Angofbew, you are right about the bickering. Unfortunately it seems that for a small number of people (on all sides) the Spelling Debate has become a matter of such emotional imnportance that the whole discussion has long ago become reminiscent of an unceasing family feud - difficult to understand to outsiders, but fought fanatically to the last drop of blood.
Re loanwords:
Where do you draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable loans? Or do you mean that *all* loanwords, regardless of how well they have been assimilated or how long they have been part of the language, should be replaced?
You should bear in mind that well above 20% of the basic vocabulary of Classical Middle Cornish as exemplified by UC and KK consists of assimilated loans. Do you think that the language should be purged of, say, words of Latin origin like <eglos> or <keus>?
I can understand that you find the style of texts like TH ("Kernewek Pronter", c.f. "brezhoneg beleg") with their gratuitous borrowings from and calques on English, disturbing. But this is entirely different from cases like, well, "eglos". Overzealous linguistic purism has never served a language too well.
Loan words are a touchy subject in any language, for example Arabic has official terms for Telephone,Computer, Bank etc, which are used by the Media, and the Government but the man on the street says "Teleefon",'Bank" Komputeer" etc.
If Cornish had survived as a community language , the same issue would probably apply, the purists would use "pure " forms , but the local farmer or fisherman would use many loan words.
The responsibility lies on us to limit the amount of English borrowings, the real future of Kernewek begins after SWF, so we the current users have a duty to limit the amount we use in our teachings and passing of the language to learners.
I think that is why an easily update-able interactive dictionary on-line, with all known Cornish words and a place to add new ones, is needed!
I was thinking more on the lines of Tregear and his use of loan words. There are many good Cornish words as well as English borrowed words, and i meant that where their is a Cornish word then the English Loan Word should be scrapped. This is not what the supporters of 'attestation' are saying, their position is that because it is in Tregear then it is acceptable, well to me it is not. I think we have the chance now to regain some position on this.
I agree with Nosdan, in that an Internet Dictonary would be an ideal thing. A quick and easy way to access words that are not a part of normal everyday speach is needed.
Pokorny, I agree pretty much with what you are saying, and no i do not want purist extremism. Many words will need to be looked at in their own context. I do think that where their is a need for a 'New Word' if it can be brought about by using Cornish stems, then that is what we do. However if not, then we must first look to Welsh and Breton before we look elsewhere.
I think that loan-words and slang are beyond proscription anyway, and whatever sticks, sticks. Words like 'pellgowser' and 'pellwolok' seem pretty well entrenched as modern terms for 'telephone' and 'television' from Kernewek stems, however things like 'plasenn arghansek' for 'compact disc' seems to be losing out to the very Anglo-phonic 'sidi'.
Thats the most important thing, plasenn arghansek maybe losing out because its not being taught to people... Think how many times pellwolok and pellgowser are used in learning materials.
I cant think of a book i have without one of them, ive never heard of plasenn arghansek...
With a viable internet depository of new words, a consensus can be quickly established on a created words, and can be quickly disseminated.
I agree that many loan words in Tregear are probably ad hoc borrowings and ought to be looked at critically before using or discarding them. I firmly believe though that everything that occurred in traditional Cornish ought to be permitted at least. If a Cornish speaker wants to use these words, or not, it should be up to his or her stylistic preferences.
A loan word, however, that is well established in various texts and can pretty much safely assumed to have been every day Cornish vocabulary should not be discouraged, I don't think, even if it may "sound English", especially when no other Cornish word is available. I believe this bending-over-backwards purism to be pedantic and quite unnecessary.
morvyl, I am not against loan woerds per se, what i am saying is that when there is a loan word that has a Cornish equivalent then it should go. I do not agree with you entirely on this, but repect your opinion. On laon words in general, I think we are in a position to say that if we look at both Breton and Welsh and there is a word in both, we can assume quite safely that it would of been in Cornish too. My argument is that this should be the stratagy we use when looking for 'lost' words. Also I do not agree with you on the first sentance of the last paragraph, sorry. I do believe that where there is a Cornish word then the load word should be discouraged. As I think this only weakens the Language, you might find that this is one of the big hurdles where other speakers are concerned. Personally when I see this in an argument for say UCR or anything else, I tend to go against the arguments that support that faction. I believe that when KK was adopted, many supported it simply because the spelling was so unlike English and not on other factors that the might not of understood.
If you look at the Welsh 'Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, GPC (free abridged e-text version can be downloaded from http://www.aber...gpc_pdfs.htm, you'll find that they have a relaxed attitude towards including loan words in this definitive Welsh dictionary. Such loans are listed regardless of whether or not there's a close Welsh equivalent.
As a Welsh speaker, my impression is that the attitude to this in Wales is not one of Right and Wrong, but more one of appropriate style. So, in everyday speech many people will use English loan words much more freely than they would in formal speech.
