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....
<yn> has 2 distinct roles in Cornish, as I understand it from Nance's dictionaries.
(1) as a preposition, meaning 'in', it causes no mutation, e.g.
-- yn gwylfos. in a wildnerness
-- yn gwyr. in truth
(2) as an adverbial particle, it causes state-5 Mixed mutation, e.g.
-- yn ta. well
-- yn whyls. wildly, savagely.
As 'gwyr' can be either a noun (=truth, right, justice, fact) or an adjective (=true, real, genuine), there are two possible phrases:
-- yn gwyr = in truth (yn + noun)
-- yn whyr = truly. (yn + adj.)
However, I have heard that only 'yn gwyr' is actually attested in traditional Cornish. Still, Nance gives both yn-whyr and yn-wyr in his dictionaries, and by now it looks like both 'yn whyr/yn wyr' and 'yn gwyr' are too firmly established in ordinary Revived Cornish usage for either to be ousted.
As I understand it, the SWF only addresses issues of spelling, not those of idiom, grammar, lexicon or syntax. And, even within that narrow confine, not everyone shares your apparent blind faith in the SWF's infallibility.
As regards <yn an>, my understanding is that the abbreviation to <y'n> is obligatory, rather than optional.
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KS: selven an Furf Screfys Savonek? -- Ya, hep wow!
The SWF only caters for orthography, not grammar. And who's "we"?
And I hate and loathe the Anglo-Saxon hw. Always have, always will (it was getting a little dull around here, Nosdan ). In any case the SWF allows the traditional wh.
This shortening of 'an' happens elsewhere in Cornish, of course, such as after other prepositions, conjunctions, and the verb 'bos'. Consider these examples:
(1) yn an; dhe an; yu an; yma an; ha an (or 'hag an'); a an; re an, etc.
. . . or . . .
(2) yu'n; dhe'n; yu'n; yma'n; ha'n; a'n; re'n, etc.
To my admittedly inexpert eye, set (1) looks like faulty beginner's Unified Cornish, while set (2) looks correct.
I don't think 'a little artistic licence' comes into it.
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KS: selven an Furf Screfys Savonek? -- Ya, hep wow!
Im well aware of the contractions, and I agree that the first set look a little untidy. But I really havn't seen anything written down that fudementally says you can NOT write them like that.
An in music/poetry in all languages theres is always some degree or rule bending. Wrinting "yn an" rather than "y'n" is hardly the biggest sin ever.
On a similar not.... Why doesn't "A allav" and similar verbs with "A a" Contract???
yu'n? Does Unified join 'yu' and 'an' like this? It didn't when I learned Unfied!
As for 'yn an' and poetic licence, I think the answer is to name a place An Bal. Then you can say 'yn An Bal' just as everyone I know says 'yn An Gannas' because to say 'y'n Gannas' sounds very odd indeed. Hope that helps, looking forward to subsequent cries of derision.
It's little wonder that we find it hard to move on when nonsense like the objection to 'yn hwir' gets raised on a regular basis.
It is one of the more bizarre aspects of our revival that a perfectly well-formed, grammatical utterance can be shunned, and openly criticised in conversation, because it is not found in the texts.
Why should it be found in the texts?
How can anyone be daft enough to suggest that it cannot be good Cornish because scribes happened not to use it in the manuscripts that have come down to us?
Every day we must utter hundreds of phrases that are not found in the texts, all of them ignored.
But dare to say 'yn hwir' and you get pounced on by people desperate to show their competence in Cornish by suggesting they are familiar with the texts.
Usually, I find, they've not even read them - they just got told about 'yn hwir' down the pub one night.
Whoever started this nonsense has a lot to answer for.
NJW did not like it, in "Form and content" he cites
14 uses of 'yn gwir' in the texts says the phrase is not an adverb but a prepositional phrase , "in truth' so I don't know whether 'yn' would mutate or not.
Robert Morton Nance started it, Pieter. If those who spoke and wrote Cornish as their everyday language didn't write "yn hwir/whir", then it must be right.
Today, though, we seem to like perpetuating mistakes and then claiming they're "correct", rathe rthan correcting them ourselves when the mistake is pointed. However, it seems that the issue is more about WHO points them out.
It has nothing to do with who points an error out.
It makes no sense at all to say that a phrase that follows all the rules of grammar as we understand them cannot be right because we cannot find an example of it in the texts. No sense whatsoever. It immediately 'writes off' hundreds of phrases that we use every day.
To follow up on Goky's point, NJW is absolutely right - the phrase 'yn gwir' is not an adverb. It is a prepositional phrase meaning 'in truth' and it's found 14 times in the texts. But we're not talking about the prepositional phrase 'yn gwir'. We're talking about the adverb 'yn hwir' meaning 'truly', which isn't found in the texts, but which, by any rules that we understand, is perfectly good Cornish.
Why do you hate the <hw> ??
I am not in favour of either - I dont mind <Wh> or <Hw>.
@ Eddie
I do not have "Blnd faith" in the SWF - I support the SWF because it is the only way forward. NOTHING will happen while people are squabbling like small children over whose sweet it is "Oooh, this is my sweet" - "No it isnt, it is MY sweet". I support the SWF because it puts a stop to the infantile arguements over how to spell things - for all that is holy, its only a spelling, its not the end of the world!
Surely all that proves marhak, is that there are two different grammatical structures which allow you to express the same thing. This is the case in any language.
It may be that the scribes preferred yn gwir, but this doesn't mean yn hwir is grammatically incorrect. It is simply a matter of style.
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). In any case the SWF allows the traditional wh.