Transcribed from the 1904 David Nutt edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
A HANDBOOK OF THE CORNISH LANGUAGE
CHIEFLY IN ITS LATEST STAGES WITH SOME ACCOUNT
OF ITS HISTORY AND LITERATURE
BY
HENRY JENNER
MEMBER OF THE GORSEDD OF THE BARDS OF BRITTANY
FELLOW OF THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES
“Never credit me but I will spowt some Cornish at him.
_Peden bras_, _vidne whee bis cregas_.”
_The Northern Lass_, by RICH BROME, 1632.
LONDON
DAVID NUTT, AT THE SIGN OF THE PHŒNIX
57-59 LONG ACRE
MCMIV
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
At the Ballantyne Press
_DHÔ_ ’_M GWRÊG GERNÛAK_
H. L. J.
_Kerra ow Holon_! _Beniges re vo_
_Gans bennath Dew an dêdh a ’th ros dhemmo_,
_Dhô whelas gerryow gwan pan dhetha vî_,
_Tavas dha dassow_, _ha dhô ’th drovya dî_.
_En cov an dêdh splan-na es pel passyes_;
_En cov idn dêdh lowenek_, _gwin ’gan bês_,
_War Garrak Loys en Côs_, _es en dan skês_
_Askelly Myhal El_, _o ’gan gwithes_;
_En cov lîas dêdh wheg en Kernow da_,
_Ha nŷ mar younk_—_na whekkah vel êr-ma_
_Dhemmo a dhîg genev an gwella tra_,
_Pan dhetha vî en kerh_, _en ol bro-na_;
_Dheso mî re levar dha davas teg_,
_Flogh ow empinyon vî_, _dhô ’m kerra Gwrêg_.
_GWAS MYHAL_.
_Scrîfes en agan Chŷ nŷ_,
_Dawthegves dêdh Mîs Gorefan_
_En Bledhan agan Arledh_, 1904.
PREFACE
This book is principally intended for those persons of Cornish
nationality who wish to acquire some knowledge of their ancient tongue,
and to read, write, and perhaps even to speak it. Its aim is to
represent in an intelligible form the Cornish of the later period, and
since it is addressed to the general Cornish public rather than to the
skilled philologist, much has been left unsaid that might have been of
interest to the latter, old-fashioned phonological and grammatical terms
have been used, a uniform system of spelling has been adopted, little
notice has been taken of casual variations, and the arguments upon which
the choice of forms has been based have not often been given.
The spelling has been adapted for the occasion. All writers of Cornish
used to spell according to their own taste and fancy, and would sometimes
represent the same word in different ways even in the same page, though
certain general principles were observed in each period. There was a
special uncertainty about the vowels, which will be easily appreciated by
those who are familiar with Cornish English. Modern writers of all
languages prefer consistent spelling, and to modern learners, whose
object is linguistic rather than philological, a fairly regular system of
orthography is almost a necessity. The present system is not the
phonetic ideal of “one sound to each symbol, and one symbol for each
sound,” but it aims at being fairly consistent with itself, not too
difficult to understand, not too much encumbered with diacritical signs,
and not too startlingly different from the spellings of earlier times,
especially from that of Lhuyd, whose system was constructed from living
Cornish speakers. 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. Possibly there is much room for
controversy, especially as to such details as the distribution of long
and short vowels, the representation of the Middle Cornish _u_, _ue_,
_eu_ sometimes by _î_, sometimes by _ê_, and sometimes by _eu_ or _ew_,
or of the Middle Cornish _y_ by _i_, _e_, or _y_, or occasionally by an
obscure _ă_, _ŏ_, or _ŭ_, and it is quite likely that others might arrive
at different conclusions from the same evidence, though those conclusions
might not be any the nearer to the sounds which the Cornishmen of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries really did make. As for grammatical
forms, it will be seen that the writer is of opinion that the difference
between Middle and Modern Cornish was more apparent than real, and that
except in the very latest period of all, when the language survived only
in the mouths of the least educated persons, the so-called “corruptions”
were to a great extent due to differences of spelling, to a want of
appreciation of almost inaudible final consonants, and to an
intensification of phonetic tendencies existing in germ at a much earlier
period. 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.
