Henry Jenner

“ 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. ”

“ In 1630 Sir John Dodridge in his History of the Ancient and Modern estate of the Principality of Wales, Duchy of Cornwall, and Earldom of Chester, says: “The people inhabiting the same [i.e. Cornwall] are call’d Cornishmen, and are also reputed a remanent of the Britaines . . . they have a particular language called Cornish (although now much worn out of use) , differing but little from the Welsh and the language of the Britaines of France.” ”

“ For the South Wales man understandeth not perfectly the North Wales man, and the North Wales man little of the Cornish, but the South Wales man much. The pronunciation of the tongue differs in all, but the Cornish is far the easier to be pronounced.” Here he goes on to compare the sound of it with the Welsh, to the disadvantage of the latter. . . . “But of late the Cornishmen have much conformed themselves to the use of the English tongue, and their English is equal to the best, especially in the Eastern partes; even from Truro eastward is in a manner wholly Englishe. ”

“ The infinitive of a verb is treated almost exactly like a noun. If its object is a pronoun, this precedes the infinitive in the possessive form and governs its initial as it would that of a noun. If the object is not a pronoun, it follows the infinitive without change of initial, after the manner of an appositional genitive.
Very often the infinitive is governed by dhô, to, as in English, and under much the same circumstances, except that it is not so governed when it comes as the subject of another verb, and of course dhô is not used after auxiliary verbs. ”

“ There is no general definite rule for the formation of plurals; they must be learnt by experience. Some words are found with two plurals, but this generally means a tendency in modern Cornish to consider yow or ow to be the normal termination, and to discard other endings in favour of it, just as the plural in s in English has superseded all but a very few other forms. ”

“ The particle a is often omitted colloquially, but its effect is perceptible in the change of the initial of the verb. If the verb begins with a vowel, a is always omitted.
With interrogative sentences should come the answers to them. It must be understood that by nature no Celt can ever say a plain “yes” or “no.” There are “dictionary words” for “yes” and “no” in Welsh and Cornish, and they are used a very little in translations from other languages; but they do not “belong” to be used in speaking or writing Welsh or Cornish. In Gaelic there are not even “dictionary words” for them. ”

“ These, written by men who spoke Cornish fluently and had no theories and often no knowledge of philology, probably represent what people really spoke in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That faintness and even silence of final letters, which seems to have been a characteristic of Cornish as it is of French, was the cause that, in writing as phonetically as they knew how, these practical speakers of Cornish often omitted the ends of words, and made it seem as though their verbs had largely lost their inflections. ”

“ Pandra venta? what wilt thou?
A wresta? dost thou? Mar menta, if thou wilt.
Pandra wrama? what shall I do?
There are some few differences between the inflected verb of the earlier MSS. and that of modern Cornish, and among other changes the lighter termination en or yn of the first person plural, and ens or yns of the third person plural, in some cases had changed by Lhuyd’s time to on or an, and ons or ans, but probably really the vowel is obscure. There was also considerable uncertainty about the modification of the vowel. ”

“ That the successive changes of masters were matters of little or no importance to the enslaved aboriginal, while a life of servitude was intolerable to the free white man, may account for the fact that the labouring classes of Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, Wales, and the Welsh border are of a type infinitely superior in manners, morals, and physique to the same class in the Midlands, because they now consist almost entirely of the descendants of the free Britons who were driven westward rather than submit to the overwhelming invasion of the Teutonic tribes. ”

“ In the third person singular it is of course only distinguishable from the impersonal form by the position of the subject, which in the inflected form would follow the verb. The inflectional form of the third person plural is only used when the pronoun “they” is the subject. When the subject is a plural noun the verb is always in the singular. The inflected form, either of the auxiliary gwîl with the infinitive of the main verb, or of the main verb itself, is always used for the imperative. ”

“ Thus it is that probably, except for a certain Silurian (or Iberian) element in South Wales, which descends from the higher or fighting sort of pre-Aryan, and a surviving aboriginal element in parts of Ireland, the natives of what are known as the “Celtic” parts of these islands are more purely Aryan than any except the upper and upper middle classes of the so-called “Anglo-Saxon” districts of Britain. And of the Celtic parts of Britain, the Highlanders of Scotland and the Cornish are probably of the most unmixed Aryan or white race. ”

“ It is well not to attempt to force a Celtic language into a Teutonic mould. Some of the most beautiful metres that the world has ever known are to be found among the works of English poets, but they are no more suitable to Cornish than hexameters, sapphics, and alcaics on strict quantity lines would be to English. It is possible, however, to write ten-syllabled blank verse in Cornish, provided a fair amount of alliteration is used. ”

“ The seven Celtic languages, then, are Irish, Albanic (or Scottish) , and Manx Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, and Gaulish, and it is possible that Pictish must be added to these.
Though a philologist has much to say on the points of resemblance between the Goidelic and Brythonic branches, and though no one who studies both can fail to be struck by their affinity in vocabulary, in grammar, and even in idiom, the speakers of different branches—a Welshman and a Highlander, for instance—are no more mutually intelligible than an Englishman and a German would be, if as much so. ”

“ The genitive of possession is the appositional genitive. This is formed by placing the noun that is in the genitive immediately after the noun which it qualifies, or, if the former has the definite article, or is qualified by a possessive pronoun or prefixed adjective, with only these intervening. No change of initial is made, [81] except the usual change of feminine singular or masculine plural nouns after an, or the changes caused by possessive pronouns, etc. ”

“ But all these spoken dialects of Welsh are kept together and their tendency to divergence is greatly checked by the existence of a very clearly defined spelling, grammar, and standard of style in the book language of what is far and away the most cultivated and literary of all the Celtic tongues. Breton has four well-defined dialects, those of Leon, Treguier, Cornouailles, and Vannes, besides the broken-down Breton of the Croisic district, the Vannes dialect differing from the others as much as Cornish does, and curiously resembling Cornish in some of its peculiarities. ”

