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....
Those who use "yn hwir/whir" are going to continue to do so. I prefer not to and "yn gwir" is somewhat easier to say, as well. Is "yn hwir" grammatically incorrect? I doubt that we'll ever know the answer to that one, unless another ancient Welsh professor has been sitting on a hitherto unknown manuscript which just happens to contain it.
Still, it all helped to liven up a forum which had become duller than dishwater
Those of us that treat Cornish as a living language know that 'yn hwir' is grammatically correct.
That's the way living languages work - you know an utterance is correct because you recognise the rules that generated it and can judge when they have been applied correctly.
That's what a grammar is for - it allows you to apply a rule to any number of different words and create a new utterance that is recognised as valid.
Here the rule is 'an adverb can be formed by preceeding an adjective with 'yn' and subjecting the adjective to fifth mutation where appropriate'.
'gwir' is an adjective. Apply the rule and the result is 'yn hwir' - a grammatically correct utterance by definition.
Just as 'yn fenowgh' and 'yn tien' and 'yn fras' are grammatically correct - for those of us that treat Cornish as a living language.
Those of us that treat Cornish as a moribund fossil and little more than a static coffee-table exhibit, in which an utterance is deemed to be gramatically correct only if it appears in the traditional texts will indeed be able to extend their command of Cornish only if futher texts are found as a result of more ancient Welsh professors biting the dust.
The pattern in Welsh is sufficiently different from Cornish that it's maybe not of much help. Fwiw, in Welsh, the words are:
gwir adj. true
gwir, gwyryonedd noun. truth
yn wir. truly (W. 'yn' causes soft mutation,
mewn gwyryonedd. in truth (W. 'mewn' causes no mutation)
In Welsh, 'yn' has 2 roles, similar to the Cornish cognate, but with some differences:
(1) to form adverbs. causing a soft mutation:
yn + da > yn dda. well
(2) as a preposition meaning 'in', but only used with definite nouns, causing nasal mutation of an initial consonant of the following word:
yn y ty. in the house (vowels don't mutate, of course)
yng nghanol y nos, in the middle of the night
ym Mangor. in Bangor.
Where Welsh also differs from Cornish is in having a word for E. 'in' used exclusively with indefinite nouns -- 'mewn', which causes no mutation:
mewn ty. in a house
mewn penbleth. in doubt; perplexed.
Thus, W. has the 2 phrases 'yn wir' and 'mewn gwyryonedd' attested as being authentic, idiomatic usage. From the rules of W. grammar, one might predict the phrase:
*'yn gwir'='in truth',
but that sounds wrong to me and afaik isn't used in the language at all.
In a similar way, we might look at English usage and find attested adverbs formed in the familiar mould:
quick + -ly > quickly
last + -ly > lastly
vast + -ly > vastly
. . . and from these attested examples, we might predict the unattested:
fast + -ly > *fastly
. . . which would, of course, be unidiomatic and would sound like a foreign learner's mistake.
As I understand it, Nicholas Williams's argument against *'yn whyr' is of this type:
I gather it's accepted as fact that *'yn whyr' is historically unattested, but it seems to be a matter of opinion whether or not it's idiomatic. Williams says it's not -- Nance seems to say it is. On this issue, as a learner, I'll just sit on the fence a little longer, but still carry on using 'yn gwyr', and 'yn whyr', and 'yn wyr', and 'dhe wyr' (since they're each 'attested' in the UC I'm learning!)
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KS: selven an Furf Screfys Savonek? -- Ya, hep wow!
The Williams approach treats Cornish as something dead, buried, but very worthy of academic study and endless debate.
Whether 'yn hwir' was idiomatic when the texts were written is doubtless an interesting question and if we were ever able to determine the answer it may or may not affect the speech habits of today's Cornish speakers.
What is beyond doubt is that 'yn hwir' is idiomatic today. And, following the accepted grammar, there is no reason at all why it shouldn't be.
Evidence that Cornish is a living language.
And whilst I follow and accept the argument that says rules sometimes have exceptions which prevent the generation of certain forms (such as 'fastly', but see below), it would be very unhelpful, and unacceptable to just about everyone, to suggest that we should assume that the absence of a form in the texts indicates the possibility of an exception and therefore the form should be avoided. Why? Because large amounts of our vocabulary (singulars, plurals, verb forms, etc.) and grammar (regular mutations, adverbs...) would have to be thrown out overnight.
'Fastly' is not unattested. Google confirms this. It may not be part of everybody's idiom, but it is attested. Clearly the 'create an adverb from adjective' rule has been applied to 'fast' - evidence that English is a living language, like Cornish.
Back to contractions... "A allav vy" in normal speach am I right in suggesting that the two A's merge? Is this ever shown in writing? If so is there any other examples, perhaps with different letters?
Late Cornish always leaves out the verbal particle, so that "My a wra" is written as "Me ra", so "A allav vy?" would, in Late Cornish, be "Ellam ve?". "My a yll" is "Me ell" in LC and I assume that it was so written because, before a consonant, the verbal particle was weak, and before a vowel, not distinguished at all.
Writings in Late Cornish don't tend to cause any confusion or misunderstanding because of the omission, so it works very well.
I don't think that Williams would agree with Piter's opinion that he is treating the language as a dead one. He does, however, point out that we are reviving a language.
But I take Pieter's point. Cornish is alive and it is to be stressed that I have not condemned "yn hwir" - its use has become widespread and established. I tend not to use it and, as I've said, "yn gwir" is rather easier to say.
Far worse things happen in English - if I hear another BBC news reporter say "3 a.m. in the morning", I'm going to throw something. When the hell else does a.m. occur?
Almost as ghastly is "this moment in time" -- what the f@%$ else do you get moments in other than time?
