Cornish Language

Standardising Cornish: The politics of a new minority language

by Dave Sayers

Forthcoming in Language Problems & Language Planning 36(2):99‐119. http://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/lplp.36.2/toc. Pagination in this document will not match the published article. Contact the publisher John Benjamins for permission to re‐use or reprint this material in any form.

The last recorded native speaker of the Cornish language died in 1777. Since the nineteenth century, amateur scholars... more The last recorded native speaker of the Cornish language died in 1777. Since the nineteenth century, amateur scholars have made separate attempts to reconstruct its written remains, each creating a different orthography. Later, following recognition under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 2002, Cornish gained new status. However, with government support came the governmental framework of “New Public Management”, which emphasises quantifiable outcomes to measure performance. This built implicit pressure towards finding a single standard orthography, for greatest efficiency. There followed a six- year debate among supporters of the different orthographies, usually quite heated, about which should prevail. This debate exemplified the importance of standardisation for minority languages, but its ultimate conclusion saw all sides giving way, and expediency, not ideology, prevailing. It also showed that standardisation was not imposed explicitly within language policy, but emerged during the language planning process.

A Reassessment of the Date and Provenance of the Cornish Ordinalia

by Gloria Betcher

Suggestions for a Morphosyntactic Tagset for Cornish, based on the EAGLES Obligatory and Recommended Attributes

by Jon Mills

Mind Your P’s and Q’s: Revisiting the Insular Celtic hypothesis through working towards an original phonetic reconstruction of Insular Celtic

by Rachel Carpenter

Senior Thesis in Linguistics at Swarthmore College.
This is the revised version of the thesis, following defenses and honors defenses.

Mac, mac, mac, mab, mab, mab- all mean ‘son’, inis, innis, hinjey, enez, ynys, enys - all mean ‘island.’ Anyone can... more Mac, mac, mac, mab, mab, mab- all mean ‘son’, inis, innis, hinjey, enez, ynys, enys - all mean ‘island.’ Anyone can see the similarities within these two cognate sets from orthographic similarity alone. This is because Irish, Scottish, Manx, Breton, Welsh, and Cornish are related. As the six remaining Celtic languages, they unsurprisingly share similarities in their phonetics, phonology, semantics, morphology, and syntax. However, the exact relationship between these languages and their predecessors has long been disputed in Celtic linguistics. Even today, the battle continues between two firmly-entrenched camps of scholars- those who favor the traditional P-Celtic and Q-Celtic divisions of the Celtic family tree, and those who support the unification of the Brythonic and Goidelic branches of the tree under Insular Celtic, with this latter idea being the Insular Celtic hypothesis. While much reconstructive work has been done, and much evidence has been brought forth, both for and against the existence of Insular Celtic, no one scholar has attempted a phonetic reconstruction of this hypothesized proto-language from its six modern descendents. In the pages that follow, I will introduce you to the Celtic languages; explore the controversy surrounding the structure of the Celtic family tree; and present a partial phonetic reconstruction of Insular Celtic through the application of the comparative method as outlined by Lyle Campbell (2006) to self-collected data from the summers of 2009 and 2010 in my efforts to offer you a novel perspective on an on-going debate in the field of historical Celtic linguistics.

Reconstructing the Brythonic Consonants

by Rachel Carpenter

"Reconstructing the Brythonic Consonants" was my final project for LING S052 Historical and Comparative Linguistics at Swarthmore College in the Fall of 2008. It has since led to further research on the Celtic languages, including my senior thesis in linguistics, "Mind Your P’s and Q’s: Revisiting the Insular Celtic hypothesis through working towards an original phonetic reconstruction of Insular Celtic."

