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...
I've got a copy! Sorry you can't have it though, I had a really difficult time getting hold of a copy, consequently I don't let my child anywhere near it......kind of defeats the object doesn't it?
I have all the 'Orvil An Morvil' series, and they are MINE
I don't have Ple'ma Spot though. Pity.
I also have some older stuff in my collection, I will go through it sometime, I am sure there is some stuff in there for Kids. When I do I will post a list for anyone who might be interested. I have quite a bit of the old Untified stuff.
I THINK Copyright laws have just been modified. Its now lawful to make a copy of, say a music CD that you own, for 'backup' purposes. (It was actually illegal before). I can't see you getting nabbed bt the copyright cops for making a copy of a cherished book for your kids to use and abuse whilst the original is kept safe.
The next conference to discuss the proposed 'roadmap' towards a SWF will be held at Tremough on Saturday 30th September. Everyone who feels strongly about the future of the Cornish language should go!
I presume it's open to all but preferably people with a positive outlook on the future of the Cornish language. No more details as of the now but I'll post the info when I receive it.
As an outsider but fellow celt (Scottish) I am a bit chary of presuming to say anything on this subject except as someone cwith an abiding love and enthusiam for all things Cornish, particularly the language.
I have got down to page 6 of the contribuions so far and respond to the points made before I forget what I want to say, as I slide into 'senior moments'!
The most interesting, I think, was the info that there has been a sort of siciolinguistic study done into the various factors/philosophies fuelling the Revival and three are salient- aesthetics
ease for learners
authenticity(ie continuity with the language souces)
Personally, on those fronts, I'd rate the version that seems the 'cinderella'- that is the Late. It also seems to me to have a very rich an distinctively Cornish vocabulary range and its grammar isn't too confusing to get a quick grasp of it in outline at least. Although I also think it is an enrichment to the language that Late is not afraid to accept a rich bank of English based terms into the vocabulary base, I do have a gripe with Late's apparent reluctance to use some of the more pleasing native coinages such as 'pellgowser' which is surely a far nicer word than TV! As for 'authenticity' one can hardly deny it is using actual, genuine Cornish as found in the sources as that is what the object of its supporters specifically aim for. It was also Jenner's original vision too, for what that is worth! Its orthography may not be purely 'phonemic' but practically no living language is , even those that have tried to iron out similar problems. Norwegian has bokmal, landsmal, nynorsk systems all running in parallel! Also, if you follow Graham Weatherhill's very good pronunciation guide in his popular book, Cornish Place Names and language, you soon get the hang of it!
Again , for what it is worth I reckon the Late would be more readily accepted as 'genuine' at university level, rather than an artificial construct.
Cornish used to be taught at Glasgow, but it stuck rigidly to the medieval and Tudor texts and quite ignored Jenner and Nance's incredible work to revive the language. This was in marked contrast to the attitude to Manx where even the recent literature, adhering to the old 'anglecised' orthography, was accorded study status. Cornish is also studied at some of the Welsh colleges and at Cambridge, though again only at advanced levels and only the old texts.
Though I quite like KK and the idea of it to ease learning pronunciation appeals, I must say I feel very uneasy that its basis may be too speculative and so less 'authentic' in its relationship to the underlying texts. I also find some of its very rigidly phonetic aspects less than aesthetically pleasing.....do you REALLY need to write 'hw' rather than the more familiar if slightly less accurate 'wh'?! And all those 'K's instead of 'c's!! Nicholas Williams has come in for quite a lot of criticism here but I do think a lot of his points should be seriously listened to.
I'm not sure who was being alluded to in one of th earlier entries where e're told they stood up and claimed to have produced the perfect system and a revolution equivalent to darwinism, but it does rather beggar belief.
One has only to do even a cursory study of the problems of orthography reform in English, Scandanavian, German, Irish, Scots Gaelic to know perfection is a very elusive quality!
It was highly amusing to read too that Cornishmen are apt to find arguments even i an empty house: we Presbyterian Scots usually get accused of that so it's good to know it is a common trait and not limited to us!