Why should Cornishmen learn Cornish? There is no money in it, it serves
no practical purpose, and the literature is scanty and of no great
originality or value. The question is a fair one, the answer is simple.
Because they are Cornishmen. At the present day Cornwall, but for a few
survivals of Duchy jurisdictions, is legally and practically a county of
England, with a County Council, a County Police, and a Lord-Lieutenant
all complete, as if it were no better than a mere Essex or Herts. {0a}
But every Cornishman knows well enough, proud as he may be of belonging
to the British Empire, that he is no more an Englishman than a Caithness
man is, that he has as much right to a separate local patriotism to his
little Motherland, which rightly understood is no bar, but rather an
advantage to the greater British patriotism, {0b} as has a Scotsman, an
Irishman, a Welshman, or even a Colonial; and that he is as much a Celt
and as little of an “Anglo-Saxon” as any Gael, Cymro, Manxman, or Breton.
Language is less than ever a final test of race. Most Cornishmen
habitually speak English, and few, very few, could hold five minutes’
conversation in the old Celtic speech. Yet the memory of it lingers on,
and no one can talk about the country itself, and mention the places in
it, without using a wealth of true Cornish words. But a similar thing
may be said of a very large proportion of Welshmen, Highlanders,
Irishmen, Manxmen, and Bretons.
_Omnia Græce_,
_Quum sit turpe magis nostris nescire Latine_.
The reason why a Cornishman should learn Cornish, the outward and audible
sign of his separate nationality, is sentimental, and not in the least
practical, and if everything sentimental were banished from it, the world
would not be as pleasant a place as it is.
Whether anything will come of the Cornish part of the Celtic movement
remains to be seen, but it is not without good omen that this book is
published at the “Sign of the Phoenix.”
A few words of comprehensive apology for the shortcomings of this
handbook. When the writer was asked by the Secretary of the
Celtic-Cornish Society to undertake a Cornish grammar, which was the
origin of this book, it was more than twenty years since he had dropped
his Cornish studies in favour of other and more immediately necessary
matters. Much of what he once knew had been forgotten, and had to be
learnt over again, and the new grammar was wanted quickly. 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. Of either of these two, Dr. Whitley Stokes and
Prof. Joseph Loth, Doyen of the Faculty of Letters in Rennes University,
who probably know more about Cornish between them than any one else ever
did, the writer may well say, as John Boson of Newlyn said of Keigwin two
centuries ago, “_Markressa an dean deskez fear-na gwellaz hemma_, _ev a
venja kavaz fraga e owna en skreefa-composter_, _etc._” {0c} For,
indeed, even in that same _skreefa-composter_ is there much scope for
argument, and Boson’s “et cetera” stands for a good deal besides.
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 it 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. Loth, Canon Robert
Williams, and Dr. Jago. Of the works of these writers he has made ample
use, though he has not necessarily agreed with them in every detail.
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. Stokes and Prof. Loth, neither of
whom, of course, really undervalues the Lexicon in the least, no one can
fail to appreciate that excellent work. Prof. Loth’s articles are mostly
on details. A more general work from his hand is much to be desired, and
every Cornish student must look forward to the forthcoming volume of his
_Chrestomathie Bretonne_, which will contain the Cornish section. It
would have been better for the present work if its author could have seen
that volume before writing this. But Prof. Loth’s articles in the _Revue
Celtique_ have been full of suggestions of the greatest value. Dr.
Jago’s English-Cornish Dictionary has also been most useful. In a
somewhat uncritical fashion, he has collected together all the various
forms and spellings of each word that he could find, and this rendered it
possible to make easily comparisons which would otherwise have given a
good deal of trouble. Even the somewhat unconventional lexicographical
arrangement of the book has had its uses, but, if one may venture an
adverse criticism, it was a pity to have followed Borlase in including
without notice so many Welsh and Breton words for which there is no
authority in Cornish. It is on this account that the work needs to be
used with caution, and may at times mislead the unwary.