“ As a rule a singular noun without any article expressed, except in the case of a noun followed by the appositional genitive, is considered to be in the indefinite state, and would be translated into English by a noun preceded by the indefinite article a or an. But partly as a corrupt following of English or French, and partly for emphasis, denoting a single one (like yr un in Welsh) , the word a or an is sometimes represented by idn (earlier un) , one. This is rare, especially in late Cornish. A similar indefinite article is common in Breton. ”

“ In Welsh, when the possessor of this “fair world” is expressed by a noun, there is a redundant possessive pronoun before byd (bês) . Thus Psalm i. begins Gwyn ei fyd y gwr, fair his world of the man. But this is not the Cornish form, which uses the simple appositional genitive in such cases. There is a contrary expression, drôg pês, found in the Ordinalia (Passio Christi, 3089) , drok pys of, unhappy am I. In this case drôg seems to put the initial of bês in its fourth state. ”

“ The pronunciation of Cornish place-names forms something of a guide to the old sounds, only one must be careful not to be misled by the modern tendency to pronounce words as they are spelt according to the English values of letters, and one must also remember that there is no settled system of place-name orthography. ”

“ Should any one wish to attempt verse-writing in Cornish, it would be best either to use one of the seven p. 190or four syllabled (or mixed) metres of the Dramas, using their purely syllabic methods, which undoubtedly work all right in modern Breton, or to extend the same principles, as the Bretons do, to lines of other lengths. The triplets of old Welsh and perhaps of very old Cornish are effective metres, but are not so easy as they look, for it is not enough merely to write rhyming triplets. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There, no doubt, when there was any fighting to be done, the aboriginal hid in the woods until it was all over, and only then came out to share in the spoil and the glory and the drinks; while the white man, whether Briton, Saxon, or Norman, went out to fight, and not infrequently to be killed. ”

“ The apparent changes of vowel sounds in the still later Cornish, more fully discussed further on, are mostly these:
1. a long sometimes becomes aw, especially before p. 51l, n, or r, and occasionally as a final; a short, under similar circumstances, becomes o short.
2. u, with (approximately) the French sound of that letter, becomes ee (î) , or else ew, as in the English word dew.
3. eu, ue, with the French sound of eu, or the German o, becomes ê (=ay in may) .
4. y of Middle Cornish, perhaps pronounced as ĭ, but sometimes obscurely, like the primary sound of the Welsh y, often became short e. ”

“ Many words in yas occur only in the Cottonian Vocabulary, and appear there as ending in iad or iat, but since all the Cottonian words in iad and iat which do appear in later MSS. are made in the latter to end in yas (or ias) , and since it may be taken as an invariable rule that all words ending in t or d in Welsh or Breton, if they occur at all in Cornish, end in s, any Cottonian word in iat or iad may fairly be taken for purposes of modern Cornish to end in yas.
§ 2. The Gender of Nouns.
Nouns are of two genders, masculine and feminine. There is no neuter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In this the Cornish began by resembling Breton and ended by approaching more nearly to Welsh.
The pronominal preposition form of dhô has variants for the first and second persons singular and first person plural, dhemmo, to me, dheso, dheso dî, to thee, and dhenny, to us. These are formed by the addition of the personal pronoun in a fuller form. In the cases of the other prepositions it is not uncommon to add the personal pronouns at the end of the pronominal compound, forming thereby a single word with the accent on the last syllable. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Like Welsh, it retained the th and dh sounds which Breton, in nearly all its dialects, has changed into z, though these in Cornish, like the guttural gh, and v or f, showed a tendency to drop off and become silent, especially as finals. In vocabulary Cornish follows Breton more closely than Welsh, though there are cases where in its choice of words it agrees with the latter, and cases in which it is curiously impartial. An instance of the last is the common adjective good. The ordinary Welsh word is da, though mad (Gaelic math) does exist. ”

“ 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 Cornish represented in Lhuyd’s writings has tended to confuse some things. Lhuyd was a Welshman, and is constantly trying to run off into Welsh, and he had for his teacher John Keigwin, who thought that he understood the Cornish of the mediæval dramas, but was often mistaken. Probably had a resuscitated mediæval Cornishman read the dramas aloud to Keigwin, he would have understood them quite as well as the ordinary English board-school boy would understand St. Paul’s Epistles in the Authorised Version, read by a revived Jacobean divine ”

“ In Cornish (as in Breton) the general principle is that (1) the tenuis changes under some circumstances into the media, and under others into a form of the aspirate; and that (2) the media changes to a form of the aspirate under some circumstances, and into the tenuis under others; but that (3) the conditions which change the tenuis into the media change the media into the aspirate: while those which change (4) the tenuis into the aspirate leave the media unchanged; and those which change (5) the media to the tenuis leave the tenuis unchanged. ”

“ Can you speak Cornish?
Mî ellam (not mî a el) . I can.
’Aljesta scrifa a Sowsnak? Couldst thou write English?
Mî aljen. I could.
’Allosta môs dhô’n chŷ? Canst thou go to the house?
Mî ellam. I can.
Na orama dr ’el an Kembrîan gwîl rag dhô witha ’ga thavas. [133] I know not what the Welsh may do to preserve their language. (Boson’s Nebbaz Gerriau.)
Radn alja bos parres dhô lavarel. Some might be prepared to say. (Boson’s Nebbaz Gerriau) .
Sometimes the verb gŏthvos, to know (for which see Chapter XI.) , is used to express can, especially when mental capability is more or less intended. ”