V Tree
A large V shaped pine tree on the Antony estate near Torpoint...
Seaton Beach
Located at the bottom of the Seaton River valley this sand and shingle beach is popular with families. At low tide it joins up with Downderry around the headland...
Seaton River
The Seaton River as it flows out of the valley and through the village of the same name...
Portwrinkle
Looking down over the one time fishing village of Portwrinkle. In the background is the start of Whitsand Bay as it stretches 4 miles down the Rame Peninsula...
Not that there's anything special about Haida, it just happened to be a page I came across recently. I could have picked any of dozens of languages from North America, Former USSR, Africa ... anywhere really that's been subject to colonisation so that outsiders invent the writing rather than the natives. Cherokee being the exception that proves the rule of course
Even Cherokee is not an exception. Not only has the Syllabary been tinkered with by the colonialist, but the language has been written using several different phonetic notations. It is also sometimes transliterated into a Latin based system.
There is also confusion on how to spell certain words since the language continues to change and there are two major dialects.
It's not a language I've studied at all so I can't comment on the 'internal' details. I just wanted to point out that even a 'primative' people were able to develop their own writing system from scratch, after which I believe there was widespread literacy. My point was that we should be allowed to look after our own language (with technical assistance if we ask for it) rather than be dictated to by outsiders and non-speakers.
The Cornish scribes developed their orthography on their own. The early Revivalists normalized their work. It was a foreign Esperantist who brought an alien orthography to Cornish.
Indeed you should. If you look carefully you will find that the technocrats who have intruded into Cornish have even made their contribution to Cherokee, although in the opposite direction than they have taken with Cornish.
Sorry, it was not my intention to dispute Cherokee with you Although if you think there's anything we can learn from them (or any similar nation) please tell us.
I didn't take it as an intention to dispute. It's just interesting to note that some of the same characters who are interfering with Cornish have also interfered with Cherokee, although much less so than with Cornish.
What is your evidence for this? Do you know who they were, when they wrote, who taught them, what their native language was? It is very obvious that they were highly influenced by Middle English writers. The truth is that no one knows very much about the authors of the fragments of Middle Cornish that have survived. We don't even know if their orthography was that most commonly used. It could be that by chance these particular writing were preserved.
Naaah, I just think it's incongruous to see Terry and Keith go on about Cherokee and "colonialists", egged on by the perpetuation of their own myth that Cornish had no scribal tradition when the patterns of the texts show clearly that there was one. "Cornish good, English bad" is the slogan.
Of course it is nonsense. The Cornish language as we know it wouldn't even exist without the influence of other languages on it. That influence is what makes Cornish so special. Of course the same thing can be said about English. Were it not for the influence of Norman French, we'd be speaking a language very much like Friesian.
Shall we expunge those vile non-Germanic Romance words from English, and speak Cleanspeech? Then instead of "the Royal Air Force" we can speak of "the Kingly Wolken Might".
Absurd? Sure it is. It's just as absurd to pretend (for that is all they do) that the Cornish language had no "real" orthography until 1985, when a "modern" and "logical" orthography was introduced (by an Esperantist) to bestow upon Cornish a "proper Celtic" orthography. That might have been fine, except that the whole language was re-cast with geminate consonants nobody managed and half-length that most didn't know about. And however "logical" the graphs were to their inventor, they attracted sustained opposition from people to whom the heritage of the texts was important.
(By the way, I have nothing against Esperanto. In fact the other week I watched Incubus, a film starring a very young William Shatner, made entirely in Esperanto. It's interesting to see his schoolboy Canadian French interfere from time to time with his Esperanto, as when he says [mi păsis] instead of [mi pensis].)
I didn't say that Cornish scribes devised their orthography in a vacuum. But it was Cornish speakers do did the devising. They weren't sitting round, writing Cornish verse on the fly using Middle English graphs. There was a system to their work.
You can see this in Jordan's use of -the in monosyllables and polysyllables. You can see this in Tregear's use of tth and nh and lh. You can see it if you know enough about medieval writing to be able to discern the patterns, to know what is significant and what is not.
If Keith's */yw/ existed, he would have been able to present all the rhymes with those words in the corpus, so that we could have evaluated that list for its veracity. He didn't, I believe, because he knows his methodology will show his thesis to be wrong.
Tim Saunders thinks that by making assertions about me he speaks for me or describes my motivations accurately. He does not.
Terry Corbett's last is just special pleading. We have the texts we have. There are orthographic patterns in them which suggest a tradition. There was Glasney too. Saying "there might have been a whole lot of other texts in a different orthography" is wishful thinking (if you wish to think that Cornish had no scribal tradition).
And Terry? Be a mensch, will you? "Technocrats"? If you want people to know that I helped to encode the Cherokee script in Unicode, say so. You might also point out that the special characters used in Lhuyd and Pryce for Cornish phonetics were also encoded by me.
ShelterBox team in 'good spirits'
A Cornish charity packs another 1,000 survival boxes after becoming one of the first teams into the Burmese cyclone zone.
Man hurt in 'tombstoning' plunge
A man suspected of "tombstoning" off a cliff in Cornwall is in hospital with spinal injuries
Work begins to repair canal gates
Work is under way to repair the storm-damaged lock gates of Cornwall's Bude Canal.
Brown wants more homes for young
Gordon Brown says he wants to help young people in Cornwall buy houses
Gangmaster hits back after losing licence
A gangmaster has spoken out after having his licence revoked amid claims of forced labour.
Pupil's punishment 'not enough'
A mother criticises a one-day suspension for a pupil who attacked her daughter at a Cornish school.
Prime Minister visits Eden
The Prime Minister made an impromptu visit to Cornwall today and enjoyed an extensive tour of the Eden Project.
Flora day celebrations
Thousands flocked to Helston's ancient Flora Day on Thursday and while they arrived in their droves, rain - thankfully - stayed (mostly) away.
Although if you think there's anything we can learn from them (or any similar nation) please tell us.
I bet that was riveting.
