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...
The SWF is not KK, but the main form looks like it in some ways. The KK phonology has been dropped, not that that will affect most most people anyway as most don't use that phonology.
The problem is that KK looked like it did because it was invented/designed (whatever) to depict KG's underlying phonology. The reason the SWF main form looks like it does is because KK looked like it did. Not a very good reason.
It has produced a main form Like KK but without the KK basis for existence and it has produced a side form that is not authentic (or at least the draft version wasn't - I haven't seen the final version yet).
I am concerned that it will do little more than further split the movement by adding in yet another orthography (or two) to the mix, which will be the case if the forms do not meet either or both sides needs. I await the the disclosure of the final draft with interest.
All the documentation I've seen talks about spelling, not phonology.
Perhaps an SWF phonology will be the next thing everyone will want to argue over and we'll suffer another two years (or twenty, depending on when you think the current process started) before some committee comes up with an SSF that doesn't meet with anybody's approval.
But until then, given your statement, what elements of the SWF will force a person that accepts the KK phonology to drop it in favour of something else?
I think you're wrong. If I accept the SWF I'm accepting a spelling system. It is not the case that I will therefore have to accept something other than the KK phonology if I want to say a few words in school or at a public event.
I was quoting your pal Palores: "More recently, Keith Bailey drew attention to the existence of the /yw/ phoneme. I understand that the Language Board recently agreed that words containing it be spelled with <uw>."
Ha ha! Ha ha! Ha ha! You have SHOWNnothing, Keith. You've been asked to show and you have begged off. Keith Bail-Out, that's what we should call you. You were too cowardly to attend the Tremough conference where the Commissioners inspired the whole community to consider working together for the first time. Not that you or some of your friends have tried to work with the rest of us, who have proved our ability to work collectively and collaboratively. KK spelling does not impress me.Because even if it did exist it was unstable and fell in with [iʊ] very soon, and since [iʊ] is what speakers of Revived Cornish use, there isn't much point in trying to get people to change to some putative archaic [yʊ].
No, I maintain that there is no point in trying to teach people to pronounce it. You lot haven't succeeded in two decades to get geminate consonants taken up. You have failed to teach [ʍ], too, substituting [hw] for it (I am not talking about graphs here; both <hw> and <wh> should represent [ʍ], as I have shown elsewhere.)
Balls to that, Keith. Nicholas never said anything about Athabascan. And of course we all know about the successive palatalizations in Slavic. Celtic is not Slavic. Cornish is not Croatian. George's error about /tj/ and /dj/ are based in his a-priori rejection of dialect in Cornish, which means for him that finding <s> in some etyma and <j> in others is an insoluble problem. Well, <s>/<j> is evidence of dialect in Cornish, not evidence of Slavic-style palatalizations.
I have not dismissed your ideas out of hand, Keith. I have dismissed them because they have no basis in sound linguistics. I have no "master", however many times you say that I have. You do not understand how UdnFormScrefys worked together, collaboratively, to produce Kernowek Standard. We worked
The Kesva does not govern the language. The Kesva is a publishing company and private hobbyist's club. Just as Agan Tavas is. There is no "suffrage" that grants the Kesva authority over the language. "Democracy" has nothing to do with it. "Democracy" has to do with the constitution of the United Kingdom and various historical treaties. The Kesva is not a part of that. It is a private organization. It does not represent me, or any of my colleagues in Agan Tavas. It does not own the Cornish language any more than anyone else does. The Kesva can revert to /tj/ and /dj/ for all I care, and teach geminate consonants, and try to teach the great and glorious [yʊ]. None of those are authentic Cornish, and I scorn them.
People in the Kesva have tried to do, and have done, good work over the years. Our rejection of Kernowek Kebmyn is not a denigration of that work, as has been suggested. But I am sick to death of the lies you spin, Keith Bailey. "The Kesva are elected to govern the language" is a lie. They are not.
You really are a big baby, aren't you, Keith? A grown-up linguist would do his job, which is to present the data.
'God' is written lots of ways, including <du>, and the burden is on you to show all the words 'God' rhymes with and all the words those words rhyme with. If /yw/ is there, the rhymes will show it. But they do not, I am sure.
I'm not trying to prove your theory. I'm not willing to do your work for you. You've shown us that your knowledge of linguistics is simply that of an amateur.
