The gradual decay of language: Why the 'last speaker' is a romantic myth

“ It is unlike any other form of death, for an unwritten language is even as a breath of air which when it is spent leaves no trace behind. A nation may die, yet its history remains, and that is the tangible part of its past. A city may fall to decay and lie a thousand years under the sands of the desert, yet its relics revivify its life. But a language that is dead, a tongue that has no life in its literature, is a breath of wind that is gone. ”

“ New ideas, being young, are healthy, they impart their freshness to the tongue and far from spoiling it they preserve it. Sometimes they rescue it. Still, if a language is bound to disappear, thickening increases, obscurity overtakes certain areas of language, the logic of the language is altered, analogies vanish, etymologies underlying the words stop showing up, sloppy spelling is applied to long-standing roots of words, shabby usage distorts what’s left of the language’s fine original structure. ”

“ So is it with language long before the grammarian undertakes its investigation. It may even be said, that the commencement of the age of self-consciousness is identical with the close of that of vitality in language; for it is a great error to speak of languages as dead, only when they have ceased to be spoken. They are dead when they have ceased to possess the power of adaptation to the wants of the people, and no longer contain in themselves the means of their own extension. ”

“ As long as it is alive and spoken, it is constantly changing and will not remain “fixed” according to the whimsical desire of the purist. When it ceases to be used upon the lips of the people as a [Pg 120] medium of communication of their thoughts and feelings, then it will cease to change and grow and will become “fixed.” But when a language is no longer spoken, it is characterized as dead. ”

“ As soon as a language loses its unbounded capability of change, its carelessness about what it throws away, and its readiness in always supplying instantaneously the wants of mind and heart, its natural life is changed into a merely artificial existence. It may still live on for a long time, but while it seems to be the leading shoot, it is in reality but a broken and withering branch, slowly falling from the stock from which it sprang. The sources of Italian are not to be found in the classical literature of Rome, but in the popular dialects of Italy. ”

“ Thus it may be said that so long as any of these three are alive, a faint flicker of living Cornish remains, even if there is no verity in the weird legends of the survival of more as an esoteric language among the peasantry and the mining and fishing folk of the West. But even if the spoken Cornish be dead, its ghost still haunts its old dwelling, for the modern English speech of West Cornwall is full of Celtic words, and nine-tenths of the places and people from the Tamar to the Land’s End bear Cornish names. ”

“ Words and sentences, and even such things as the Creed and Lord’s Prayer were handed on, some of them to our own day. The mother-in-law of the present writer, Mrs. W. J. Rawlings (née Hambly) of Hayle, who died in 1879 at the age of fifty-seven, had learnt to repeat the Lord’s Prayer and Creed in Cornish when she was a child at school at Penzance, but unluckily had quite forgotten them in later life. In 1875 Mr. and Mrs. John Kelynack, Mrs. Soady, Mrs. Tregarthen, and Captain Stephen Richards, all of Newlyn, and Mr. Bernard Victor of Mousehole handed on to the Rev. ”

“ Much has been written about Dolly Pentreath, but little is known of her uneventful life. That little may be summed up in few words.
Her maiden name was Jeffery, and when she was a child her parents and all about her spoke the Cornish language. Drew, in his History of Cornwall, quoting Daines Barrington, says: "She does indeed talk Cornish as readily as others do English, being bred up from a child to know no other language; nor could she (if we may believe her) talk a word of English before she was past twenty years of age." ”

“ In 1768 Daines Barrington himself writes an account of an interview with the celebrated Mrs. Dolly Pentreath, popularly, but erroneously, supposed to have been the last person who spoke the language. He also contributed to Archæologia, in 1779, a letter received in p. 211776, written in Cornish and English, from William Bodenor, a fisherman of Mousehole, who according to Polwhele died in 1794. The writer states that not more than four or five people in his town, and these old folk of eighty years of age, could speak Cornish. ”

“ But the statement is by no means conclusive, and there were probably several other “last living men” going on at once, and certainly John Tremethack, who died in 1852 at the age of eighty-seven, must have known a good deal of Cornish, some words of which he taught to his daughter, Mrs. Kelynack of Newlyn, who was living in 1875. There p. 22was also George Badcock, the grandfather of Bernard Victor of Mousehole, who taught a certain amount of Cornish to his grandson, who was living in 1875, when the present writer saw him. ”