Sports commentators are some of the worst offenders; a few that have stuck in my memory:
-- during a Formula 1 (car!) race, we were informed that Schumacher was "literally flying round the course" (surely planes are not allowed in F1), and that he was "really burning up the track" (rather a destructive way of using up the tarmac, I'd have thought).
-- in a championship snooker match, when the 2 players were having a long, tactical exchange: "Well, at the end of the day, you got to get all the balls in the pockets." That has to be much less interesting to watch than the normal method of play, when the competitors pot the balls throughout the course of the entire day, rather than just at the end!
But, occasionally, commentators descend to such depths of malapropism that they actually achieve something sublime:
-- in a kick-boxing fight, a spectacular flying kick K.O. to the head was greeted with the remark, "Wow! That kick will go down in the anals of the sport!" (and it *was* pronounced "ay-nals", honest!)
-- one of the world's best poker players was knocked out of the World Series once, when his famous intuition (or 'gut', in the jargon) let him down. The commentator said, "Joe always plays with his gut, but this time it's backfired on him." Quick chorus of the "London Derrière", anyone?
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KS: selven an Furf Screfys Savonek? -- Ya, hep wow!
Untrue! Look at what Williams has written in Cornish, and judge from that, rather than from this tired bit of KKist disinformation. His list of writings includes:
-- UCR; an orthography for learners and users of Cornish, not for academics (who have no need and no wish for a normalised, revived orthography -- they work from source texts only).
-- a UCR dictionary; not one for academics, but for learners and users of Cornish.
-- a grammar-based course book in UCR, 'Clappya Kernewek'; not some formal, academic, Chomskyan Transformational grammar aimed at academics, but a practical one for ordinary learners and users of Cornish.
-- a UCR New Testament, containing some of the most beautiful Cornish ever written, imo.
-- some fine poetry.
Please explain to us how all this new, fresh writing -- none of it aimed at his fellow academics! -- shows Williams treating our language as 'something dead'.
Of course, Williams has also written books and articles discussing the Revival and the language, and which are critical of Kernewek Kemyn:
-- Cornish Today
-- Towards Authentic Cornish
-- numerous articles in "Cornish Studies" and "Writings on Revived Cornish".
The KK 'heavyweights' have been largely unable to refute his arguments, apparently lacking both the facts and the wit to do so. Moreover, they've shown themselves incapable of using his critiques to improve KK; one of them even went so far as to respond that KK "tends towards perfection". Instead, they've gone for the so-called 'ad hominem/ad personam' tactic, attacking the person rather than his/her arguments.
This is the real reason why the KK hardkore (with whom you seem to align yourself, 'Pieter') try and badmouth Williams: his academic study and debating of Cornish has led him to dismiss your chosen KK orthography as flawed and spurious.
It's worth recalling when Williams's dictionary was published, there was an outcry from some of the KK hardkore over his inclusion of these entries:
.Williams was, of course, recording actual Cornish usage with these entries, and even marked the derogatory terms as such. But, evidently, the KK establishment only like to invoke 'living spoken Cornish' when what's spoken is what favours them. Dissenting voices are not allowed, and dissenting groups are dismissed as 'a tiny minority of (noisy) troublemakers', 'a few old fossils' etc.
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KS: selven an Furf Screfys Savonek? -- Ya, hep wow!
Thanks for that, 'Eddie-C' (I note from your post that putting names in quotes is de rigeur again. This fashion appears to be confined to the language threads, but I'll go along with it so as not to offend).
Your post is a timely reminder, should one be needed, that Williams has, indeed, as you point out, two approaches to our language.
The first is to treat the language as if it fossilised centuries ago. This is the 'I find no evidence in the texts that monks at Glasney used this phrase, and it is therefore inadmissable' approach.
The second is to treat the language as a personal canvas on which anything can be splashed and then presented to the world as 'Cornish', regardless of whether anybody else recognises it as such.
As a result his dictionary is full of phrases that he has simply made up and which have never been heard in Cornwall (you will remember from Cornishorthography the observation that there are more 'Cornish' terms for self-abuse in the Williams dictionary than most people could muster in English).
No harm in making suggestions, of course, but they do need to be marked as such lest people treat them as idiomatic Cornish and wonder why everyone looks blankly at them when they come to Cornwall and try to use them.
An hilarious example of this was conveyed to me at the last Cornish language weekend. A friend pointed out the trouble you could get into if you use the Williams dictionary to translate 'Come up and see my orchids sometime', or 'those are the biggest orchids I've ever come across' especially if you're one of those Kemmynites (hardkore or otherhwise) who shuns English-looking words on principle.
Now, those of us with degrees in linguistics, pedantry, classics, and showing off know why he translated 'orchid' as 'dog's b*ll*cks' but I've yet to find another English to Something dictionary that thinks that is appropriate. It really is a case of caveat lector where the Williams dictionary is concerned, don't you think? (I thought you'd like 'caveat lector' because you're so fond yourself of using le mot juste in various Fremdsprachen).
Nevertheless, your cogent arguments have now convinced me that the Williams approach to Cornish is spot on.
I've always argued that Cornish has been revived and that what we need to do now is 'get the product to market'.
But as 'marhak' has pointed out, Williams says we haven't revived it yet (despite the fact that many of us could live our lives in Cornish given half a chance), but are in the process of reviving it. So it's back to square one (or maybe two) with everything up for grabs. I can see now that that's the way forwards!
So I'll be there with the rest of you, following Williams into the sunset.
[Apologies to anyone detecting an unintentional lack of civility in this post - both 'marhak' and 'Eddie-C' cleaned up their acts, and I'm trying to do the same but probably failing right now. Must try harder.]
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