The author begs to thank very heartily Mr. E. Whitfield Crofts (“Peter
Penn” of the _Cornish Telegraph_) for his great service in making this
handbook known among Cornishmen.
Perhaps a subject in connection with Cornish which may be of greater
general interest than anything else is the interpretation of Cornish
names. It is for this reason that a chapter embodying shortly some
general principles of such a study has been added, and for those who
would try their hands at original verse composition in Cornish a chapter
on the principles of Cornish prosody has also been given. The
composition of twentieth-century Cornish verse has already begun. Dr. C.
A. Picquenard of Quimper, well known as a Breton poet under the title of
_Ar Barz Melen_, has produced several excellent specimens, Mr. L. C. R.
Duncombe-Jewell published the first Cornish sonnet in _Celtia_ in 1901,
and the present writer has contributed a sonnet and translations of the
Trelawny Song and the National Anthem to the _Cornish Telegraph_, besides
writing two Christmas Carols, one in _Celtia_ and one printed separately,
and the dedication of this book, which, he may remark, is not meant for a
sonnet, though it happens to run to fourteen lines.
The writer had originally intended to add some reading lessons,
exercises, and vocabularies, but it was found that the inclusion of these
would make the book too large. He hopes to bring out shortly a quite
small separate book of this character, which may also include
conversations, and he has in preparation a complete vocabulary, though he
has no idea as to when it will be finished.
PART I—THE HISTORY OF THE CORNISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
CHAPTER I—THE STORY OF THE CORNISH LANGUAGE
There have been seven Celtic languages—not all at once, of course—and
indeed it is possible that there may have been more; but seven are known
to have existed. One other may have been a Celtic speech, or it may have
been something pre-Celtic, but of it we know too little to judge.
The Celtic languages belong to the type known as Aryan or Indo-European,
the language of the higher or white races whose original habitat was once
taken to have been near or among the Himalayas, but is now located with
much less exactness than heretofore. To this class belong the Sanscrit,
with its multitude of Indian derivatives; the Persian, ancient and
modern; the Greek, the Latin with all its descendants, the Lithuanian,
the Slavonic, the Teutonic and Scandinavian, the Albanian and the Celtic.
It is not to be supposed that the possession of an Aryan language is
necessarily a proof of the possession of Aryan blood. In many cases the
conquering white race imposed its language on the aborigines whom it
subjugated and enslaved. This must have been very much the case in
Britain, and it is probable that the lower classes of a great part of
England, though they now speak a language of mixed Teutonic and Latin
origin, as they once spoke Celtic, are largely the descendants, through
the slaves successively of Britons, Romans, and Saxons, and the
“villains” or _nativi_ of the Norman manorial system, of the aboriginal
palæolithic “cave” man, and have far less in common with the Anglo-Saxon,
the Celt, or any other white man than they have with the Hottentot, the
Esquimaux, the Lapp, or the Australian “blackfellow.” This is
particularly the case in what was once the forest-covered district of
middle England. 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. A survival, perhaps, of the unfittest was the
result, which may account for some of the peculiar characteristics of the
Midland lower classes. 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. 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.