Sorry not to convince you.
My recent work on <wh> is fairly solid, I think. And the recent discoveries we made about tth/lh/nh in Tregear are extremely interesting. Saying this does not make it so. And agreeing with Williams does not mean I have had a lobotomy, or that I am a yes-man. It really bugs you that a smart fellow like me doesn't agree with George, doesn't it, Keith? Well, there are many reasons I don't agree with George's reconstructions. But I made up my own mind. And I do not parrot anybody.
Is there any point in us talking, Keith? I disagree with you, and you despise me for it, because I have some influence in the Revival.
Q.E.D., laddie. Shall I hold my breath waiting for the **promised** apology?
Or doesn't a deliberate lie count, being as it's not a 'mistake by accident'?
Keith, you're a chronic liar; your own words show you in your true light . . .
The Kesva was set up by the Gorseth of Cornwall and the FOCS to take over responsibility for promoting and governing the language, and when there were sufficient people in the language community arrangement were made for most Kesva members to be elected. Suggestions that anything underhand has taken place have no basis in fact and are just malicious sniping. The Kesva still has the confidence of the Gorseth. The Gorseth is the senior cultural body in Cornwall and was itself inaugerated by the Welsh Gorseth, the senior body in this island. That is the constitutional set up, it's about as good as you can get. No worse that the chain of legal fictions that make the Queen the Queen for instance. But to take a more pragmatic tack, the Kesva actually organises the language exams (recognised by the Gorseth) and teachers' training, and vocabulary development, and so on. AT does none of these things, and doesn't have the structure to do them, indeed was never intended to do them. AT is a club and really was reformed behind the backs of most of its original members.
What you have written above shows what we all know by now, that you are not part of our community, don't begin to understand it, and are without doubt a danger to it.
A grown up linguist would not suffer the likes of you for five minutes.
Oh what a confort your faith must be to you! You are sure, you haven't bothered to look, but you are sure! Like the fellow who refused to look through Galileo's telescope because his faith told him that the Jovian satelites couldn't exits. Cornish really has entered a new Age of Ignorance and Unreason. Still they say Ignorance is Bliss.
Looks like you're not going to get an answer, Nosdan, so I'll tell you what the rumour is (it will then no doubt be corrected in a flash and you'll get the information you're seeking).
The rumour is that they refused to accept "tth" in the SWF (well, it is used in Kemmyn, after all) because it wasn't attested. Then, when someone pointed out that it was used in Tregear, they "discovered" it there.
Then they "discovered" that this was evidence of geminate "th".
They further "discovered" that "lh" and "nh" were found in Tregear, and went on to "discover" that this was evidence of geminate "l" and geminate "n".
I think Evertype (smart fellow that he is by his own modest admission) is using the word "discovered" as you might use it in "I went to Porthleven yesterday and discovered it was on the coast".
Anyway, they are now insisting that the SWF allow people to write double "l" as "lh" as well as "ll" and double "n" as "nh" as well as "nn" (e.g. 'tesennow' or 'tesenhow').
I guess George might have come to the same conclusion years ago when he "discovered" "tth", "lh" and "nh", had he believed that we should have umpteen ways of writing the same sound. Thank God he didn't.
Let's just hope the saviours of the language don't take another look at Tregear and find that in a couple of instances he wrote "lll" and "nnn" too.
You couldn't make it up, could you?? Correction to rumour will arrive any second soon.
That would seem an over-complication in the extreme... would that also mean the RLC speakers could write... tesednhow / tesedhow (how does it work with pre-occlusion)?
I do admire the authenticists trying to use authentic graphs. I don't believe in the English ad-hoc writing system... But I do also think that languages should modernise and they do not stay static if not through natural selection than through careful pruning. There is a time when they should say enough is enough... this graph describes the same sound as this other one... it only adds complexion.. lets dump it in favour of the other.
Both sides have been to unrealistic in my view... but lets hope the AHG haven't been... whenever they finally release the SWF...
I've no idea. My source didn't mention RLC or pre-occlusion.
Since I recorded the rumour here I've been thinking about it.
If everyone currently uses 'll' and 'nn' and nobody currently uses 'lh' and 'nh' why on earth would anyone insist that they be part of the SWF?
I think it can only be to give people even more opportunity to set themselves apart -
'WE use 'nh' and 'wh' and 'c' and 'y' and...and...and...