I do devoutly hope the version question WILL be finally hammered out and resolved. I'm learning Unified at the minute but must admit it IS a huge disincentive to have materials all over the place so far as spelling and even words are concerned and I can understand the contributer who aid he'd be going to Welsh or Breton...however I like Cornish too much to give upthat easily so I'm persevering, even if it does mean veering wildly from Cornish For Beginners to Tavas A Ragadazow to KK First 1000 Words in Cornish! It makes it hard work on the poor, old memory but the systems aren't that alien to one another.
Finally the Cof E in Cornwall seems just too 'high' for this Scot at least to stomach though I'm sure there are some traditional 'low' congregations scattered around and attending a Service with the BCP in Cornish might be fun!
.....and before anyone else gets there first, I must correct myself without delay- pellgowser, of course means telephone, not tv as I inadvertantly wrote...see, I do have senior moments, Lord help us and my hair is thinning fast!
One point that has been banged on about in this long, intriguing thread is the need for academic acceptance and respectability being bestowed on the language to give it real clout in the school system. This obviously is vital and I can only say as someone who has been through the system of Celtic Studies at university level that for some reason Revived Cornish just never got that atention...and that reason was that it was perceived as an artificial concotion ans so somehow less 'real' than the other living Celtic tongues or even Manx...we studied a modern version of the Bible in it and yet it had been composed at least a decade after the generally recognised last native speaker had kicked the celtic bucket.
However there is another aspect here that has also been raised- do academics prescribe or only describe what they are studying? And if there is a living body of literature and speakers why should they be proscribed as an object of study by some prior concept of artificiality?
To some extent linguists and professional academics are aware of this conflict but I do suspect that unless the SWF can cut it in proving itself to be a 'natural language' it may continue to get the academic cold shoulder which needless to say could have dire consequences for its future propogation in schools. My suspicion is, though I may be entirely mistaken in this, is that the version they'd view as the most 'natural evolved' form and so an 'authentic' language would be Late or Tudor UCR.
Still, the last laugh may yet be with the Cornish language community themselves, for if they DO just get on with it and refuse to die, sooner or later I guess the acadmeics WILL begin to take notice of its de facto and study it as a phenomenon of social, literary and linguistic interest.
Wow, that must have been some Celtic Studies course you were on, rosen-de, given your very reasoned and cogent evaluation of the situation the language finds itself in. To sum up, you're learning Unified, you rate Late (and got the hang of it quickly by reading Craig's popular book), you quite like Kemmyn, and you think academics might plump for UCR. I think we'd be hard-pressed to find a Cornish speaker who would disagree with you.
It would be interesting if you could expand or comment on a few points:
Could you say which bits you feel may be too speculative? What are your views on the Williams speculation about the dating of the prosodic shift, the extent to which Cornish was spoken in East Cornwall in the 16th century, and his speculation about grammar? And what about the Late/Modern speculation about how to spell everything and anything? We are a bit hamstrung by speculation in Cornwall.
It depends on whether you think we should make a distinction between 'wh' and 'h' in speech. Everyone seems to agree that a distinction was made traditionally, but modern speakers who were brought up on 'wh' often say it as 'h'. They even WRITE it as 'h' occassionally! So you'll find 'whethel' in the dictionary, but people say and sometimes write 'wethel'. I have never heard a KK speaker do this. They learn to say 'hwedhel' and they see it in print. It never occurs to them to say 'wedhel'.
This is really interesting. I've never seen any criticism of Williams for his use of 'c'. Can you give us some references?
You're absolutely right - it beggars belief because the claim was never made! This is just one of the myths that get bandied around, and it's a complete nonsense of course. There was a statement made in a book (I forget which) along the lines of 'Kemmyn almost achieves phonemic perfection' which, in context, meant '(almost) every defined phoneme is written in a specific way'. As a result the rumour mill has it that all KK classes begin with the chant "Our system is perfect". You really need a sense of the bizarre to get close to Cornish!