The Celtic languages are subdivided into two branches, representing two
separate immigrations, about which little is known for certain, except
that they happened a very long time ago. These are:—
1. The Goidelic (or Gaelic), consisting of the three languages, or
properly the three dialects, known as the Gaelic of Ireland, of the
Scottish Highlands, and of the Isle of Man. It has been said, with some
truth, that these three are as far apart as three dialects of the same
language can well be, but are not sufficiently far apart to be counted as
three distinct languages. Until the first half of the eighteenth century
the written Gaelic of the Scottish Highlands differed from that of
Ireland scarcely more than the written English of London differs from
that of New York. Even now, though the use of the sixth and seventh
century Latin minuscules, which people choose to call “Irish” letters,
has been dropped in Scotland, any one who can read the one dialect will
have little difficulty in reading the other. Manx adopted in the
seventeenth century an attempted, but not very successful, phonetic
spelling, based partly on Welsh and partly on English, and therefore
looks on paper very different from its sister languages; but it takes a
Gaelic-speaking Highlander of intelligence a very short time to get to
understand spoken Manx, though spoken Irish (except the Ulster dialect)
is more difficult to him. Possibly Pictish, if it was Celtic at all,
which is uncertain, was of the Gaelic branch, for we find but little of
any language difficulty when St. Columba and his fellow-missionaries,
whose own speech certainly was Gaelic, were evangelising among the Picts.
But the absence of such mention proves very little, for Christian
missionaries, from Pentecost onwards, have not infrequently made light of
the linguistic barrier, and we really know next to nothing about Pictish.
2. The Brythonic (or British), consisting of Welsh, Cornish, and Breton.
These may be said to be as near together as three separate languages can
well be, but to have drifted too far apart to be accounted three dialects
of the same language. The place of Cornish, linguistically as well as
geographically, is between Welsh and Breton, but though in some points in
which Welsh differs from Breton, Cornish resembles the former, on the
whole it approaches more nearly to the latter. Probably Cornish and
Breton are both derived from the language of the more southern, while
Welsh represents that of the more northern Britons. {6} Of course
Cornish, like Welsh, has been influenced to some extent by English, while
the foreign influence on Breton has been French. It is probable that the
ancient Gaulish, certainly a Celtic language, belongs to this branch.
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 three sets of
Gaels, however, can understand one another with considerable difficulty,
and Irish priests have been known to preach sermons (with but moderate
success) in the Catholic parts of the Highlands. But though there has
been for some time a Welsh mission of some sort of Nonconformists in
Brittany (with doubtless a very limited following), it is said that the
missionaries, though they learnt Breton easily, were greatly disappointed
with the extent to which at first they could understand the Bretons or
make themselves understood. Simple things of everyday life might be
asked for in Welsh, and a Breton might “average” what was said, but no
sort of conversation could be held, though any one who knew both Welsh
and Breton might make himself understood at some length by a mixed
audience, if he very carefully picked his phrases; it would not, however,
be good Welsh or good Breton. But the same would only apply in a far
less degree to Cornish, for Cornish is very much nearer to Breton than
Welsh is. {7} The divergence is increased by the tendency of all the
Celtic languages, or, indeed, of all languages, to subdivide into local
dialects. Thus the Irish of Munster, of Connaught, and of Ulster must be
mutually intelligible only with great difficulty; the dialect of Munster,
by reason of the difference of the stress accent, being especially
divergent. There is growing up now, with the Irish revival, what may be
called a Leinster dialect, founded on the literary language, with
peculiarities of its own. The Scottish Gaelic has at least four marked
dialects: Northern, spoken in Sutherland, part of Caithness, and Ross;
Western, spoken in Inverness-shire and Argyle and in the Islands; and the
rather broken-down dialects of Arran and of Perthshire, but the speakers
of these are not very unintelligible to one another. Even Manx has a
tendency to a “north side” and a “south side” dialect. Welsh has two
fairly well marked dialects, of North Wales and South Wales, and the
Welsh of Glamorgan, once the classical form of the language, before the
Cardiganshire Welsh of the translation of the Bible superseded it, is now
tending to be a broken-down form of South Welsh. 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. Here there is
no one literary standard, but each of the four dialects has its own,
though it is generally held, rightly or wrongly, that the Leonais dialect
is the best, and the Vannetais the worst. An examination of the names of
places in West Cornwall gives some indication that there was a slight
difference of dialect between the Hundred of Kerrier, or perhaps one
should rather say the peninsula of Meneage, and the Hundred of Penwith,
but it amounted to very little, and the evidence is very scanty.
