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...
To be precise, I use 'Modern' in the normal sense, of that phase of a language following the 'Middle' one. Since the first coherent Revivalist texts date from about the middle of the nineteenth century, anything before that is 'Early Modern' and anything after that is 'Recent Modern'.
Dick Gendall and his associates put together some very valuable material from Early Modern and related sources, but they dissipated far too much of their energy on polemic rather than concentrating on promoting the language. Despite that, and the continuing lack of a stable Early Modern-derived orthography, we mustn't let the good work done fall out of sight.
That's a matter of familiarity.<oo> is attested more than 170 times in the corpus, I believe.
As an aside, Axel Wijk's splendid proposal for English spelling reform regularizes the use of the silent -e. He writes foode, moone, soot, look. Such a reform would help foreign learners, and probably native-speaker children, quite a lot.
This is not problematic. The later gemination of [lh] to [l:] is a secondary gemination.Nonsense. This assertion on your part is unwarranted. Nothing prevents a secondary gemination. In Slavic there were successive waves of palatalization. NopeRed herring. You are changing the topic and appealing to authority, and I for one don't think that Chaudhri's PhD thesis trumps Williams' work. But anyway it is off-topic.
I think you are badly confused about when some of these sound-changes could have occurred.I don't think Tregear was writing -h when there was no breathing. You've just posited that -h was used by Tregear as a mark of length, and not, I think, on any grounds.Hyperbole isn't very helpful.
OK, so all gemination is lost with your early PS (have I got that right?).
Then sometime later (when?) there is a secondary gemination. You have to explain what were the conditioning factors for this change.
And it is exactly parallel to Chaudhri's criticism of your explanation of PO. PO develops where historically there were geminate /nn, mm/ (just as <lh> is seen where there was /ll/). But if as you believe an early PS leveled /nn, mm, ll/ to /n, m, l/ how come PO/<lh> developed in just these places and nowhere else. Chaudhri contrasts this with Manx PO which is unrelated to gemination. This can't have escaped NJAW's notice as he is familiar with Manx.
The "sawing off the branch you need to sit on" analogy is quite apt imho, you can't dispense with gemination before PO and <lh> (whatever that may represent) have come into being.
The paper on Apache phonetics is here http://www.ling...honetics.pdf. It would appear that with the affricates there is a variable duration of devoicing after the stop onset, with this lasting longer where the stop is aspirated than when it is plain. This implies that the second element is intrinsically voiced. Where we have just a fricative without the stop onset element, the contrast would be a simple one of voice. Since /T/ is already voiceless there is nothing that 'aspiration' can do to it.
In any case you still have to explain why [h]'s which had apparently disappeared in OC were still hanging about at the time of the Reformation.
I already explained the secondary gemination to you. <lh> [lh] > [l:], <nh> [nh] > [n:], <tth> [θh] > [θ:]. Apache is irrelevant; I am not talking about */lh/, */nh/, or /θh/ here, but a phonetic environment. At a morpheme boundary where the second morpheme began with -h, it appears that the -h was assimilated with compensatory lengthening, in this small class of verbs and adjectives. And I am not suggesting [lʰ], [nʰ], or [θʰ] either.
This means (please help me understand what you're saying) as best I can make out, that <lh> represented an actual sequence of [l]+[h] which later (when?) assimilated to a long or geminate [l:] or [ll] (just a difference of notation?).
[And likewise for <nh, tth> but I'll just take <lh> as representative].
By <lh> I take it you mean those found in Tregear etc.
OK so the sequence was assimilated, there was no more [h] just an extended [l:]. I can see two explanations, but neither seem to account for the data.
1. The h was assimilated sometime before the date of the texts, the written <lh> would then have to be the result of a very enduring scribal tradition hundreds of years old. In which case the older texts should all have shown <lh> which they hardly ever do, although the digraph <lh> is regularly used where there really was [l'hV] or [lx] in words like golghi, dalghenn, gwell'ha. One would expect that if <lh> represented the sounds of an earlier time it would be more frequent in the earlier more 'traditional' texts, and less in the later ones as they become increasingly influenced by Early Modern English (silent <e>'s random doubling of final <l> etc.)
