[Spellyans] Introduction

[Christian Semmens]

My name is Christian Semmens. My family hail from St.Just and
Botallack, and had it not been for National Service so would I, but as
it transpired I was born in Somerset whilst my father was in the RAF.
I currently live in a little village at the edge of east
Leicestershire where we moved to in 1969 when my father left the RAF.
I am married with an eight year old son, Talek.

My interest in the Cornish language started with a copy of Heini
Gruffudd's Cornish is Fun when I was about 15. After a couple of years
at Plymouth Poly, where, strangely enough I was a student of Ken
George (he was one of my Astronomy lecturers), I decided that I was
not going to be a chemist and opted for an IT career. After a twenty
year career in IT I currently work as an IT manager at DeMontfort
University in Leicester where I run the team that is responsible for
the University's central computing systems. I decided to revive my
early interest in Cornish in the late Eighties and learned about the
changes in orthography. Discovering that one of my lecturers was the
inventor of Kemmyn I was excited, and bought both his first
dictionary, Wella Brown's Grammar and Holyewgh an Lergh course to get
me kick started along with the tapes. Within a few days I was
horrified at what I had found (especially Graham Sandercock gargling
and rolling his r's like a scottsman on the tape), so much so that I
gave up the language in disgust for another twenty years, but always
thought, "I'll start learning Cornish next week!". Finally I stumbled
by accident into the bear pit that is the forums on C24 and after
trading insults with a few Kemmyn zealots discovered the moves to
develop a compromise form that lead me to discover the wonderful work
done with KS.

I am no linguist, but certainly enthusiastic. I can also tend to be
rather verbose, so please accept my apologies in advance :)

Christian