The difference between Cornish and its two sisters is not very easy to
define in a few words. There are differences of phonology, vocabulary,
and grammatical forms. In phonology the most marked difference from both
is the substitution of _s_ or _z_, with a tendency, intensified in later
Cornish, to the sound of _j_ or _ch_, for _d_ or _t_ of Welsh and Breton.
Cornish agrees with Breton in not prefixing a vowel (_y_ in Welsh) to
words beginning with _s_ followed by a consonant, and its vowel sounds
are generally simpler and less diphthongalised than those of Welsh. It
agrees with Welsh in changing what one may call the French _u_ sound into
_î_ (English _ee_), going apparently further than Welsh in that
direction, while Breton still retains the _u_. 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. In Breton _mad_ is the regular
word, though _da_ is used as a noun in the sense of _satisfaction_ or
_contentment_ (_da eo gant-han_, good is with him=he is pleased). In
Cornish _da_ and _mas_ are used about equally. As an instance of the
first, _bras_, which in Welsh means _fat_, _gross_, is the more common
Cornish and Breton word for _large_ or _great_, though _mêr_ (_mur_,
_meur_) in Cornish, and _meur_ in Breton, the equivalents of the Welsh
_mawr_, are also used. In grammatical forms Cornish almost invariably in
cases where Welsh and Breton differ follows the latter, but, as in
vocabulary, it sometimes has also ways of its own.
* * * * *
Except for the existence of Cornish names in the Bodmin Gospels, and in
Domesday Book and one or two early charters, and of the Cornish
vocabulary in the Cottonian Library, the earliest mention of the Cornish
as differentiated from any other British language that has been as yet
discovered occurs in Cott. MS. Vesp. A. xiv., in the British Museum (the
volume in which the said vocabulary is included), in a Latin life of St.
Cadoc. This speaks of St. Michael’s Mount being called, “in the idiom of
that province,” _Dinsol_ (or the Mount of the Sun).
Giraldus Cambrensis, writing in the latter part of the twelfth century,
says: “Cornubia vero et Armorica Britannia lingua utuntur fere persimili,
Cambris tamen propter originalem convenientiam in multis adhuc et fere
cunctis intelligibili. Quæ, quanto delicata minus et incomposita magis,
tanto antiquo linguæ Britanniæ idiomati, ut arbitror, est appropriata.”
{10a}
In the fifteenth-century cartulary of Glasney College, belonging to Mr.
Jonathan Rashleigh of Menabilly, an old prophecy is quoted: “_In
Polsethow ywhylyr anethow_, _in Polsethow habitaciones seu mirabilia
videbuntur_.” This is supposed to date before the foundation of the
college in 1265.
In a letter of 1328-9 from John de Grandisson, Bishop of Exeter,
1327-1369, to Pope John XXII., the writer speaks of Cornwall as looking
on the south upon Vasconia [Gascony] and Minor Britannia [Brittany]
{10b}; “Cujus lingua ipsi utuntur Cornubici.” And in another letter in
the same year to certain cardinals he says: “Lingua, eciam, in extremis
Cornubie non Anglicis set Britonibus extat nota.” With this comes
another passage in the Register of Bishop Grandisson, quoted by Dr.
Oliver in his _Monasticon Diæcesis Exoniensis_ (p. 11), which, in an
account of the submission of the parish of St. Buryan to the bishop,
after a certain quarrel between them, states that a formal submission was
made by the principal parishioners in French and English (the names are
given, thirteen in number), and by the rest in Cornish, interpreted by
Henry Marseley, the rector of St. Just, and that after this the bishop
preached a sermon, which was interpreted by the same priest for the
benefit of those members of the congregation who could only speak
Cornish. These records are to be found in Mr. Hingeston Randolph’s
edition of the Grandisson Registers, and in these and other
fourteenth-century Exeter registers there are several allusions to the
obligations of hearing confessions and propounding the Word of God in
Cornish.
