[Spellyans] Ian Jackson: introduction

[Craig Weatherhill]

But don't forget that Lhuyd was writing phonetically.  It is common in Cornish speech to render short O as short U, e.g. "dunkey" (donkey).  This might well have been found more widely - how does one explain the Eng. pronunciation of "monkey", which at face value, ought to be pronounced as Eng. "donkey".

Craig

On 2015 Kev 15, at 11:38, Nicholas Williams wrote:

> The last instance of ponya before the seventeenth century seems to be Tregear ca 1555 who writes lyas onyn a rug resak ha ponya in stray TH 30a. Lhuyd in Archæologia Britannica (1707), however, writes the verbal noun of the verb ‘to run’ as punnia AB: 53b, punnya AB: 61c. In later Cornish therefore one might more accurately spell the stressed vowel as <u> rather than <o>.
> 
> Janice says:
> 
> Yth esof vy ow ponya — shift forward a few hundred years and you get Thero vy ow ponya.
> 
> I am not sure I can agree with her.
> Setting aside the verbal noun for a moment, let us look the rest of the phrase.
> 
> In Sacrament an Alter (ca ?1570) we read:
> rag ne geran cregy nanyle regardia gerryow Dew ‘for we do not believe nor regard the words of God’. Notice both that the -s- of eson has been rhotacised and that the particle ow, o has been suppressed/omitted before both cregy ‘believe’ and regardia ‘regard’.
> 
> Look then at the following quotations from the Creation of the World (1611):
> 
> mere yth esaf ow towtya CW 1540
> yeth esaf ow tremena CW 1696
> yth esaf ow pose gorthys CW 2125.
> 
> It seems, therefore, that neg eran cregy from ca 1570 predates yth esaf ow towtya from 1611. Jan’s remark ‘a few hundred years’ is difficult to sustain.
> 
> This is, I believe, an important point. Many of the alleged differences between Middle and Late Cornish are apparent rather than real and it is unwise to emphasise the distance between the two forms of the language. 
> 
> Nicholas
> 
>> On 13 Dec 2015, at 17:50, Nicholas Williams <njawilliams at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Me a bon means 'I shall run'. 'I run' is best translated Yth esof ow ponya.
>> 
>> And indeed 'I shall run' is more idiomatically rendered me a vydn ponya or
>> me a wra ponya. 
>> 
>> Nicholas
>> 
> 
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