Lexicon Based Critical Tokenisation: An Algorithm

by Jon Mills

In EURALEX '98 Proceedings

In some languages, spaces and punctuation marks are used to delimit word boundaries. This is the case with more In some languages, spaces and punctuation marks are used to delimit word boundaries. This is the case with
Cornish. However there is considerable inconsistency of segmentation to be found within the Corpus of Cornish.
The individual texts that make up this corpus are not even internally consistent. The first stage in lemmatising
the Corpus of Comish, therefore, involves the resegmentation of the corpus into tokens. The whole notion of
what is considered to be a word has to be examined. A method for the logical representation of segmentation into
tokens is proposed in this paper. The existing segmentation of the Corpus of Cornish, as indicated by spaces in
the text, is abandoned and an algorithm for dictionary based critical tokenisation of the corpus is proposed.

Screffva: A Lexicographer's Workbench

by Jon Mills

Proceedings of Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Athens, Greece, 31st May - 2nd June 2000, pp. 351-353.

Linguistic Relativity and Linguistic Determinism: Idiom in 20th Century Cornish

by Jon Mills

Paper presented at the New Directions in Celtic Studies Conference, Newquay, November 2000.

Cornish Lexicography in the Twentieth Century: Standardisation and Divergence

by Jon Mills

Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliquée, 69/1, 1999. 45-57

Suggestions for a Morphosyntactic Tagset for Cornish, based on the EAGLES Obligatory and Recommended Attributes

by Jon Mills

Revised: 15 October 2002

Reconstructive Phonology and Contrastive Lexicology: Problems with the 'Gerlyver Kernewek Kemmyn'

by Jon Mills

published in 'Cornish Studies' VII, pp. 193-218.

A Comparison of the Semantic Values of Middle Cornish 'Luf' and 'Dorn' with Modern English 'Hand' and 'Fist'

by Jon Mills

published in Language Sciences, Vol. 18, Nos 1-2, pp. 71-86, 1996

Genocide and Ethnocide: The Suppression of the Cornish Language

by Jon Mills

Published in Interfaces in Language (2010)

This paper investigates the relationship between the Cornish language and officialdom over the past thousand years.... more This paper investigates the relationship between the Cornish language and officialdom over the past thousand years. The social status of Cornish is examined along with attitudes towards the language held by monarchy, government and their agencies. During the middle-ages, Cornish was relatively stable and indeed enjoyed some prestige amongst the gentry who used Cornish as their preferred language for family mottoes. However, following the Tudor accession, the number of Cornish speakers was greatly reduced following the brutal repression of several popular uprisings when a significant proportion of the Cornish speaking population were exterminated. During the 17th and 18th centuries, Cornish continued to be used amongst the poor in Cornwall's fishing communities. The revival of Cornish began around 1900 and the number of speakers grew throughout the 20th century. Nevertheless, the government and state education system provided no support for Cornish language learners until 2002 when the European Union granted Cornish official “minority language” status under Part II of the 1992 Council of Europe Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. In 2005, the government confirmed modest funding support for the Cornish language. Local government in Cornwall are currently implementing a Cornish language strategy to determine a standard written form for Cornish that can be used for official purposes, such as signage, and for education in schools.

A Description of the Middle Cornish Tregear Manuscript

by Talat Chaudhri

MA dissertation, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 2001

A description of the Middle Cornish manuscript found amongst the Puleston Papers by John Mackechnie in 1949, now Add.... more A description of the Middle Cornish manuscript found amongst the Puleston Papers by John Mackechnie in 1949, now Add. MS. 46397 in the British Library. The manuscript is a sixteenth-century translation into Cornish of thirteen homilies published by Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London in 1555 forming the latter part of his A profitable and necessary doctrine, with certayne homelyes adioyned therevnto. (Only one of these originals was his own, the majority by John Harpesfeld, Archdeacon of London and two by Oliver Pendilton.) An analysis is made of the historical context in which the translation was made, the likely provenance and dating of the manuscript and the extent of collaboration by co-translators with the principal translator John Tregear. The replacement of the expected thirteenth homily by a translation of an unknown English original on the same subject is also discussed. The quality of the translation and the effects of this upon the syntax and vocabulary of the Cornish homilies is described, including a discussion of the extent to which the macaronic character of the text is deliberate. The manuscript is examined as evidence for linguistic change in Middle Cornish, addressing two major areas: the morphology of personal pronouns, verb forms and conjugated prepositions; the major phonological features of the Cornish in the manuscript, principally the loss of vowel quality in unstressed syllables and the incidence of the sound-change s/j as an effect of palatalisation.

