I am convinced that the Standard Written Form is a disastrous mess which would make Cornish unteachable in schools. I strongly suspect that this in no coincidence.
What better way for the government to keep the Cornish language from progressing than to appear to honour their Regional and Minority Languages Charter obligations by funding a Partnership, a Commission, a Process etc. etc. etc. which produces a dog's breakfast of an orthography and which creates more splits and disagreement than it heals?
Out of curiosity I briefly joined the Spellyans list, as they claim that they can 'fix' it. However, don't hold your breath - I came to the conclusion that their real agenda is to continue to oppose Kernewek Kemmyn, Ken George and the Cornish Language Board.
So what they want to do is to purge the SWF of any resemblance to Kemmyn.
The fact that this would estrange the SWF even further from existing fluent and competent speakers seems not to concern them at all. Odd that - you would almost think that the government was pulling their strings!
Since 1995 Dr Nicholas Williams has been an implacable enemy of Kernewek Kemmyn. Members of this list might like to read what this leading member of Agan Tavas thinks about royalty, and why he is against independence for Cornwall.
Penny
From: nicholas williams <njawilliams@gmail.com>
To: Penny Squire
Sent: Tuesday, 15 July, 2008 4:44:41 PM
Subject: Royalists
Why is it so odd to find royalists who are interested in Cornish?
Jenner was an utter royalist and a Catholic integrist, and the Cornish themselves supported Charles I against Parliament.
I don't quite know where to start because you seem to be making a number of unrelated assumptions.
In the first place I am English and have lived in Dublin teaching Irish in University College for over 30 years.
I have become convinced that the real mistake the Irish made and what has damaged the language was complete independence.
In 1922 the Irish handed over educational policy to the Roman Catholic church and in Ireland that means an authoritarian an anti-intellectual church. The church here has been led since the 17th century by the English speaking Catholics of the Pale, the Old English. They always despised the Gaelic Irish and during the course of the 18th century effected the start of the language shift. In 1794 when the major seminary in Maynooth was founded, the language of instruction was Latin and of the house English—even though at least half the students were native speakers of Irish.
Even now the RC church is opposed to Irish. The present archbishop of Dublin knows no Irish and his predecessor didn't either. I spoke Irish recently to an Irish bishop, Donald Caird, retired Church of Ireland archbishop of Dublin. When I'm in Westport I go to the Church of Ireland church there. The rector translated the Book of Common Prayer into Irish (the fifth time the BCP has been translated). Ken Mackinnon and I met at the launch in Downpatrick in 2004. The Gaelic revival of the late nineteenth century was started by Protestants, Douglas Hyde and Maxwell Close, and other. For many years the Irish department in UCD had the highest concentration of Protestants in the college (UCD is the successor to Newman's Catholic University).
In 1922 the Irish voluntarily left the United Kingdom, the richest country in the world at the time, and thus impoverished themselves. Massive emigration from the western sea-board further weakened the language. I am writing this on the north east coast of County Mayo, where emigration was catastrophic.
By impoverishing themselves they left themselves without money. There was no proper radio station in Irish until 1970 and no television until the late 1990s. Even now there are no proper dictionaries. Compare and contrast Wales.
Two further points here. By giving themselves a sovereign state the Irish believed they were a nation. Given that they have for the most part abandoned their language and their Catholicism they are now left with nothing. A Hungarian friend said to me recently: "The Irish have no culture".
It is much better when trying to maintain a minority language in these islands to deal with Westminster than with an independent Irish govt. or with a devolved government. Already things are said to be harder for Welsh dealing with the assembly and administration in Cardiff than they were dealing with the Welsh Office. The English civil servants are supportive and feel guilty. The local politicians just don't want to spend money on a language most of them don't know. That is why independence for Cornwall would be the end for the language.
Now to the matter of Royalism.
It is possible that you take me for a monarchist, but I am not. Monarchists are right-wing, integrist, chauvinist. My own view is that in a modern pluralist democracy a king or queen as head of state is preferable to an elected president for a whole variety of interlocking reasons.
Let's look first at the question of minority languages. After Catalan, the three most thriving linguistic minorities are the Basques, the Welsh and the Frisians. But Spain, the UK and the Netherlands are all monarchies. Is this a coincidence? I think not. Compare the different treatment of Inuit in Canada (monarchy) and Alaska (state in a federal republic). In Canada they have Nunavut their own area, where the working language is Inuit. The Canadian government supports them financially. There is nothing comparable in Alaska. There is funding for Welsh in Wales but how is Breton doing in France, the ultimate republic? "Pour l'unité linguistique de la France il faut que la langue bretonne disparaisse" (ministry of educ. edict from the 1920s) Very badly.