2. A new [h] somehow developed during the period for which we have texts from a pre-existing /ll/, the exact reverse of what you seem to suggest. You would then be dealing with a real phonetic [lh] (or some such) contemporary with the later texts. This would explain the practical absence of <lh> in the earlier texts, but would require that gemination had persisted throughout otherwise how could <lh> only show up where the consonants were historically geminate?
Of course my preferred explanation is that there was no prosodic shift, certainly not before c1625, that gemination persisted throughout Middle Cornish, and that the appearance of <lh> for /ll/ was purely graphical, reflecting changes in English orthographic practise, especially the use of <l> and <ll> interchangable, so that a new way was needed to indicate Cornish /ll/.
This last has the really wonderful advantage that it actually explains the data, and is fairly easy to understand. Both (1) and (2) above are overcomplicated and don't in any case account for the observed facts.
Well perhaps I've missed something. Please tell me which of (1) and (2) is nearest to what you think, and explain where I've misunderstood.
P.S. I'm sorting out the <tth> data from Tregear, but have had other work to attend to].
I would like to address both Morvran and Pietercharles who responded to my post of 13 March.
Morvran opposes the SWF. He displays – as do others – a genuine earnestness of view. Like others, he has spent years of involvement with the language and defends his views with a passion fed by that investment of time.
However, to the tens (truly, hundreds) of thousands of Cornish folk – like myself – who normally sit outside the language debate, we see a small group of people arguing fiercely about, to us, acutely arcane matters. You might just as well be monks arguing about the number of angels you can get on the head of a pin. I do not mean this unkindly – it is simply true. You Kernewek speakers are a very small but passionately divided tribe.
To Pietercharles, I would say that, standing outside of this Kernewek language tribe, I assumed, clearly erroneously, that the SWF was a means of bringing together the different factions in the language. You state twice that I am not a linguist. I don’t know what you mean by that, but I have achieved advanced qualifications in six languages, two of them at degree level. I have also worked in two ‘foreign’ languages for a living. I have also acquired a further non-European language in daily life. I am a practical user of languages.
What I would like is to have a clear target for learning in my ‘own’ language. If I want to earn Turkish, Russian, German or French, I have clear targets with standard forms of each. That’s what I want in Cornish.
What dismays and angers me is the sad fact that the language movement in my own country is so bitterly fractured. It is like a boat taking in water with a crew that is focussed on fighting each other instead of bailing out.
The reason for the so-called fighting, discussion, arguments or whatever, is because some people feel strongly about the language, who do not wish the see the revival sabotaged and derailed, and then there are the the naive onlookers who pretend they are shocked by it all,and use it as an excuse not to learn the language.
This is what we had - and, if we want it, still have. The clique who voice their propaganda through bylines such as Evertype and Eddie-C decided that they wanted to wipe it out. They found some powerful backers, who were working to an entirely different agenda.
We find this as distressing as you do. We've found from bitter experience that rational discussion and attempts at compromise only trigger greater ferocity in the onslaught on Cornish.
As for Bardh's comment "This is what we had", this argument has been going on for years, it was going strong in the 90's, it was going on in the late 80's, there was "disagreement" in the early 80's. It was what some "had", others disagreed, and there has been "war" for years.
I know, I have been around for a while.
As for goky, he really should go back to playing with his gloves, he just argues for the sake of it.
By the way, I have been told that the SWF is finished,(as in completed) as I understand it, it will be published at the end of April, I look forward to it.
SO, to get back on topic.
Who's is going to support the SWF, and hence the Cornish Language, and who wishes to keep up the relentless prattle that serves only those who wish to see our language fade away in to obscurity?
Kernow Kensa!
Our day will come!
"Everyone has their own particular part to play. No part is too great or too small, no one is too old or too young to do something."
Until we actually see the fabled SWF, it's impossible to make any judgement about its relevance, let alone suitability. And there's no guarantee that the Authenticists will let up on their campaign of lies and vilification when it finally does appear.
In the end, we've got to decide whether we're grownup enough to stand by our achievements, or else submit to bullying by a clique of embittered reactionaries.
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.
