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...
Angofbew - I absolutely agree with what you are saying ... Cornish is a living language today. The orthography will need to reflect that not be hamstrung by 16th, 17th or 18th century texts.
Branvras, if KK is phonemic and the other orthographies are also phonemic, where's the gulf between them?
My own, poor brain tells me the other systems have as their primary goal 'authenticity' or continuity with the source texts, ratifying as many of the spellings as possible by this standard which means they are not and cannot be primarily designed to give an instant indication of the sounds as the traditional orthography allowed various pronunciations to be attached to more or less all the letters. Sure, to get as accurate a representation as possible is desirable but can that override the need for attestation in the sources in Late or U/UCR? It's clear choosing which variant spelling as the standard in such a system involves just as much deduction and painstaking research of the sources as KK . Does the difference lie in the fact that where KK goes with the deduced system, Late in particular will stick with what is considered the best historical variant. Maybe this makes for less immediate phonetic accuracy but lots of orthographies are like that, most notoriously of course English! If I always seem to be plugging away at KK here it is only because I personally and instintively agree with the 'Late' approach.
Incidentally I would be genuinely appreciative of it if you could give us the main outlines of Dr George's objections to the other systems . We moved house recently and I seem to have lost my Cornish for 21st Century. Very frustrating! It seems most of the posters on here are in favour of KK....is this beacuase there ARE no Late/UCR folk around anymore, to speak of?!
When I remarked that it seems the move to get a SWF seems to be getting done in a rush, all I meant was that I think it would have done Cornish a real service if , after he parting of the ways, there had been a serious move to get professional linguistic help to sort this out over a longer period of in depth research, just as a former contributor said in an earlier post.
It's easy to denigrate the 'professionals' but they have done a great job for both Scots Gaelic and the Scots Doric( Lowland English Scots form of English).
On the topic of the lexical base/ vocabulary borrowing of Cornish, particularly of English, I agree that wherever possible good Celtic word and neologisms should be used, pellgowser being one success story in this regard as you see it used in the revived language with real ease. However many words obviously used in the Mid/late period clearly are English borrowings that that Cornish speakers made their very own and far from diluting the language actually enrich it. Would these later native speakers recognise as part of 'their language' older celtic words that had been rendered archaic by their time? I wholeheartedly agree that a new Cornish dictionary should include 'em all and give as wide and rich a base to the revived tongue as possible.
I agree that it is the nature of the beast that languages naturally change. Even Dr Williams is prepared at points to 'go with the flow' rather than enforce attested authenticity! He has a note to this effect about a certain point in Clappya but at the moment I cannot locate it!
[quote]
However many words obviously used in the Mid/late period clearly are English borrowings that that Cornish speakers made their very own and far from diluting the language actually enrich it.
rosen-de, although i can appreciate your views, i cannot however agree with this. I as a personal opinion, think the exact opposite. I believe that English borrowings not only do not enrich Cornish, i think that they actually weaken and belittle it. Naturally this, as is yours. is only an opinion, but i think that most supporters of the Language would like to see as few of these borrowings kept as possible.
But I didn't say they were all phonemic. I said they all have to do the same thing - determine what their phonemes are and then tell you how to say those phonemes.
'Phonemic' in the sense that people apply it to KK means that each phoneme is spelt in its own particular way. So the four different sounds in UCR which are all spelled 'u' are all spelt differently in KK.
I think you understand this because you've gone on to explain it, accurately, I would say, in your post, and I'll just comment on a few of your points:
Yes, of course it can. Hundreds of KK users will confirm this. And in any case it doesn't actually override attestation in the sources. The words are not unattested, they're just spelt slightly differently in order to gain the advantages of a phonemic spelling.
Put simplistically it's a very simple choice - people that want a spelling system that only uses spellings found in medieval texts choose UC or UCR. People that prefer a spelling system that tells them reliably how to say a word choose KK.
