[Spellyans] UC/UCR

[Michael Everson]

On 13 Nov 2012, at 09:15, Ray Chubb <ray at spyrys.org> wrote:

> On 12 Du 2012, at 21:59, Herbie Blackburn wrote:
> 
>> Then when I first saw Nicholas Williams’s UCR Dictionary, I thought the future of Cornish was secure and resolved.
> 
> Absolutely correct.  If only the language movement had been happy to incorporate the kind of adjustments to Unified in the 1980's that UC(r) proposes we would not be in the mess that we are in today.  Members of the yet to be reformed Agan Tavas did try to get agreement to a compromise of that sort but without success.

As it happens, though, Nicholas did not stop studying Cornish in the 1980s. UCR wasn't the end. And KS isn't some alien thing foisted upon the Revival by untrained linguists. It's the result of a collaborative effort by many people trying to fix the SWF. 

KS is in a very real sense, UC3. It respects Traditional Cornish. It *looks* like Cornish. It's got rules that make sense, and those rules have been tested, even against the difficult question of how to write the Hebrew, Latin, and Greek personal and place-names that pervade the Scriptures. 

>> So, I cannot believe how the legacy of Nance, and the fantastic effort of Nicholas are still being argued against, and the amount of negative effort that has been wasted.
> 
> Some of us still think that Unified/UC(r) is the best option for Cornish.

At the end of Towards Authentic Cornish we argued for UCR. But then the SWF process arose, and we began, in UdnFormScrefys, to discuss the possibility of ***unifying*** the RMC and RLC groups. KS1 came out of that. 

I think it very unlikely that the public authorities in Cornwall will ever revert to UCR, or to UC. They want to use this "consensual" SWF, despite the fact that it was developed in hostile negotiations over a five day period. KS fixes the SWF, as authentically as possible, and if you want me to guess, I guess that the SWF Review won't fix the SWF in a linguistically robust fashion. 

Sure you can stuck to UC and UCR. You won't get a Desky Kernowek in them though. Or a Beybel Sans. And both KS and the SWF will be there, for years to come, I believe. 

If you ask me, our friends in the Kesva and Cowethas must delight in the fact that we Traditionalists are ourselves split into factions. 

Spelling reform means reform, change and move on, change and move forward. Yes, there were 80 years of UC. Choosing to accept a spelling reform doesn't wipe that off the face of the earth. Neither does it mean that we should ignore later research and the work of later people, and stick to it. Because it's *not* better than what we have today. It's really not. 

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/