'Reversing Babel: Declining linguistic diversity and the flawed attempts to protect it' (PhD thesis)

by Dave Sayers

For those not logged into academia.edu, it's also online here:
https://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/publications/theses/PDFs/2000-2009/2009/Sayers_ReversingBabel.pdf

This thesis is not to be confused with 'Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners', by Michael Erard. There is some overlap though, and readers of one may be interested in the other.

Abstract:

This is an investigation about linguistic diversity, examining its decline in different societal... more Abstract:

This is an investigation about linguistic diversity, examining its decline in different societal conditions over the last century, and interrogating claims in language policy and planning to be ‘protecting linguistic diversity’, using the UK as its main example.

Chapter 1 comprises a review of variationist sociolinguistics, showing how it has never fully defined linguistic diversity. Adjustments are suggested, and a working definition of linguistic diversity offered.

Chapter 2 presents data from two major nationwide dialect surveys, in 1889 and 1962, showing how local dialects were weakening in this period. The main focus is declining diversity, but information is presented about possible conditioning factors, primarily increases in literacy.

In the absence of such nationwide reports after 1962, Chapter 3 collates individual dialect studies from two regions of England, the northeast and southeast, describing dialect convergence across these large geographical areas. These changes are contrasted to those reported in Chapter 2. Again the main theme is declining diversity, but information is reviewed to help explain these contrasts, primarily increases in geographical mobility in the latter half of the 20th century, concentrated around these regions.

Chapter 4 examines dialect weakening that some researchers have attributed, at least in part, to the media. This also represents a change in societal conditions undergirding declining diversity. Some theoretical work is done to distinguish such changes from those observed in Chapter 3.

Chapter 5 reviews the rhetoric of minority language policy and planning, and its frequent and explicit claims to be ‘protecting linguistic diversity’. The insights developed in Chapters 1-4 are applied to two modern UK language revivals, Cornish and Welsh, to see how diversity overall is faring here.

The conclusion sums up the gaps in our thinking about linguistic diversity, and clarifies the limitations of planned interventions upon language.

Vocabularium Cornicum: Plain Text Electronic Version

by Carl Anderson

This is an in-progress, plain-text representation of the contents of the Vocabularium Cornicum, a 12th-century glossary that contains the bulk of the corpus of Old (or perhaps Early Middle Cornish). It is essentially a transcription of the 1853 Zeuss edition, with some corrections based on Graves's 1962 thesis. I have long intended this to form the basis for an freely available, online, annotated version of the Vocabularium Cornicum, but other commitments mean that goal is still a long way off.

This file contains a comma-delimited edition of the text of the Vocabularium Cornicum. It has been hand-transcribed... more This file contains a comma-delimited edition of the text of the Vocabularium Cornicum. It has been hand-transcribed from the edition of MS British Library Cotton Vespasian A.xvi ff. 7a-10a included in Johann Kaspar Zeuss, Grammatica Celtica (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1853), with some corrections based on the 1962 thesis about Vocabularium Cornicum by E.V. Graves..

All entries in this file are found in their original order from the manuscript, and the original manuscript foliation is marked. The entries' comma-delimited format is intended to make it easy for you to move the data into a database.

In both Latin and Cornish, the abbreviations l. (standing in the manuscript for the common cross-barred l form) and ul. stand for Latin vel ("or"). Common scribal spelling abbreviations have been silently expanded, mostly because of the difficulties of representing them in plain ASCII text.

Note that the entries in this file have not yet been extensively proofread and may contain copying errors!