But until the time of Henry VIII. we have no trustworthy information
about the state or extent of the language. It is highly probable, from
the number of places still retaining undoubtedly Celtic names, and
retaining them in an undoubtedly Cornish form, that until at least the
fifteenth century the Tamar was the general boundary of English and
Cornish; though there is said to be some evidence that even as late as
the reign of Elizabeth, Cornish was spoken in a few places to the east of
the Tamar, notably in the South Hams. Polwhele, however, limits the
South Hams use of Cornish to the time of Edward I., and we know from the
English Chronicle that when Athelstan drove the “Welsh” out of Exeter in
936, he set the Tamar for their boundary. In the reign of Henry VIII. we
have an account given by Andrew Borde in his _Boke of the Introduction of
Knowledge_, written in 1542. 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. 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, quoting 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. Had the Book of Common Prayer
been translated into Cornish and used in that tongue, two things might
have happened which did not—the whole language might have been preserved
to us, and the Cornish as a body might have been of the Church of
England, instead of remaining (more or less) of the old religion until
the perhaps unavoidable neglect of its authorities caused them to drift
into the outward irreligion from which John Wesley rescued them. {12}
But it is said by Scawen and by Bishop Gibson in his continuation of
Camden’s _Britannia_, that they _desired_ that the Prayer-book might not
be translated, and, though the statement is disputed, it is quite
possible that the upper classes, who spoke English, did make some such
representation, and that the bulk of the population in Cornwall, as
elsewhere, had no wish for the Reformed Service-book in any language; for
there were churches in Cornwall in which the old Mass according to the
Use of Salisbury was celebrated as late as the seventeenth century,
notably in the Arundel Chapel in St. Columb Church, as may clearly be
inferred from the inscription on the tomb of John Arundel and his wife,
the latter of whom died in 1602.
It is asserted by Carew, Polwhele, Davies Gilbert, Borlase, and others,
that in the time of Henry VIII. Dr. John Moreman, the parson of
Menheniot, was the first to teach his parishioners the Creed, Lord’s
Prayer, and Commandments in English, these having been “used in Cornish
beyond all remembrance.” This same Dr. Moreman is mentioned in the
petition (or rather _demand_) presented to Edward VI. by the Cornwall and
Devon insurgents, in favour of the old form of worship. One paragraph of
this is as follows:—“We will not receive the new service, because it is
but like a Christmas game. We will have our old service of Matins, Mass,
Evensong, and Procession as it was before; and we the Cornish, _whereof
certain of us understand no English_, do utterly refuse the new service.”
In the early part of the reign of Elizabeth, during the course of the
many discussions on church matters, a number of articles were drawn up,
to judge by their general tone, by the extreme Protestant party, and a
copy of these, taken from a MS. in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,
occurs in Egerton MS. 2350, f. 54, in the British Museum. They are
entitled “Articles drawn out by some certaine, and were exhibited to be
admitted by authority, but not so admitted,” and their date, to judge by
accompanying letters, etc., is about 1560. The last article is “A
punishment for such as cannot say the Catechisme,” and in it there occurs
the following sentence: “Item that it may be lawfull for such Welch or
Cornish children as can speake no English to learne the Præmises in the
Welch tongue or Cornish language.”
In the same reign, but somewhat later, a report on England, addressed to
Philip II. of Spain by an Italian agent, speaks thus of Cornwall: “Li
hauitanti sono del tutto differenti _di parlare_, di costume et di leggi
alli Inglesi; usano le leggi imperiali cosi como fa ancola li Walsche
loro vicini; quali sono in prospettiva alli Irlanda et sono similmente
tenuti la maggior parte Cattolici.” However, since the agent insists
that the Severn divides Cornwall from England, he can hardly have known
much about the country. The report occurs among a number of Spanish
state papers in Add. MS. 28,420, in the British Museum.
In Carew’s _Survey of Cornwall_, written about 1600, we read, however,
that the language had been driven into the uttermost parts of the Duchy,
and that very few were ignorant of English, though many affected to know
only their own tongue. It seems, however, from what he says further on,
that the _guaries_, or miracle plays, were then commonly acted in
Cornish, and that the people flocked to them in large numbers, and
evidently understood them. Carew adds that the principal love and
knowledge of the language died with one “Dr. Kennall, the civilian,”
probably John Kennall, D.C.L., Archdeacon of Oxford. Carew gives the
numerals and a few other specimens of the language.