THEY use 'nn' and 'hw' and 'k' and 'i' and...and...and...'
Like when a certain group of people suddenly started saying 'bus' for English 'but' after years of us all saying 'mes'. Just (my cynical mind tells me) to set themselves apart.
All (sorry, Alh) in the name of healing the rift...
Yep, or buz, it's what happened to mez in Late Cornish, just one of the many delirious ramblings that the language came out with on its deathbed.
There's nothing new about lh and nh they've been know about for decades, and they do indeed generally signify the double (geminate) sounds. There has been discussion as to whether lh implied some sort of Welsh 'll' sound, and the answer is we don't know. Quite probably stressed double l in Cornish did have a distinctive 'thick' sound of some sort. However the reason these writers used <lh> and <nh> was probably because by their time English had long lost it's double sounds and written <ll, nn> no longer had any special meaning. So to convey this important difference in Cornish they hit on using <lh, nh>. A rare case where English spelling was modified to fit Cornish.
Ken originally couldn't see how to indicate the double 'th' sound, since <thth> was a bit much, but we pointed out that we all use <tth> in words like "Matthew" and so that solution was adopted. It had nothing to do with what was or wasn't in the texts.
Tregear does use the sequence <tth> a few times (unlike ME, I've just run a check) but in no case does it match a geminate consonant. Words include dhedhi 'to her', which has dh, the other side of th phonetically from tth. Another common one is goedh '(be)falls' as in y koedh dhyn "It falls to us", i.e. "we ought". No double 'th' there. So it looks like Tregear just doubled the <t> now and again when the mood took him, a common English practise at the time. Anyway if anyone can find something special about these words I'd be interested.
So this now shows very clearly the mentality we're up against. <tth> is OK because it happens to turn up in one or two texts in a completely different context. So what's wrong with oe? I can't believe the sequence <oe> doesn't turn up a few times in all the texts, with a different meaning of course, but that no longer seems to matter!
No, 'll' is a Welsh speciality, it goes along with 'rh' and the way Welsh generally puts more ephasis on aspiration whereas Breton and I'd think Cornish made more use of voice. Put simply Welsh is more 'breathy' and C&B more sonerous -- think of snakes and bees
Lhuyd had a special sign for Welsh 'll' which he used once in JCH almost certainly by accident.
JCH34 Ha nebyn Manah a trailiaz e gein uar bidn an tu`l~, Ha neb unn managh a dreylyas y geyn war-bynn (erbynn) an toll, "And a certain monk turned his back to the hole". The Welsh word twll probably got copied accross from the parallel Welsh text in AB. Elsewhere he doesn't use this special sign, and even avoids writing <ll> very often since that would suggest the Welsh sound to him. For instance he writes "gillyz pe`l" 'gone far' and "mar be`l" 'for so long' with a single <l> but then has to put a grave on the vowel (following Welsh practise) to show that the l is long and the vowel short pell.
So no, it fairly certainly wasn't the same as in Welsh, but it still may have had a distinctive sound, I wonder if anything carried over into dialect?
The late Cecil Roberts of Sennen Cove (who had a lot of traditional Cornish and knew all the coastal names) used to pronounce "Scilly" with two distinct ls, rather like saying "ill-lit" and I wonder if this might be a hangover from the language introducing the second L with a slight "h" sound ("sil-hlee"). Any opinions?
It was Cecil who gave us the Cornish word for lighthouse - not "golowjy" (which was made up by Nance), but "golowty" - the ancient "t" retained much like "lety". You would think that the stress would be on the second syllable but apparently, in this case, it's on the first one, with the "-ow-" reduced to schwa. This was confirmed in 1964 when the Tater-du lighthouse was being built and an old local man was heard to ask the builders if they were building as "new gol'ty". I believe that the Welsh word is "goleity".
A correction here wouldn't hurt any of the current orthographies and perhaps future dictionaries could strike out "gol'owjy" and replace it with "'golowty".
I never had any feedback on my question as to whether Genver (January) should be pronounced with a j rather than a hard g (textual examples from Late Cornish either spell it with a J - Jenuar, etc - or with a G representing j). Opinions on this would also be welcome.
Re: SWF, Jenefer should be circulating the result tomorrow. Then we'll see whether it's workable or not.
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.
