[Spellyans] SWF vowel inconsistencies
Jon Mills
j.mills at email.com
Wed Jul 2 14:25:04 BST 2008
I'd be grateful for any references in the literature to this.Jon
----- Original Message -----
From: "nicholas williams"
To: "Standard Cornish discussion list"
Subject: Re: [Spellyans] SWF vowel inconsistencies
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 13:44:20 +0100
Not so, Jon. There is evidence for the collapse of unstressed vowels
as schwa in Late West Saxon.
Nicholas
On 2 Jul 2008, at 13:03, Jon Mills wrote:
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:
http://www.vmi.edu/english/audio/GP-Opening.ram . 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.Jon
----- Original Message -----
From: "nicholas williams"
To: "Standard Cornish discussion list"
Subject: Re: [Spellyans] SWF vowel inconsistencies
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 12:22:54 +0100
Welsh pronunciation is very un-English and native speakers of
Welsh pronounce English likeWelsh not vice versa. They say,
for example, kri:w for crew and ni:ws for news [nju:z]. They
have troublewith [z] and will say [hausIs] for houses and 'I
saw a Sebra in the soo'. Indeed zoo is written sw in Welsh.
The intonation of Welsh is very different from English and
even in English Welsh speakers willpronounce toponyms in
their Welsh form. We say bang-g@ for Bangor, but native
Welsh speakers sayBangor with the stress on the first
syllable but a rise in tone on the second syllable and a
clear o vowel.
The whole point about the Prosodic Shift in my view is that
it made Cornish closer to English than ithad been and thus
less like Welsh. The Welsh name is Caradog with three clear
syllables whereasthe Cornish equivalent Caragek after the
shift would have been k at raedZ@k with schwa in the unstressed
syllables.
The weakening of unstressed syllables to schwa is already
noticeable in PA and the Ordinalia. By the time ofBM it is
complete. The scribe of BM writes dotha 'to him' because his
final unstressed syllables were all schwa.
The next stage is seen in TH who in order to keep gansa 'with
him' apart from gansa 'with them' recharacterisesthe latter
as gansans.
The first stage in the anglicisation of Cornish phonology was
the assibilation of tad > tadz > tas/taz. This came aboutbecause
the Brythonic distinction between fortis and lenis was
replaced by the English opposition of stop and affricate.
A later stage in the anglicisation of Cornish was the
phenomenon known as pre-occlusion. The distinction between n
and n:survived long enough in some forms of Cornish to
undergo sound substitution: n: > dn. A similar phenomenon isto
be seen in Manx, which is Gaelic (which has long consonants)
in the mouths of Norse speakers.Pre-occlusion in Manx goes
back to the beginnings of Manx in the ninth century, but does
not appear in writing tillmuch later.
If we Cymricise Cornish we will, I believe, do violence to
the phonology of the language, which has been closer to
English than to Welsh since the beginning of the Middle
Cornish period.
Nicholas
On 2 Jul 2008, at 11:37, John Sheridan wrote:
--- On Wed, 7/2/08, nicholas williams <njawilliams at gmail.com>
wrote:
There is really no way round the difficulty. Revived
Cornish even when
fluent
sounds like English in both phonemic inventory and
intonation.
The problem is exacerbated by the inevitable tendency
to
sound-
substitution.
Matthew Clarke ...
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.
The best Cornish I have ever heard was Neil Kennedy's
before he left
for Brittany and
Dan's JCH. Dan has the great advantages
of being 1. a trained linguist; 2. a professional
actor.
Perhaps Dan should be employed to produce learners'
materials.
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.
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.
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)!
Yn lel,
-John
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