I gather there were different 'versions' along the way before one method was chosen? Sorry about all the questions just curious as language seems so important in defining what it means to be Cornish for Cornish people. I wouldn't compare the two because Mercian has been dead for far longer than Cornish was, but i still wonder if it's a viable project for the curious.
Well to accept that Cornish never really "died out" unlike old anglo-saxon would be a start!
The date of the last monoglot speaker is contested and what people often ignore is that well after the last monoglot died, some people continued to use Cornish as a community language but where bilingual English/Cornish. This is also evidence to suggest that Cornish fishermen used Cornish to count into the early twentieth century.
When you consider that the language revival started in the 18 century then what in fact you have is a continuum of usage.
As to the spelling systems, there is one language with different orthographies as is the case with many languages.
Hello Offa, I'm not qualified to answer your questions specific to Kernewek. I live in London and am learning Kernewek because my family lived there for half of my upbringing (before b*ggering off back to where they came from!), and the emotional links have remained strong. Nevertheless, I know little about the development of Kernewek to its current position.
What I feel I can bring to this discussion, however, is my understanding (still quite limited) of the English language and its development. I would be reluctant to agree with any suggestion that Anglo-Saxon "died out" as such. Anglo-Saxon, so far as I know, is only a term to describe one particular period in the development of the English language. I don't know much about Mercian dialects, but couldn't that act in much the same way as a completely different language might in terms of defining what it is to be Mercian?
The term dialect tends to be used to describe ways of speaking that have a medium to high level of mutual intelligibility, especially when they exist within the same political unit. However, divide that political unit into many smaller units, and the dialects often become different languages in order to reinforce national identity.
If you really want a challenge, maybe try and construct a language and grammar based on what the pre-Mercian Celtic population might have spoken, using Kernewek and Cymraeg and native Celtic place and river names. After all, most Britons are descended from the original Mesolithic and Neolithic settlers, not from Anglo-Saxon invaders. We only speak English because it has been imposed upon us by our rulers.
So walk the path to freedom true
And be you not distracted by
Oppressors from the East by whom
Your treasures are extracted dry
In theory you can reconstruct any language if you've got enough material, and know something about how it related to other languages, about words borrowed to and from the language, what sort of verse it used, and so on. I've seen quite detailed reconstructions of Ancient Greek (nothing like the modern language!) for example. In theory if enough people wanted to start speaking a 'dead' language again and went to enough trouble then you could in theory crank the thing up. Once children start to learn it from adults, and then go on to pass it on to their own children the language has become self-sustaining. Hebrew is the one big success story, but in very special circumstances.
There's plenty of Anglo-saxon material, and the scholars and linguists have a pretty good idea how it sounded, but I've no idea how much Mercian has survived. Most stuff got converted to West Saxon because the rest of England was overrun by the Danes and they didn't have a lot use for books at that time. IIRC, they know fairly well how Mercian differed from West Saxon in terms of sounds, and it would have been far less than the difference between say Geordie and Cockney today. There are probably people around who speak AS, they're the same sort of people who dress up and re-do the Battle of Hastings etc.
As for Cornish the bulk of the surviving material is from c1400-c1600 (so called Middle Cornish), to be exact around 22,000 lines of verse and a collection of *very* boring sermons in prose. This is just enough to reconstruct the grammar, sounds and basic vocabulary. The gaps are filled in by analogy, looking at Welsh and Breton etc., and just making up words from Cornish roots for things like "telephone", or in the last resort, borrowing from English. The language changed slowly in a fairly orderly way through this period, so most standards aim at somewhere around 1500, but use material from *all* periods in the reconstruction.
Then there's "Late Cornish" (aka Modern Cornish), mostly small samples written by or for antiquarians c1660-1770. This was when there were still fluent speakers in the far west of Cornwall, but they'd stopped passing the language on to their kids, so people realised Cornish didn't have long to go and wrote down bits of it. So we've got a few pages of Bible translation, umpteen creeds and 10 commandments, a few letters and bits of poetry, a rambling essay and a folk tale that's a real gem ... But the literary language had been lost and writers pretty much made up the spelling as they went along, not all of them knew the language very well, etc. etc. So what we've got are some very interesting scraps, but not enough to reconstruct from without leaning heavily on Middle Cornish.
OK the factions. Jenner is credited with starting the revival about 100 years ago now. He thought he could "pick up Cornish where it had left off". Unfortunately for the reasons given above, the Late Cornish materials weren't enough, so when the first comprehensive reconstruction was done between the wars, Unified Cornish, by Nance and Smith, it was based on Middle Cornish.
That was the standard until about 20 years ago, the grammar was pretty good but the sounds hadn't been studied properly, so there was a lot of academic criticism, calling it "Cornic", a "made up language" etc. There were two reactions to this. First Richard Gendall had another try at reconstructing Late Cornish, which looks a bit more folksy and closer to what remains in local dialect. He got a few followers and they're still going, but there's never been very many of them and they've never produced a stable standard, they change it ever couple of years so it seems.
Then Ken George did the academic work on the sounds of historical Cornish and as a spin-off proposed a reformed spelling with clear pronunciation rules (Kernewek Kemmyn). After quite a bit of discussion, this was accepted by nearly everyone c18 years ago, and has been a great success ever since, especially with teachers. However a few folk wanted to stick with what they'd already learned (Unified), and some still do today.
OK, clear so far? About 10 year ago, Dr. Williams, a Irish-speaking cockney from Dublin (got that??) who'd learnt Cornish as a schoolboy, decided we'd done it all wrong and wrote a book saying so. He went on to make up his own version of Cornish, UCR -- Unified C. Revised, and campaign loudly against Kernewek Kemmyn. He picked up support from a handful of dissidents, but otherwise UCR didn't really take off as he'd expected. That's not to say that people don't buy his dictionary out of curiosity.
So that's it really, just like the Jewish Liberation Front etc in The Life of Brian, except with a recent promise of some official recognition and funding, the war has heated up as all the groups try to convince the authorities that theirs is the Real Cornish. The latest news is that the Late Cornish and UCR groups are trying to invent a "Fifth Form", while the rest of us know very well that that will lead to yet another split ... aaaargh!!!
It's not just spelling, there are differences of style and vocabulary, but no greater than you get in English. Late Cornish can be hard to read though, sometimes it seems harder that *real* historical Late Cornish
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, mar pleg. Bagasva rag teyluyow yw hemma.