Believe me, where Cornish is concerned they prescribe!! You know how linguists used to write English grammar books about not constantly splitting infinitves, and prepositions at the end of sentences up with which they would not put? Well, because everyone ignored them completely, which was very frustrating for them, they seem mostly to have turned to Cornish. They love telling us what we should be saying, rather than noting what we are saying. I tell you, it's nirvana for failed linguists here!
I think everyone would agree with you, but it's fraught with issues. What if you please a few failed linguists and professors in Riga, but completely alienate everyone that has any competence in the language? How do you explain to ordinary people that what they are speaking, perfectly fluently, is 'not natural' (and since KK, UC and UCR are the same spoken language, that's a hell of a lot of people)? How do you get them to understand that 'pellgowser' and the letter 'k' are unnatural and must be purged from the language?
It's very clear how you would come to this conclusion - it's a widely held view. Our problem is that other conclusions are equally, if not more, if not less, widely held.
And God help us then, eh? Look what they've done for the language so far. Cornish speakers meet and chat amicably together and then an academic arrives and says 'I heard a glottal stop there, between the 'a' particle and the verb. Circumstantial evidence would suggest that such unnatural acts are not authentic' - and the next thing you know a major argument breaks out we're at each others' throats, and everyone is speaking English for fear of embarrasing themselves with a badly placed glottal stop.
Just to reiterate - you need a sense of the bizarre to get close to Cornish....
Hee! hee! Branvras, I am in substantial agreement with most of what you say.
And just to clarify- sadly my course in Celtic,though it did cover Welsh as well as Scots Gaelic, Irish and Manx, never afforded me the opportunity to study modern Cornish, the lecturer retired the year I entered junior Hons and so we never got Breton or Cornish to do formally.
I hope I have not given the impression of being anti-kk; my remarks are based on what I have read of the subject both by Nicholas Williams(not unbiased, perhaps!), Richard Gendall, Neil Kennedy, Craig Weatherhill, and some of the Welsh blokes,as well as the few passing and rather disdainful remarks made in my far off undergraduat days by my lecturers on Unified.
KK looks fairly ok to my eye...First 1000 Words is almost as good as Rex Vinson's pics in Kernewek Mar Plek ! However it is a fact that professional linguists like Williams and others have strong reservations about it as a system which could hamper its University respectability, though as you say there is no real reason why this should be the case if it is a language that is d facto up and running! I guess the main objection would be there are other, somewhat more 'authentic' versions that are at least less speculative and more tied to the actual historical textual basis of the language. As you say each system has its own underlying speculations of one sort or another. But let's face it at ground level the differences can be absurdly and dangerously overplayed.
My comments on the hard 'k' istead of 'c' involved Nicholas Williams, not in that his system exhibits this but that he was one of those who criticial of it. It's ages since I read all the data so I hope I am not misrepresenting him by wrongly attributing him with this view! It was in either one of his review articles or the response to Cornish for 21st Century, I believe.
As for the 'wh' sound, I can see that this ould be a problem perhaps outside of Scotland where the sound is most definitely NOT 'w' but always a 'hw' so that its traditional representation is never a bother. Stubborn to the last, I still don't like it!
You are quite right- linguists can make mountains out of molehills but then again they often, perversely perhaps, do it just because of their minute love of the language and their desire to get it right as hey see it, if not everybody else! The tension between describing and prescribing is a well known one in linguistics....but if they say a good 'Glasgow' glottal stop is wrong , that is just beyond the pale! Blodly to prescribe or not to boldly prescribe, that is the question! At the end of the day however some degree of standardisation is required by any language or its whole raison d'etre would disappear!
My point only intention in mentioning how our new SWF may cut it in academia is that if it doesn't then that does have very serious repercussions in how you train folk to teach it in schools and the status
it will gain thereby. It just occurs to me that there used to be an 'O' Level in the language which presumably means someone, somewhere in official academia was recognised as an expert and could set the standard. If you can do that without University recognition once, why not again?
Ah, well, I have once more been on here too long and will be exhausted tomorrow if I don't retreat soon.But it has been fun!
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