“ Carew, who published his Survey of Cornwall in 1602, notices the almost total extirpation of the language in his days. He says, 'The principal love and knowledge of this language liveth in Dr. Kennall the civilian, and with him lyeth buried; for the English speech doth still encroach upon it and hath driven the same into the uttermost skirts of the shire. Most of the inhabitants can speak no word of [Pg 244] Cornish; but few are ignorant of the English; and yet some so affect their airs, as to a stranger they will not speak it ”

“ These numerals and sentences are, as far as is known, the earliest specimens of printed Cornish, earlier by a hundred and sixty-five years than Lhuyd’s Grammar, though Dr. Jago, p. 12quoting from Drew and Hutchins, who had evidently never seen this book, Dr. Davies’s Llyfr y Resolusion of 1632, or Gibson’s edition of Camden’s Britannia of 1695, says that there is no evidence that anything was ever printed in Cornish before Lhuyd.
The Reformation did much to kill Cornish. ”

“ The motto of Harris of Hayne, “Car Dew dres pub tra,” is mentioned in Boson’s Nebbaz Gerriau, and is part of stanza 23 of the Poem of the Passion.
[50] The remarks added here in brackets are those of the present writer.
[54] In compound words the accent is always on the qualifying part, and if that is a monosyllable and comes last, the accent is therefore on the last syllable. This is common in place-names.
[55] It seems likely that in the very peculiar intonation of Zennor, Morvah, Towednack, and the country part of St. Ives the true intonation of Cornish may be best preserved. ”

“ He says, “In Cornwall is two speches, the one is naughty Englysshe, and the other is Cornysshe speche. And there be many men and women the which cannot speake one worde of Englysshe, but all Cornyshe.” He then gives the Cornish numerals and a few sentences of ordinary conversation. These are much mixed with English, and were, no doubt, such as might have been heard on the borders of Devon, for he probably did not penetrate very far, being doubtless deterred by the impossibility of obtaining drinkable beer—a circumstance which seems to have much exercised his mind in describing Cornwall. ”

“ A word finally loses its consonants the way an animal does its bones. The carcass suffices to come up with the word just as it does to reconstruct the animal. Gradually, the growing obsolescence of the doomed language brings about an embryonic, barely organized, semi language that inserts itself between the old one that is going to die and the new one slated to be born; the semi-language is a lichen, a parasite, a worm, a disease, that makes a place for itself on the old language and sinks its roots into it. ”

“ In murmuring echoes dies away,
⁠And melts like sorrow on my ear.
The voice of joy no more can cheer,
⁠The look of love no more can warm,
Since mute for aye's that voice so dear,
⁠And clos'd that eye alone could charm. ”

“ It is not given to a grammar-writer to strive after originality. If he did so, he would probably not be the better grammarian. The writer therefore has no hesitation in acknowledging to the full his many obligations to previous workers on the subject. To Lhuyd and Pryce, to Gwavas, Tonkin, Boson, and Borlase he owes much (and also, parenthetically, he thanks Mr. John Enys of Enys for lending him the Borlase MS.) . But p. xivit is to the workers of the second half of the nineteenth century, living or departed, that he owes most, and especially to Dr. Edwin Norris, Dr. Whitley Stokes, Prof. ”

“ The well-known work of Edwin Norris has been of the greatest value in every way, and the copious examples given in his “Sketch of Cornish Grammar” have frequently saved the writer the trouble of searching for examples himself. Dr. Whitley Stokes’s editions of two dramas and a poem have been of the greatest assistance, the notes to the St. Meriasek being especially valuable in collecting and comparing the various forms of irregular verbs, etc. Without Canon Williams’s Lexicon nothing could have been done, and though some amount of friendly criticism and correction has been given to it by Dr. ”

“ The rhymes are quite strict to the eye, but that is no doubt because in the days when one could spell as one pleased, the writer might arrange his spelling to suit, but there appear to be cases where the dh and th, both written th, as final consonants are made to rhyme together, and the three sounds of u (oo and the French u and eu) are sometimes confused. ”

