[Spellyans] vocabulary
Ken MacKinnon
ken at ferintosh.org
Fri Jun 25 07:32:00 BST 2010
Do we have a grid reference and OS sheet number for Bostrase?
- Ken
Ken MacKinnon is now on Broadband with new e-mail addresses:-
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(Prof) Ken MacKinnon
Ivy Cottage, Ferintosh,
The Black Isle, by Dingwall,
Ross-shire IV 7 8HX
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Tel: 01349 - 863460
----- Original Message -----
From: "Craig Weatherhill" <craig at agantavas.org>
To: "Standard Cornish discussion list" <spellyans at kernowek.net>
Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2010 8:17 AM
Subject: Re: [Spellyans] vocabulary
Perhaps I should make my view plainer than I have. I accept that
Cornish contains loan words from all periods and several languages;
however, I'd rather not see them as first options. I would far rather
use (for, say, valley) nans, stras, tenow, etc., than valy. In fact,
until Nicholas pointed it out, I didn't even know that valy existed in
Cornish texts with that meaning. I'd only ever seen the word (a
different word, of course) in the exclamation "Tety valy!". Staying
with 'valley', the genuine Cornish choices give a greater scope for
accuracy: nans "river valley"; stras "flat-bottomed valley"; tenow
(tnow) "tributary valley", etc.
(As an aside, the stable yard at Bostraze [bos + stras] is at the head
of a generally narrow, steep-sided valley but, at this point, the
valley head proper widens into a wide and very flat-bottomed bowl
surrounded by hills - a remarkable feature of the landscape and a
stunningly good example of a 'stras'. A good map with contours shows
it very clearly).
The loan words, though, can often work this way, too. For 'table' we
have the choices of bord (more accurately a table-top, and, of course,
a loan-word), moos and tabel (another loan-word attested in the place-
name Table Maen and its various spellings - the stone still exists at
Mayon, Sennen - named after it - and is the site of an Arthurian
legend and a doomy prophecy of Merlin).
Craig
On 23 Efn 2010, at 07:51, Daniel Prohaska wrote:
> Comments inserted below…
>
> From: Ceri Young
> Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2010 1:48 AM
>
> Thanks Ewan,
> (Sorry to Spellyans for deviating in this thread, it's still in the vein
> of Craig's post.)
> The thing is Ewan that the word 'great' even rehashed as 'grêt' isn't
> Welsh. (You won't find it in a Welsh dictionary to attest for it being
> Welsh (the Welsh themselves to my knowledge have never chosen to include
> the word), yet you'll find it frequently in Welsh texts, novels, magazine
> articles and every other episode of Pobol y Cwm etc.). Yet if you asked
> someone who regularly used it in their colloquial Welsh if it was
> 'Welsh', I doubt they'd even concede that it was. They know what it is.
> It's English, and it's in a particularly English habit that they use it.
> Thankfully, Welsh is sufficiently understood and documented by Welsh
> speakers to defend itself against outsiders presuming that such a word is
> deemed to be Welsh by the Welsh themselves.
>
> Yet of course, if every Welsh speaker and dictionary vanished, and just a
> handful of texts or records survived... Presumably alien intelligences
> might write the word 'grêt' into a Welsh dictionary, presuming the Welsh
> truly regarded that as a formal part of their language...
>
> I thought as much. Thanks for this little excursion into Welsh Welsh
> life. I’ve always enjoyed watching Pobol y Cwm and other Welsh TV and
> film productions and have noticed the many spontaneous Anglicisms (“Mae
> pizza yn sort o ethnic!”).
>
> “A clear phenomenon exists where the Welsh will use English words, even
> Cymricise English words in pronunciation and spelling in full knowledge
> of what those words are with complete (yet tacit) acknowledgement that
> those words are not Welsh. How then, do the academics of the Cornish
> revival account for the possibility that this pheonomenon existed in
> Cornish? Surely, the answer is that they can't. (You can't trust every
> English word depoyed in Welsh to be a wholly accepted and encorporated
> part of the Welsh language - so why would you ever do so in Late
> Cornish?)
> Best wishes,
> Ceri”
>
> Again you assume that it is only Late Cornish that incorporated loans. As
> mentioned in my previous post, most English loan words are actually
> attested in Middle Cornish. I completely agree with you that the
> encroaching English language would have lead to a large portion of the
> Cornish speaking community to become bilingual and then code switching
> would have been quite normal. I would regard Tregear’s Cornish as a
> perfect example of this. Because of the lack of learned ecclesiastical
> vocabulary he used the terms current in English, also rhetorical devices
> and many of these I would say are spontaneous and it would be wise to
> look ate them critically and imitate him only where his wording can be
> corroborated in other texts. His grammar, however, is an essential part
> of the Revival as it is our only MC prose text. So, no, I don’t think
> “academics” would discard the possibility of code switching phenomena in
> bilingualCornwall.
> Dan
>
> From: ewan wilson <butlerdunnit at ntlworld.com>
> To: Standard Cornish discussion list <spellyans at kernowek.net>
>
> Ceri,
>
> I can understand why some English 'loans' make the more literate/
> articulate/purist Welsh cringe at times! I have native Welsh speaking
> friends in Aber who deplore such usage as 'downright lazy' or 'perverse'
> when perfectly good Welsh equivalents exist. However others seem almost
> to glory in doing so and insist theu're just as 'Welsh'!
