[Spellyans] Cornish on Government website

nicholas williams njawilliams at gmail.com
Sun Dec 28 13:32:02 GMT 2008


There are three problems confronting the revival, now that the  
question of orthography has been settled for the time being:

1. there are no native speakers and not enough fluent speakers
2. there are not enough children being taught to speak Cornish
3. there is far too much indifferent, bad and indeed very bad Cornish  
in use.

The solution to 3. is for all speakers to read traditional Cornish  
continually.
Unfortunately many find the traditional orthography intimidating and
the language of the traditional texts too difficult. Moreover they have
been taught, for example, that the Cornish for 'money] is arhans (not  
the correct mona);
for 'animal' is mil (not the correct best), for 'face' is enep (not  
the correct fas/fâss)
and that the Cornish for 'houses' is *chiow (not the correct treven)  
and for 'things'
is *traow (not the correct taclow). And yn kever is so often wrongly  
used with a noun
to mean 'about' by so many people and indeed Brown's grammar approves
of this misuse.
All these errors (and they are errors) can be blamed on Nance. But it  
is time to correct them.

We need to think seriously about providing KS versions of everything
from the Charter Fragment to Nebbaz Gerriau.

Although he insisted on using KK the late Ray Edwards was aware that  
much
of revived Cornish was without warrant in the texts. See his Notennow  
Kernewek
http://www.kdl.org.uk/notennow/index.htm

Nicholas

On 28 Dec 2008, at 10:06, Ray Chubb wrote:

> Surely it is not unreasonable to expect only the very best Cornish  
> from the Council.

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