[Spellyans] The Celtic Languages

[Owen Cook]

Well, be fair, it is Routledge. They do good work, in general, but
they're not really scholarly publishers.

Still, the sentence "The prospect of money caused the groups who do
not use Kemmyn to cease squabbling among themselves and to attack
Kemmyn", besides being unnecessarily polemical in tone, really impugns
opponents of Kemmyn by alleging their motivation to be financial. Real
conflicts of interest do crop up, but this is a very broad brush. The
more so as Ken goes on to write, "They re-opened the question of
orthography, placing it on the agenda of the partnership. Nicholas
Williams criticized Kemmyn, claiming that it was linguistically
flawed." Now, Nicholas had begun publishing his criticisms of Kemmyn a
decade or more before Cornish was designated for regional language
funding. I'm surprised Ken's phraseology didn't send up red flags --
it would have done if I'd been editing.

Still, I have a copy of the older edition of The Celtic Languages, and
I've found it useful and interesting on many counts. There'll still be
plenty of good material in the new edition, I'm sure.

Best,
~~Owen

On 29 January 2010 16:57, Ken MacKinnon <ken at ferintosh.org> wrote:
> Craig,
>
> That is a fair point.  Ray makes the point also that this account prejudices
> the whole publication.  I would not go so far as that - but again it does
> suggest that this passage is less than academic and objective in tone.
>
> - an Ken ken
>
>
> Ken MacKinnon is now on Broadband  with new e-mail addresses:-
>
> ken at ferintosh.org
> and also at:-
> ken.ferintosh at googlemail.com