Constitutional monarchies work on the twin principles of loyalty and honour. A citizen is loyal to the king and therefore keeps his laws, and if required fights for him in his forces. He is honourable in that in public life he acts in the public interest and is perhaps rewarded by the king with a public honour. Ireland is proportionally more sleazy than Britain because it has no honours system. Many republics have honours systems but they are relics of former monarchical times.
If a citizen is loyal to the king or queen he keeps his or her laws. But he can be any colour, any ethnicity and any religion. You can see this in Belgium where the only apparent force keeping the country together is Albert II. In a republic on the other hand the citizen is loyal to the republic, which is an abstraction and in effect means the people, which means the majority. That is why republics are for the most part less comfortable for minorities.
Moreover an elected president either has power as in France and US and thus too much. Or he has no power as in Germany or Ireland. But even there he has to be elected. In Ireland the president is always a party political nominee. Only one president (Mary Robinson) was not nominated by Fianna Fáil. In order to become president, the candidate has to campaign. The campaign is inevitably divisive and then once elected he or she has to unite the nation. What an absurd system!
Some people will then say that they abhor monarchy because aristocracy goes with it. But Canada is a monarchy with no aristocracy and so is Norway (to say nothing of Australia and New Zealand). There are still aristocrats in France and Germany and Poland. Did you know, for example, that Jaruszelski was made prime minister by the Communists because he was a Polish aristocrat and was more acceptable to the Poles than the Jewish Geremek? (I hope I have spelt these names properly).
The king or queen is by definition not elected and also has no power. In Britain the HM not merely has no power, she has less freedom than any of her subjects. Any of them can speak on a radio phone in. She can't. Any of them can join a political party. She can't. She can say nothing without the approval of her government, elected by her people. She is in effect a captive, whose sole job is to function as a public servant. Her warrant on goods means that the items are of high quality, her acting as patron of any organisation (and the royal family collectively are patrons of thousands of them) gives the organisation a seal of approval.
The monarch's unique and historical role means that in her person she represents power but does not exercise it. This is a safeguard against a coup d'état, but of course Britain will not have a coup d'état, any more than it will vote for a republic.
There is also a religious dimension to this since she is Gratia Dei Regina and she was consecrated for the task by her coronation. You may well not be religious, but I am and so is Ken Mackinnon and we are both royalists. Ken is a Methodist, I am an Anglican. Though Britain has no written constitution the Christian understanding of God is in it by virtue of the Queen's being queen by the Grace of God and we still say "God save the Queen!" Her position as supreme governor of the CofE is a different matter, because she is also queen in Wales and NIreland where there is no established church.
Monarchy used to be more powerful. Now the power rests with the people through parliament but it is the monarch's parliament. That is why in the British system we speak of the Queen in parliament. In fact she is queen only by the will of parliament because her father was made king by parliament in 1936. If you think about many of our monarchs were made thus: Charles II, William III, George I for example.
Because the monarchy is pre-feudal it is quasi-religious. The king's person is sacrosanct since he is God's representative. George the III was the last king to let people touch him as a cure for scrofula (the king's evil). But even now you can assassinate a president but not a king. When the Germans invaded Norway they asked the king to appoint Kvisling as prime minister. He refused on the grounds that Kvisling had no mandate. For a week he equivocated and all the while Norwegian patriots were secretly shifting Norway's gold reserves onto ships and the gold and most of Norway's navy sailed away to Scapa Flow in Shetland and were thus saved for the allies.
In 1981 Milans del Bosch and Tejero and others staged an attempted coup against the democratic government of Suarez in Spain. They cut the king's telephone lines but he being a radio ham got in touch with all his senior officers and told them that he was their commander in chief and to support the coup would be treason. He then went on television and told the Spanish people that he, Juan Carlos de Borbón y Borbón, their king was the guarantor of the constitution. He asked them to demonstrate in favour of democracy. The next day a million people came out on the streets of Madrid and the coup failed miserably.
This answer has gone on too long already, but I leave you with one thought. The constitutional monarchies are Britain, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They are among the most stable and best governed countries in the world. Res ipsa loquitur.
