<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">Of course nans is part of the Cornish vocabulary, but</span></font><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">there is no evidence that the word was used in Middle or Late</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">Cornish when talking about a valley (outside the place-name</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">itself). If nans had been the ordinary word,</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">Jordan would have written *nans Ebron not valy Ebron.</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">I assume that the English borrowing valy had replaced nans in that context,</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">exactly as cothman, fas, rom, swan, profet had by the 16th century replaced</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">car, enep, stevel, alargh and profus. </span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">Tota Cornicitas means that we can use the attested valy in preference</span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="Baskerville" size="5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 18px;">to the unattested unbound morpheme nans.</span></font></div><div><br></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;">Nicholas</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;"><br></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>On 26 Jul 2008, at 19:58, Craig Weatherhill wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>Apart, of course, from place-names. I look upon historical and attested <br>place-name elements as textual evidence. Awan, "river" does survive in <br>a small handful of names. Nans survives in a great many. Steval <br>appears in just one place-name but, in my opinion, these examples <br>qualify each word as genuine, attested and acceptable to the Cornish <br>vocabulary. I don't feel that we have to discard them simply because <br>they do not appear in scribal texts. For me, toponymic evidence is just <br>as valid.<br><br><blockquote type="cite"><br></blockquote></div></blockquote></div><br></div></body></html>