> If a word like 'gret' gets sucked into the language in particular
> contexts when does it become 'naturalised' and how do we decide it's NOT
> part of the language when it's being used in front of us.
> English as we all know is a real mongrel language with its rich
> Norman/Latin strand and surely that has enriched it. Cornish seems to be
> nowhere near as 'penetrated' with borrowings but those it does have seem
> to have been absorbed into the very Celtic syntax and even mutations
> system so that as you point out it'd be practically impossible to spot in
> a fluent speaker's discourse.
> The very small number of as good as 'native' Cornish speakers who still
> use the tongue regularly must be a good pointer as to its natural
> development, whether they be 'literate' speakers or not. Can one assume
> the former would have a larger lexical base for pure 'Celtic' fluency
> without resort to plugging the gaps with (inevitably English) borrowing?
> That Cornish is good at coining new terms that seem to stick with greater
> facility I'd say than in Welsh where they can sound odd ( pellgowser,
> pellwollok, golghva-kerry) also acts as a protection from Anglo-
> infection!!
>
> Ewan.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Ceri Young
> To: Standard Cornish discussion list
> Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2010 8:59 PM
> Subject: Re: [Spellyans] vocabulary
>
> Although I have no qualifications to chip in, I agree with Craig here
> (and having itched to comment earlier I'm very glad to read his
> response). When I hear a comment like Nicholas' "My preference is for the
> language of the texts rather than for some reCelticised fantasy" I can't
> help being reminded that to some, the whole Cornish Revival is just one
> elaborate fantasy of reCelticisation; of salvaging lost Celticity from
> the desolation of a tragic, sustained, ethnocidal assault. It also then
> strikes me that it's perfectly natural to regard nurturing those late
> Anglicisms is somewhat contrary to the general ethos of such a fantasy of
> reCelticisation. Surely, just because a word is borrowed, doesn't make it
> a formal part of the language. Welsh speakers will routinely throw
> English loanwords like the adj. 'grêt' (great) (although they'll be using
> it as an interjection) into their speech and even write it into informal
> texts, but that doesn't mean 'grêt' is a Welsh word to be found in or
> even inserted into a Welsh dictionary as a translation of 'great'.
>
> Even if I totally understand the need for the strictest academic
> rectitude in the revival, I can also see why some might harbour an
> instinct to purge such late Anglicisms from their own useage of Revived
> Cornish. It may not be remotely impartial or academic, but I can quite
> understand an uneasy attitude towards Anglicisms in Celtic languages in
> general, stemming from a sense of nationhood being established and
> complete from a given point that precludes influence from a resented
> imperial oppressor. (Perhaps as an Englishman, Nicholas simply doesn't
> see or feel this.) As a Welshman, I see the Welsh nation as one of
> Romano-British origins (and would have assumed the Cornish might be
> justified in thinking similarly) and so, as Ken George is accused of
> here, I can understand a bias towards Celtic & Latin words, and some
> unease towards Anglicisms.
>
> Beyond that, if those Anglicisms entered into Cornish via borrowing and
> were legitimised by Cornish language users taking them into their
> linguistic currency, what would be so wrong with Revived Cornish speakers
> borrowing from Cornish's sister languages (along academic lines of their
> own) - and legitimising any reCelticisation of their language which they
> see fit? I guess that simply can't happen until the language is flying
> naturally of its own accord, and finally out of the hands of academics.
>
> Best wishes,
> Ceri
>
>
> From: Craig Weatherhill <craig at agantavas.org>
> To: spellyans at kernowek.net
> Sent: Tue, 22 June, 2010 18:56:22
> Subject: [Spellyans] vocabulary
>
> I'm concerned over one or two views that have been expressed re.
> vocabulary. On one hand I'm hearing support for tota Cornicitas, and on
> the other, I'm hearing that a word only attested in OCV and not in the
> MC/Tudor texts shouldn't be used (stevel being an example that
> immediately springs to mind; use rom instead is the advice). I don't
> agree with this. Here's an example to illustrate why I think this way.
>
> Dyek (SWF: diek), 'lazy' occurs on OCV as 'dioc', and not in MC at all.
> Until the 80s, when Dick Gendall was the first to look at Late Cornish in
> depth, it was being assumed that the word didn't survive into MC. In
> fact, it must have survived into Late Cornish because it turns up in
> dialect as 'jack'. So, if the word made it to Late Cornish and dialect,
> it follows that it must have existed in MC. We just don't have a text
> that features it and, let's face it, we only have a fraction of the texts
> that must once have existed. Attestation in MC texts supports the use of
> a word; absence from what survives of the MC texts is not a reason for
> rejection. It only tells us that the word isn't found in those few
> texts; not that it didn't exist.
>
> For me, tota Cornicitas is essential.
>
> I'm afraid that some words being put forward will never find use with me.
> I don't see the point of 'valy' for "valley", when so many Cornish words
> for different types of valley already exist. Nor am I minded to reject
> lyw/liw (or however we're spelling it) in favour of 'color'. I want to
> write Cornish. I already know English.
> --
> Craig
>
>
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--
Craig Weatherhill
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