[Spellyans] SWF Review

[Owen Cook]

On 19 September 2012 19:45, A. J. Trim <ajtrim at msn.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 19/09/12 21:16, Owen Cook wrote:
>>
>> There is a reason the SWF had to rechristen itself "Standard Written
>> Form" rather than "Single Written Form", which is that it never was a
>> single form. That, to my mind, was the greatest failing of Treyarnon.
>> There should never have been the main/traditional distinction to start
>> with.
>
>
>
> We should have had a Main form and a Late form (both using traditional
> graphs.)

I strongly disagree: We should have a Middle and a Late form. (Taking
Middle as 'main' is not really acceptable.) And the distinction
between Middle and Late Cornish is not absolute. The SWF does an okay
job (not a great one) of accommodating both forms with umbrella graphs
and regular alternations.

You can have a single written form that admits dialect variants (cf.
aluminium and aluminum). What I mean by that is that, for example,
[dʒ] is always written as ‹j›. In a given word, some speakers will
have [dʒ] and write ‹j› while others will have [z] and write ‹s›. Same
convention, applied differently.

> If we wish to include both Middle and Late Cornish, we must have two
> versions -- so no single form is possible but the variants can be written
> into a single standard. The name "Standard Written Form" is OK, except that
> KS uses the word Standard.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Andrew J. Trim
>
>
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