<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Not so, Jon. There is evidence for the collapse of unstressed vowels as schwa in Late West Saxon.<div><br></div><div>Nicholas<br><div><div>On 2 Jul 2008, at 13:03, Jon Mills wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>It is not until the Middle English period that vowels start to become schwa in unstressed syllables. This first occurred in word final vowels: 'soote', 'roote', 'yonge', 'sonne'. Follow this link to hear some Chaucer: <a href="http://www.vmi.edu/english/audio/GP-Opening.ram">http://www.vmi.edu/english/audio/GP-Opening.ram</a> . Middle English did not have the preponderance of weak forms that appear in today's English. Weakening of vowels in unstressed syllables would appear to be an areal feature that affected both English and Cornish. It is possible that it even started to occur in Cornish before English.</div> <div>Jon<br><br></div> <blockquote style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid">----- Original Message -----<br>From: "nicholas williams" <njawilliams@gmail.com><br>To: "Standard Cornish discussion list" <spellyans@kernowek.net><br>Subject: Re: [Spellyans] SWF vowel inconsistencies<br>Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 12:22:54 +0100<br><br><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">Welsh pronunciation is very un-English and native speakers of Welsh pronounce English like</span></font> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">Welsh not vice versa. They say, for example, kri:w for crew and ni:ws for news [nju:z]. They have trouble</span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">with [z] and will say [hausIs] for houses and 'I saw a Sebra in the soo'. Indeed zoo is written sw in Welsh.</span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px"><br></span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">The intonation of Welsh is very different from English and even in English Welsh speakers will</span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">pronounce toponyms in their Welsh form. We say bang-g@ for Bangor, but native Welsh speakers say</span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">Bangor with the stress on the first syllable but a rise in tone on the second syllable and a clear o vowel.</span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px"><br></span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">The whole point about the Prosodic Shift in my view is that it made Cornish closer to English than it</span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">had been and thus less like Welsh. The Welsh name is Caradog with three clear syllables whereas</span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">the Cornish equivalent Caragek after the shift would have been k@raedZ@k with schwa in the unstressed syllables.</span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px"><br></span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">The weakening of unstressed syllables to schwa is already noticeable in PA and the Ordinalia. By the time of</span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">BM it is complete. The scribe of BM writes dotha 'to him' because his final unstressed syllables were all schwa.</span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px"><br></span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">The next stage is seen in TH who in order to keep gansa 'with him' apart from gansa 'with them' recharacterises</span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">the latter as gansans. </span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px"><br></span></font></div> <div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px; FONT-FAMILY: Baskerville">The first stage in the anglicisation of Cornish phonology was the assibilation of tad > tadz > tas/taz. This came about</span></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">because the Brythonic distinction between fortis and lenis was replaced by the English opposition of stop and affricate.</span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px"><br></span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">A later stage in the anglicisation of Cornish was the phenomenon known as pre-occlusion. The distinction between n and n:</span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">survived long enough in some forms of Cornish to undergo sound substitution: n: > dn. A similar phenomenon is</span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">to be seen in Manx, which is Gaelic (which has long consonants) in the mouths of Norse speakers.</span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">Pre-occlusion in Manx goes back to the beginnings of Manx in the ninth century, but does not appear in writing till</span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">much later.</span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px"><br></span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px">If we Cymricise Cornish we will, I believe, do violence to the phonology of the language, which has been closer to English </span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5">than to Welsh since the beginning of the Middle Cornish period.</font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px"><br></span></font></div> <div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px; FONT-FAMILY: Baskerville">Nicholas </span></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px"><br></span></font></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="FONT-SIZE: 18px"></span></font> </div> <div><br></div> <div><br></div> <div> <div> <div>On 2 Jul 2008, at 11:37, John Sheridan wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> <blockquote type="cite"> <div>--- On Wed, 7/2/08, nicholas williams <<a href="mailto:njawilliams@gmail.com">njawilliams@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><br> <blockquote type="cite">There is really no way round the difficulty. Revived<br></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite">Cornish even when <br></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite">fluent<br></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite">sounds like English in both phonemic inventory and<br></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite">intonation.<br></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite">The problem is exacerbated by the inevitable tendency to<br></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite">sound- <br></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite">substitution.<br></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite">Matthew Clarke ...<br></blockquote><br>Matthew Clarke is perhaps the best case in point. With his Radyo an Gernewegva, he is building up a substantial inventory of news reports with (sometimes) accompanying text transcriptions. It is admirable work and a true boon to the Cornish speaking community. In some ways, he is becoming the Cornish voice of Cornwall. So perhaps that's really what 21st-century Cornish sounds like.<br><br> <blockquote type="cite">The best Cornish I have ever heard was Neil Kennedy's<br></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite">before he left <br></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite">for Brittany and<br></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite">Dan's JCH. Dan has the great advantages<br></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite">of being 1. a trained linguist; 2. a professional actor.<br></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite">Perhaps Dan should be employed to produce learners'<br></blockquote> <blockquote type="cite">materials.<br></blockquote><br>Hear, hear! As an aside, I've also thought that someone should produce a filmed version of the Tregear homilies with Dan playing the preacher.<br>But Dan also has the advantage of being bilingual from birth and living abroad, thus having a facility with language and not influenced by UK dialects. <br><br>It interests me, Nicholas, that you chose to learn Irish, because I have often thought: perhaps I should learn Welsh and model my Cornish pronunciation after Welsh. At least then it would be modeled after some Brythonic language. But Welsh itself for all I know may be heavily influenced by English; and besides, as it has been said umpteen times by many on this list, Cornish is not Welsh (or Breton)! <br><br>Yn lel,<br>-John<br><br><br><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>Spellyans mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Spellyans@kernowek.net">Spellyans@kernowek.net</a><br><a href="http://kernowek.net/mailman/listinfo/spellyans_kernowek.net">http://kernowek.net/mailman/listinfo/spellyans_kernowek.net</a><br></div></blockquote></div><br></div><br>_______________________________________________<br>Spellyans mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Spellyans@kernowek.net">Spellyans@kernowek.net</a><br>http://kernowek.net/mailman/listinfo/spellyans_kernowek.net<br></spellyans@kernowek.net></njawilliams@gmail.com></blockquote><p><br><br></p><pre>_____________________________________
Dr. Jon Mills,
School of European Culture and Languages,
University of Kent
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