Oh, dear, Penny - talk about turning one's views and outlines of history into something it really isn't Nor is Nicholas a leading member of Agan Tavas. He isn't Chairman, Officer or Committee member and I am disappointed that this slant on one man's personal viewpoint has been turned into an implied condemnation of an entire organisation.
I am currently a leading member of Agan Tavas and I am already on record as holding the personal belief that the Royal Family and its hangers-on are a complete waste of the good air I breathe. And I support the notion of Cornish autonomy.
Does it then follow that every member of Agan Tavas agrees with my view? Of course it doesn't. It can't if we all agree with Nicholas as well, can it?
That was a cheap shot, Penny, and you should be ashamed of it.
The point I think, was that if you and Hunlef etc. want to tell those you don't consider to be Cornish (whether by birth or outlook is never clear) to bugger off and not meddle with the language, then you ought to be even handed. Here is proof that NJAW is not by any stretch of the imagination "Cornish", yet you are happy to hang on to his ever word as far as the language goes. How do you explain that?
Seventy Percent of "competent & frequent" Cornish users prefer to write KK! (MAGA/CLP Survey)
Yes, it was fairly brief, wasn't it, "Penny"? Brief, because you were found to have lied to the Spellyans group: you lied in the fake name you offered us, you lied in the "self description" with which you introduced yourself to the group, and you lied in your stated intentions in joining the group.
You're almost as poor at lying convincingly as Keith is. Take care you don't reveal your real identity! What you fail to mention is that you joined Spellyans with that conclusion already firmly in your prejudiced little mind. You joined as a troll, and it was as a troll that you were kicked out.
You contributed nothing, and you've not been missed.
Dear god! Do you really believe that what we do revolves around KK? You have delusions of grandeur for you chosen orthography!
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
KS: selven an Furf Screfys Savonek? -- Ya, hep wow!
Because Nicholas is one of the very few professional linguistic scholars we have and knows what he's talking about, rather than pretending to as others do. He has been involved with the language far, far longer than either thee or me (back into the 50s, I think). I have no choice to defer to his vastly greater knowledge because it is available in few other places. But, I don't hang on his every word. We have disagreed several times (without hostility).
Re; John King - you forgot the TSW series "An Canker Seth" (which was bad Cornish anyway - shouldn't it have been "An Seth Canker" or "An Seth Kencras"?). Pauline Sheppard took part in it, as well. I still have the scripts for that series.
It appears that opposing Kemmyn is a mortal sin and it also appears, from what Penny says, that we have somehow concealed the fact.
I have opposed it since its demonic birth in the mid 80s. I have always said so, and will continue to do so. I was honest and open about it then, as I am now. I have recently said that I will not, under any circumstances, be using the untraditional graphs of the SWF ("main"). You might not like that, but I refuse to be dishonest about it.
Steve, I think there's a point that you're not getting, either. And the second word of it is "off".
Fascinating approach, whether or not one agrees with the content, from Nicholas Williams. I've never, ever, come across another English person who thinks, and speaks, and writes, and behaves like this. Unfortunately.
It's very surprising then that more people have not taken up UCR then
I have an awful feeling that a lot of this backbiting, personal insult, anti-KKing and OTT critism is in retaliation as to how great the take-up of KK has been. Perhaps all this anti-KK behaviour should be renamed 'sideforming'
And therein lies a tale. The name of the series was based on the name of the pub that featured in it. It was intended to be called "The lobster pot" and afaik JC provided the correct translation. However when they did the set, the artist couldn't draw lobsters, or got mixed up or something, and put a crab on the sign instead. The producer then decided it had to be "The Crab Pot" and looked it up in a dictionary, and as you might expect got it all arse-backwards, and came up with "The vase crab". Well belive it or not, as they say.
Seventy Percent of "competent & frequent" Cornish users prefer to write KK! (MAGA/CLP Survey)
I can well believe it. There's a converted chapel at Canonstown - now called An Coth Eglos.
Oh, well, at least someone tried.
It's loss of Cornish that bothers me. Greatly. You'll search in vain for Ventonegga on the maps, a name recorded at least from the 1600s. You won't find it. It's now called Brook Cottage.
Perhaps the point that could be drawn from Nicolas Williams analysis is if you want to actually become independent from the imperialist powers, jettison the linguistic time wasting and get on with political and other activities that lead to indpendence?
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