"Today, children, we've got an exciting time ahead of us! After sums this morning and before P.E., we've got Basic Phonology! Then after playtime there's Verb Paradigms, and this afternoon there's The Interchange of <gh> and <h> in Personal Prepositions incuding A-UGH!
Now, hands up who wants to be a linguist when they grow up...."
Firstly, this doesn't affect spelling, only the recommended KK pronunciation.
I've always felt that having two recommended sounds for this phoneme is an unnecessary complication that has confused many people, so I'd be interested to know the reason for it. That is 1. what evidence is there that /o/ had a different realisation when short, even apparently when short and stressed; and 2. why [7] which according to my chart is the unrounded equivalent of [o]. Surely this was an error for something like [U] a more centralised version of [o] that might be expected when the vowel was unstressed, in the same way that /i/ when unstressed comes out as [I]. Do you really believe that the stressed short vowel in toemm next to [m:] was an unrounded [7] ??
The SWF has attempted to please everyone by setting up different rules for the different groups of Cornish speakers. They have been imagined as different 'tribes' speaking different related dialects of the same language. I don't really think this describes the situation, but since there was no field research who can tell? The devisors of the SWF believed everything they were told by the different groups, so they assumed there was a large body of UC-ers over here who speak like this and a large body of RLC fans over there who speak like that etc. They've tried to incorporate both the real rules of Cornish phonology, along with a lot of phoney rules that come from misinterpreting the texts and genuine mistakes that were made by Nance etc. e.g. in UC.
The result is something far more complicated than Cornish ever was, which contains many irrational and completely unnatural rules. It's particularly unfortunate that at least in its rules for UC-ers it seems to assume a 'prosodic shift' at a time when linguistic scholarship is beginning to doubt whether any such event ever took place. The SWF will do nothing to enhance the academic status of Revived Cornish, in will only confirm academia's view that Revived Cornish is a bit of a joke. Pity!
I suspect that it comes from the markedly different pronunciations of the word koes when stressed and unstressed. Compare in the west, Barncoose v. Cusgarne, Tolgus , and in the east, Penquite v. Cutcrew.. This suggests remarkably different pronunciations at all periods. How far English has affected these place-names needs to be considered.
Not I.
I.
It is so unutterably poor, compared with KK.
To foist this on Cornish schoolchildren is an abomination, when we can do so much better. Any teacher comtemplating using it must be made aware that it is a political fudge.
I hardly need say, need I? For the sake of being seen to have agreed to something the politics of the situation have forced an uneasy agreement over an artificial form that in any case will be up for review again after five years. This will hardly inspire confidence or investment. If KK really was politically unacceptable, then UC should have been chosen, at least as a stop-gap, since everyone is familiar with it (warts and all) and as an essentially arbitrary system of spelling, it doesn't make any assumptions about how Cornish was or should be spoken, it leaves that question open. Existing dictionaries etc. could have been used by officialdom, and resources kept in reserve while a professional in-depth examination of the whole question was commissioned.
What's likely to happen now is that money will be spent supporting a system that no-one really likes, that will attract academic distain (from some of the people who we really need to have take an interest), and which in any case is likely be be scrapped or seriously overhauled just as it's starting to bed-in.
""Today, children, we've got an exciting time ahead of us! After sums this morning and before P.E., we've got Basic Phonology! Then after playtime there's Verb Paradigms, and this afternoon there's The Interchange of <gh> and <h> in Personal Prepositions incuding A-UGH!
Now, hands up who wants to be a linguist when they grow up...." "
Dont you think we ALREADY get that?
"Today, children, we've got an exciting time ahead of us! After algebra this morning and before P.E., we've got Basic Phonology, where we are going to learn the irregular English spellings! Then after playtime there's Verb Paradigms, showing irregularities within the language, and how to pronounce them, and this afternoon there's The Interchange of <ize> and <ise> in words incuding Franchise/Franchize!
Now, hands up who wants to be a Chav when they grow up...."
Well, I'm afraid some of us were naive enough to hope so, but it would appear that the only phonologist(s) on the team knew squat about Brittonic languages, and the only Celts were sociolinguists (fast becoming a term of abuse in some circles), which wouldn't have mattered if they'd worked with the local experts (or even the LWG!), or called in academics with the right background. Even the sociolinguists were helpless without accurate survey data, which was not, and still is not forthcoming. So same old story, with no consultation with the language groups, and no survey data, but swamped with submissions from everyone and anyone and with no way of figuring out who knew what they were talking about, the Commission floundered, made an excuse and left.
Most active users of Cornish are KK people, so most comments will come from them. UC supporters on the whole will accept anything that looks a bit 'Cornish', and RLC speakers are a figment of someones imagination. All the problems are caused by perhaps a dozen activists who for various personal reasons are out to 'get' KK, Ken and the Kesva. To this end they're quite prepared to send the Revival down a blind alley for several years and seriously dent the language's public image and academic credibility. Well done boys, there ought to be a special grade of bardship to promote you all to.
edited by: morvran, May 06, 2008 - 06:23 PM
Seventy Percent of "competent & frequent" Cornish users prefer to write KK! (MAGA/CLP Survey)
Why isn't < oo > used everywhere that KK uses < oe > ? UCR and RLC users could simply pronounce any < oo > that is not in a monosylabic word as [ O ] since for them the < oo > is only pronounce [ u ] in that circumstance. Every where else they would automatically substitute the pronunciation [ O ]. Doing that and allowing KK users to have a varient that doesn't include vocalic alternation would have gone a long way toward making the SWF acceptable to more KK users.
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