[Spellyans] Holyer an Gof 2010

[Eddie Climo]

My Cornish studies began with UC, using books by Mordon Nance, Caradar  
Smith, Peter Pool and Dick Gendall for the most part. Later on, I  
found UCR quite easy to read, as I do KS and the MC version of SWF/T.  
All look (to my eyes) pretty much how MC-based revived Cornish  
'should' look, although some features in the SWF/T do tend to annoy.

UC is still my preferred form, though, and it's what I use daily. Of  
course, it's also what the bulk of the Revived Cornish corpus has been  
written in, so even those who choose not to write UC pretty much have  
to come to grips with it if they want to read any of these modern  
classics.

To be frank, that's pretty much my attitude towards KS at present:  
I've no current intention of writing in it, certainly not before the  
2013 SWF Review process is behind us. But I do enjoy reading in it. It  
does help, of course, that so much of the KS literature is written in  
such good Cornish! And I do think that authenticist Cornish publishers  
should be open to publishing works written in KS.

The KS diacritics (so extravagantly loathed and excoriated by some of  
the Emskemmynnyonn) don't get in the way of reading, I find, as they  
don't much change the word shapes. Mostly, I take little notice of the  
accents when reading, but if I'm uncertain about the value of a vowel,  
all I have to do is note any mark it might have to settle the doubt.

Interestingly enough, after I'd been studying the language for a  
couple of years, I chanced to look at someone's copy of Whitley  
Stokes'  'Pascon agan Arluth' (in which he strove to give a literatim  
transcription of an original MS copy of this great work). My reaction  
was, "That's what I've been learning!" Of course, some of the  
spellings looked a little 'odd', and my vocab wasn't up to  
understanding it all, but that was when I first realised how close UC  
has stuck to historical forms.

However, my reaction to first having KK (and much later SWF/M)  
inflicted upon my poor eyes was quite different; it looked (and still  
looks) uglee, rong, un-Cornish, a djerry-bilt pidgin -- allmoesst az  
iff it had beenn konnkokkted bye (oar fore) summwunn sufferyng from  
akywt annd kronnyk dysslekksya— oar laik thee proe-nunn-see-ayshun  
kollumm ynn ann oeld-fashunned frayz boek four forrenn too-rissts!


Eddie Foirbeis Climo
- -- - -- - -- - -- - -- - -- - -- - -- - -- - -- - -- - -- -
Dres ethom akennow byner re bo lyeshes
Accenti non multiplicandi praeter necessitatem

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