True, but the KK point of view is that it doesn't have to be like this. Just because English spelling is impossible, why should Cornish be the same? I'm told (hearsay alert!) that there is research on the web that shows that Italian children learn to spell much more quickly than their English counterparts and the reason for this is put down to the fact that Italian spelling is very 'phonemic'.
Not only do we have the opportunity to sort out Cornish spelling and make it easier but we HAVE done it - KK has been alive and kicking for nearly 20 years. Of course, it may not be around for much longer if there is a consensus that medieval spelling is more appropriate.
This will just start an argument - believe me, it's inevitable - and I'm not here to argue in favour of one system or another. The point I was making was for you, not me - if you are going to tell everyone what Gendall and Williams think then you should be telling them what George thinks as well.
You've done it again! WHO is denigrating the 'professionals'? I don't even know who the 'professionals' are! Really, I don't know what you're talking about. Is it that some people don't accept George's and Williams' rationales for KK and UCR? Well, as an example, I don't agree with Williams that we have to use only spellings that are found in medieval texts. But I'm not DENIGRATING the man. Just what do you mean?
By 'denigrating the professionals' I mean quite simply the attitude that has been expressed(not by you, I didn't say that!), it seems to me, at points on this thread, that if we left it to the professional/academic linguists/celticists to sort it out we'd be arguing till doomsday. Not a view I share though obviously academics will differ over certain issues but in the long run a thorough, impartial examination of the language over a long period would definitely have benefited the status of the resultant language at teriary education level which is a huge advantage not to be lightly dismissed. Indeed wasn't it just the lack of such acceptance that led to a replacement for the old Unified ? Anyway, like it or lump it, the investigations of professional linguists into the language have helped to keep an interest in and understanding of it alive. As a former poster pointed out their contributions to other minority languages have been a real boon to those languages in many cases. Though in the past academic interest in the language seems to have been woefully restricted even in the Welsh university colleges, let's hope the academic urge to research will help get Cornish new adherents and friends. When you look at just a smattering of the literature being produced in such volumes as Francis Boutle's Nothing Broken and The Wheel you realise just how vibrant it is despite all the setbacks it has had to endure. There is a whole body of work ready to be studied from the Revived period.
So I hope those involved in deciding the SWF wil carefully take the voices from academia into account.
On the orthography phonetic accuracy front, I do agree with you that the English system is a particularly extreme example of a very erratic and irregular one. That it got like that is probably indicative of the multiple streams that have fed into the modern English language that lends English its peculiarly rich range of 'registers'. And it is true that anyone who has learned a few other European languages will have recognised how much more regular spelling and so predictable the sounds are. Welsh and Scots Gaelic are two examples, though even they are far from 'perfect'. The greater facility of those Italian kids to acquire a mastery of their language's spelling would seem obvious. But then these languages all have a very different history from English! Those governments that have tried to revise their spelling systems have often foud it a bigger challenge than had hitherto been expected, leading precisely to a multiple tier situation as currently pertains in Cornwall-Norway is a clear case.(Landsmal, Bokmal, Nynorsk) There was a lot of rumblings in Germany when certain changes were forced through. I guess the forces of inertia and conservatism make this kind of reaction inevitable!
The choice of Cornish orthography can either follow the 'historical development' path and go for textual attestation or the KK way. I do not myself think the old standardise from attestted sources would lead to huge difficulties on the scale that meets the learner of English as the very act of standardising severely limits the variation of sounds any latter can carry.
The Late system in Tavas A Ragadazow seems relatively easy to get the hang of.
Incidentally is the reference to following the 'medieval' form o the language quite accurate for either UCR or Late? Dr Williams seems to go predominantly to the Tudor period whilst Late is what its nickname states: drawn from the latest stages of the language and according to Messrs Gendall and Kennedy has the virtue of a simplified morphology/system of verbal conjugations which means less taxing memory work.