An example of this (which I've mentioned before, so please skip ahead if you've already read it) is something I heard in a North Wales bank, between 2 native speakers. The customer said to the bank teller, "Dwi'n wantio transfferio ffunds o'r cwrrent account i'r deposit account, plis." He was using so many English loan words that there's no need to offer a translation, I'm sure!
Just about all of those loan words are listed in the GPC, and many native Welsh speakers would use them (although not everyone would overdo it to the extent that this chap did). I won't pretend I like the Welsh he was using (and I wouldn't use it myself), but he's a native speaker and I'm not.
However, he was speaking in a casual situation, where this style or register may be fairly acceptable. It would be quite unacceptable for, say, the Finance Minister in the Welsh Assembly to speak in this casual register when making his/her Budget speech. It would sound as incongruous as hearing a government minister in the Houses of Parliament using Cockney rhyming slang in a speech.
The sort of prescriptive linguistics some people here are advocating is not widely accepted these days. My view is that the Definitive Cornish Dictionary should contain just about all the words in all the texts from the historical corpus. In addition, it should contain just about all the words in all of the modern, revived corpus, from every single variety of Revived Cornish.
It would be a good idea to mark the provenance of each entry, to show which text it came from, or which modern dictionary, or which variety of Revived Cornish had engendered any neologisms. It would be acceptable to give both the original spelling(s) as well as a normalised SWF spelling. It would be fine to mark a word as an English or Breton loan. And it would be fine to mark an entry as 'deprecated: see xxx' to suggest another word instead.
But it would not be acceptable to censor the dictionary to suit the views of the lexicographer. Think about it: one lexicographer might have a prejudice against English loans and calques, while another might reject, say, Welsh-based items, or French ones, or slang, or swear words or . . .
Definitive dictionaries, such as the GPC, must reflect the language as it actually is, and has been, used rather than as the lexicographer wishes it to be. After all, the final decision as to which words are actually used is up to the speakers of the language; all the experts can do is advise.
Of course, specialised dictionaries like those for schools, or learners, or students of historical linguistics must pick and choose what goes into them, but the editorial rules for these smaller dictionaries are necessarily different from those for a Definitive Dictionary.
Eddie, I agree with a lot of what you say. However we are not in the same position as either Welsh or Breton, we do not have a bank of Native Speakers. I think that this puts us in a difficult position in regards to the use of Loan Words. I see it like this, at this stage we need eo be more like the 'correct english' Brigade, in that what we should be aiming for, is as pure a Language as we can, that would be the Official Form. Outside of this, users would use whatever they feel they want to use, which is fine. BUT, I do think that an Official Form is necessary, and important. I am not talking about coloqual Cornish, more of a High Browed Cornish if you want.
I think speakers will use whatever term is easier to use or say, "pellgowser" and "pellwolok" have been established, the Germans say "Fernsehen" but even they use the international term "Telefon"
'Cee Dee" or however it will be spelt will I think catch on quicker then the more convoluted "Plasenn
Arghensek" (even formal Arabic uses "si-di")this would probably go for a lot of modern technological terms such as DVD or HD,especially when (unlike in most other languages) the media and advertising in Cornwall will be in English , packaging and instructions manuals will come in English and the other European languages plus Chinese and Japanese,but not in Cornish.
The process in Cornwall will be no different then in French,German, Japanese where English loan words for popular culture and consumer items would be used despite the protests of the language purists in those countries.
Well, I see what you mean, but I wouldn't say that it ought to go, but that the speaker has the choice in a dictionary between using a well attested loan word and a Cornish equivalent. If the Cornish equivalent is well attested then it should definitely be encouraged, such as "convedhas" in favour of "understondya".
That's always a good start
It will remain an assumption. In our current position such assumptions are legitimate, but these forms should always appear next to the attested word in dictionaries and should be so indicated so that the speaker has the chance to chose between a well attested loan word and a word reconstructed through Breton and Welsh.
I completely disagree that loan words "weaken" a language, just look at English and that language is anything but weak in our day and age. Loan words are a fact of language life - they have always existed and always will. Words perceived as Cornish, such as "eglos, gol, pons, cusca, bednath, mollath" and so many others, are loan words. They were borrowed from Latin, when the Romans were the rulers of the British lowlands, not the English. Loan words are part of the history of a language. Don't get me wrong, I'll prefer a "good Cornish" word of a loan word any day, but I don't think we ought to "purify" the language and make it into something it never was. That's very 19th century...
Now you're moving back into the spelling debate, when the discussion about loan words has nothing to do with it. The question of dealing with loan words is relevant to any orthographic form. It's too simplistic to say that UCRers like English loan words and KKers do not.
And many didn't support it, which is why we're here 20 years later arguaing over the same things... but again, this is another discussion entirely.
Yes. Is there a definitive decision on the pronunciation of the letters of the alphabet in Cornish? if we had a vote on that then the letters DVD, HD and CD could be used, but pronounced as though spelling them out in Cornish. German speakers will say "CD" and pronounce [tse: de:] which is the way the letters "C" and "D" are spoken, quite different from the English [si: di:].
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