[Spellyans] Introduction

[Craig Weatherhill]

A name like Semmens can only hail from St Just/Botallack - and a lot of 
them are still there.  Just outside St Just is Semmens Coal and Oil 
Yard; a Semmens whose first name escapes me for the moment was, until 
recently, the regular full-back for St Just rugby club, and Adrian 
Semmens is currently Chairman of Penwith Council's Planning committee.  
The Queen's Arms, Botallack (mentioned in both of Hammond Innes's 
novels, "Wreckers must Breathe" and "The Killer Mine") is where my 
drunken Irish horse and I can often be found during the lunchtime 
periods at weekends.

Craig

Christian Semmens wrote:
> 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
>
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