“ A song beginning “Ma leeas gwreage, lacka vel zeage,” a series of moral platitudes on married life and the bringing up of children, by James Jenkins of Alverton, near Penzance (died 1710) . This consists of five stanzas of five or six lines each. There is a complete copy in the Gwavas MS., and a copy wanting one line in the Borlase MS., and this in complete version, with a translation, has been printed by Pryce and Davies Gilbert. A note in Pryce says that Tonkin had it from Lhuyd and p. 36again from Gwavas, whose is the translation. It is in idiomatic late Cornish, in rather wild spelling. ”

“ There must needs be, therefore, inaccuracies and inconsistencies, especially with regard to the spelling, which had to be constructed, and he is conscious also that there are at least two living men, if no more, who could have made a far better book. ”

“ Thus it is that inflections which in the late Cornish often seem to have been almost, if not quite, inaudible, have been written in full, for that is the author’s notion, founded on what Middle Cornishmen actually did write, of what Modern Cornishmen were trying to express. For most things he has precedents, though he has allowed himself a certain amount of conjecture at times, and in most cases of difficulty he has trusted, as he would advise his readers to do, to Breton rather than to Welsh, for the living Breton of to-day is the nearest thing to Cornish that exists. ”

“ The writer has arrived at his conclusions by a comparison of the various existing spellings with one another, with the traditional fragments collected and recorded by himself in 1875, with the modern pronunciation of Cornish names, with the changes which English has undergone in the mouths of the less educated of Cornishmen, and to some extent with Breton. The author suggests that this form of spelling should be generally adopted by Cornish students of their old speech. The system cannot in the nature of things be strictly accurate, but it is near enough for practical purposes. ”

“ With all such efforts those who have at heart the real welfare of our tongue will have no sympathy—least of all the strong men of literature who are forever ravenous after new words and old. Victor Hugo, for example, so far back as 1827, when the modern science of linguistics was still in its swaddling-clothes, had no difficulty in declaring the truth. “The French language,” he wrote in the preface to ‘Cromwell,’ “is not fixed, and it never will be. A living language does not fix itself. Mind is always on the march, or, if you will, in movement, and languages move with it.... ”

“ The English language is in continual use by many millions of people. We call it a “living” language, with good reason; and we know that living languages never remain static. English has undergone many changes, some of which have not seemed good. While it lives it must continue to change for better or worse. If we lengthen our time-scale, we perceive that the change in its big aspect parallels the principles of true growth, including of course those of decay. This is the rational view. For we must be aware that the span of a few centuries is not long in the life of a language. ”

“ In vain do our literary Joshuas command the language to stand still; neither the language nor the sun stands still any more. The day they do they fix themselves; it [Pg 101] will be because they are dying. ”

“ So long as a language is alive, it is constantly changing, so that the grammar and rhetoric of living language can never be absolutely fixed. It is only when the language has ceased to be spoken — has become as we say, a dead language — that fixed rules can be framed which every one who undertakes to write it must observe. ”

“ To speak of Latin dying in giving birth to her offspring is again pure mythology, and it would be easy to prove that Latin was a living language long after Italian had learnt to run alone. Only let us clearly see what we mean by Latin. The classical Latin is one out of many dialects spoken by the Aryan inhabitants of Italy. It was the dialect of Latium, in Latium the dialect of Rome, at Rome the dialect of the patricians. It was fixed by Livius Andronicus, Ennius, Nævius, Cato, and Lucretius, polished by the Scipios, Hortensius, and Cicero. ”

“ Let English die, and Shakespeare goes out of your closet, and passes away from you, and is then your brother-Englishman only in name. So close is the bond of language, so sweet and so mysterious.
But there is yet a more sacred bond with the language of our fathers when it can have no posthumous life in books. This is the bond of love. Think what it is that you miss first and longest when death robs you of a friend. Is it not the living voice? The living face you can bring back in memory, and in your dark hours it will shine on you still; the good deed can never die ”

“ So in the heart,
When, fading slowly down the past,
Fond memories depart,
And each that leaves it seems the last;
Long after all the rest are flown,
Returns a solitary tone,—
The after-echo of departed years,—
And touches all the soul to tears. ”