As for purging Cornish of many of its Englisg borrowings which had become integrated into the language long before its final demise, I question whether this does 'pollute' the purity of the language. Languages are forever borrowing from each other, most naturally where they exist in a bilingual/multilingual situation. A vibrant language can absorb these without any great damage to itself. However I am not saying we should allow it to be swamped both in vocabulary and syntactic structure by its dominant neighbours! It horrifies me to hear perfectly fluent speakers of Scots Gaelic interject English words and phrases just because they have not deepened the range of their native vocabulary. It is a balancing act, isn't it? The problem for minority languages especially those surrounded by the all prevailing English is that we absorb the 'Big Boy' without the least conscious effort on our part, it being practically inescapable, whereas a real effort has to be made to keep, widen and deepen our command of the 'minor' . And allow the minor, too, to grapple with and process as it were 'new' areas of our existance. Two very informative and entertaining books on this are Spoken Here by Mark Abley and Language in Danger by Andrew Dalby.
PS I found the refernces in Clappya Kernowek where Dr Williams seems content to 'go with the 'revived flow' rather than slavishly follow historic attestation- page 62 where he deals with what he calls the 'ghost-word' ylow(=music) an more generally at page 15 when discussing DH and J. Incidentally, when is the SWF summit due? Do you reackon all sides will be represented? I do hope there will be no boycotting of it by certain parties.
Drok a vydh gansans na wrons y dos: onen ha oll!
PS Can anyone tell me which version Rod Lyons excellent, little book Everyday Cornish follows? I thought it was Late but it looks like a sort of composite approach, the closer I look at it.Probably just me being dumb!
The first 'summit' is on Saturday at Tremough, all sides will be explaining their philosophies so we can understand where they are coming from. There are breakout sessions in the afternoon for discussion, topics as yet unrevealed.
The argument that dare not speak its name ... you could probably count the number of fluent Cornish speakers who use late spelling on one hand.
Tim Saunders new poetry book edited by him (and therefore pretty unbiased) is probably indicative of literary usage. About 2/3 of the poets use Kernewek Kemmyn, a quarter use Unified Cornish (tend to be older (and some are no longer with us)) 10% e.g. 3/30 used Late Cornish and there were no poets using UCR in this volume.
NB One of Tim's advisors was a LC user, so one would expect this area to be over-represented if the poetry existed. Also worth noting that Pol Hodge one of Kernewek Kemmyn's most prolific writers was not included suggesting that KK was probably underrepresented.
This will give you some idea of real usage of the various sytems amongst the Cornish language community.
OK we can agree to disagree here. I must point out that at present Cornish is not a vibrant Language (which will hopefully change in the future). What is happening is that we the Cornish are reviving our Language. Therefore we are in an almost unique position, in the we can look back to a purer form of it. If the Language had been consistant, we would not be able to remove these 'borrowings', but that is not the case here. This i sone reason i do not support the Late Form. We are able to mold a form that is a lot purer, which is what I support. I think the vast majority of speakers and potential speakers would support this as the way forward. Yet again this is only my opinion.
Thanks for those responses.
Out of matter of interest, can I ask if Alan M. Kent who's one of my favourite poets is using the Late form? Only his Kernopalooza Rap which features in 'Nothing Broken' anthology is a deliciously witty, rhythmical and memorable composition and clearly from the pen of one with a real mastery of the language....and it looks 'Late' to my admittedely unpractised eye.
Alan Kent is using Late Cornish (one of the three (along with Dick Gendall - who is getting on a bit and Neil Kennedy who has migrated to Brittany), AK is an acomplished writer in english I don't know how much of a master he is with Cornish. He certainly uses fairly free translation.
Any update on the SWF summit at Tremough which was awaited with so much keen anticipation...and expectation of a fresh start resultant solidarity for the language movement ?
I know it's early days but I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to know at least in outline how the conference went....if only because it'll give one a good idea whether the version one is learning at the moment is likely to be closer or not to the SWF! Will I be advised to ditch Kernewek Mar Plek and Clappya Kernowek for Skeul An Yeth, do you think, or should I persevere with them?
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