Gunwalloe - Church Cove
View across Church Cove in Gunwalloe at the base of the Lizard Peninsula.
The church is St Winwalloe with it's distinctively seperate bell tower and surrounding Tamarisk hedge....
newlyn house
Wonderfully painted frontage....
rogers tower
A folly built 18th C, for Mr Rogers, a local landowner....
Said to be derived from 'Attila', 5th Century Branch Manager of Hunnic Household Finance. HHF's penalty for loan defaulting was said to be "Two vital organs - our choice".
Many years ago, at University, I knew this linguist. He had a natural flair for picking up languages. Of Spanish extraction, he was. He already knew all the Latin derived languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Romanian), plus Dutch, German, Russian, and so on. I remember he picked up a working knowledge of Gaelic in about 6 or 7 weeks. (Working knowledge ? Well, remember the lines from Blackadder....."I can order coffee, deal with waiters, make sexy chit-chat with the ladies -- just don't ask me to teach brain surgery or direct a light opera."
At any rate, despite such a great natural ability, he still had a few tricks up his sleeve. One was a method for remembering vocabulary. He made the point that, if you can derive a mental picture for a foreign word, the more outrageous or humorous the better, it assists greatly in remembering it.
And with that in mind, the Cornish word for today is :
DAMPNYA - (v) to damn (as in, to Hell)
Derived from the English verb "to dampen".
Cognisant of the fact that neither hellfire nor any other extreme underground heat held any fear or discomfort for the Cornish miners -- after all, worried about catching cold in the afterlife of eternal damnation, they had been known to send back for their blankets -- the medieval church decided to add an eighth circle of Hell especially for the Cornish. Therein, every Cornishman condemned to Hell is up to his bottom lip in muck ..... liquid filth. And rather than "Abandon all hope ye who enter here", the words written up on the portal of the Cornish circle of Hell are "Do not make waves".
Derived from the porn star of the same name, who fulfilled every man’s fantasy by not only making the guy a full cooked breakfast the next morning, but ironing his shirt as well.
Thanks for that one.
Then there's this violent little word, for which Nance gives a long list of English equivalents, so many that it'd be just about the only one a Cornish comic writer would need in his/her action balloons:
squattya - to hit, knock, break, crash, squash, chop, smash, bump, bang, etc.; (of a mine) abandon working.
This English loan comes from a little-known variant of Cornish omdowl (that has found great popularity in Japan), and the name describes the ritual E. squatting the contestants indulge in before the main stramash itself.
The Japanese had to rename it, because 'omadowra' (as they would pronounce the Cornish word in their syllabary) has unfortunately obscene connotations in their own language. Thus, because they felt that it was the ultimate SUM of 'Omdowl' they dubbed it (in less unfortunate Cornish)
SUM O > J. sumo . . . i.e. 'It was (the) sum'
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KS: selven an Furf Screfys Savonek? -- Ya, hep wow!
'Gaseth' is UCR, LC has 'wheroder' I dont know what KK uses, as I cannot locate it in a KK dictionary.
Problem is what term will KS use or for that matter any new standard.
This is going to happen with a lot of the lexicon where different forms use different terms for similar things or concepts.
Lexicon is a different matter from orthography. Even in the UCR dictionary we had a tendency to be catholic and inclusive of words. We always retained words attested in the corpus, but did not tend to shun other words in use. The new dictionary should be inclusive, I should think.
Geseth looks like it's from ges, e.g. gul ges 'to make fun (of someone)'. So Geseth would mean 'joking' or 'mocking'.
I can't see that that's really irony. Irony is saying the opposite of what you believe, usually in a tone that makes this plain. E.g. "Isn't he clever!" when your meaning is "what a fool!"
Tim's right about the need for precision. Many of Nance's 'translations' have no textual basis.
Seventy Percent of "competent & frequent" Cornish users prefer to write KK! (MAGA/CLP Survey)
Williams would have gesya for 'joking' and gwyl ges a for 'mocking'. He gives gesedhus 'ironic', gesedhek 'ironical', and geseth 'irony'. So he is making a distinction.
Welsh has eironig and eironi (borrowed from English). Breton has godisus and godis (borrowed from Old French goder 'to joke', to mock').
I don't really think Williams' terms are objectionable in that context, do you?
Or in the words of Bart Simpson
"The ironing is delicious'
(delycyous ew an levnans' po 'delicyous ew an plattians') although does not really work in Cornish.
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We live and learn - nice one!