In a survey of Cornwall, by John Norden, entitled _Speculum Magnæ
Britanniæ_, _pars Cornwall_, addressed to James I., the following account
of the language is given.
“The Cornish people for the moste parte are descended of British stocke,
though muche mixed since with the Saxon and Norman bloude, but untill of
late years retayned the British speache uncorrupted as theirs of Wales
is. 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. In the west parte of the county, as in the Hundreds of Penwith
and Kerrier, the Cornishe tongue is mostly in use, and yet it is to be
marvelled that though husband and wife, parents and children, master and
servauntes, doe mutually communicate in their native language, yet there
is none of them but in manner is able to converse with a stranger in the
English tongue, unless it be some obscure persons that seldom converse
with the better sort.”
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.”
In 1632, Dr. John Davies, the well-known Welsh lexicographer, published a
Welsh translation of the _Booke of Christian Exercise_ of Robert Parsons
the Jesuit, under the title of _Llyfr y Resolusion_. In it he gives a
Cornish version of the Lord’s Prayer and Creed, the earliest extant, and
evidently translated from Latin, not from English.
In the same year appeared a play called _The Northern Lass_, by Richard
Brome. In this occurs an opprobrious sentence of Cornish, put into the
mouth of a Cornishman bearing the absurd name of “Nonsence,” and
addressed to a Spaniard who had no English, on the argument that Cornwall
being the nearest point of Britain to Spain, Cornish might possibly
approach nearer to Spanish than English did.
The next mention of Cornish we find in a diary of the Civil War, written
by Richard Symonds, one of the Royalist army in Cornwall in 1644 (Brit.
Mus., Add. MS. 17,052). He gives a short vocabulary of common words,
together with four short sentences. To these he appends the following
note:—
“The language is spoken altogether at Goonhilly, and about Pendennis
and the Land’s End they speak no English. All beyond Truro they
speak the Cornish language.”
Much about the same time William Jackman, the vicar of St. Feock, near
Falmouth, chaplain of Pendennis Castle during its siege by the rebel
troops, was in the habit of using Cornish for the words of administration
of Holy Communion, because the old people did not understand English.
The Cornish words asserted to have been used by him were printed in
Hals’s History of Cornwall in 1750, though they do not occur in all
copies of that scarce book.
In 1662 and 1667 John Ray, in his _Itinerary_, mentions one Dickon Gwyn
(his real name was Dick Angwin), of St. Just, as the only man who could
write Cornish. Ray adds that few of the children could speak it, “so
that the language is like in a short time to be quite lost.”
This is probably the “Sieur Angwin” mentioned in a valuable little
treatise on the Cornish language by John Boson of Newlyn, of which more
later. This little tract, entitled _Nebbaz Gerriau dro tho Carnoack_ (or
“A few words about Cornish”), is only known from a copy which formerly
belonged to the late Mr. W. C. Borlase. It was written about the year
1700, and according to it the Cornish-speaking district was then “from
the Land’s End to the Mount and towards St. Ives and Redruth, and again
from the Lizard to Helston and towards Falmouth,” but the language had
decreased very much within the writer’s memory.
It is recorded by Dr. Borlase that Cheston Marchant, who died at Gwithian
in 1676 aged 164 (!), could speak nothing but Cornish.
Writing in the latter part of the reign of Charles II., William Scawen, a
Cornish antiquary, gives a long account of the state of the language in
his time, in a treatise in which he laments the decline thereof,
accounting for it by no less than sixteen elaborate reasons. This
treatise, _Antiquities Cornu-Britannick_, was abridged by Thomas Tonkin,
the Cornish historian, and the abridgment was printed in 1777, and again
by Davies Gilbert at the end of his history. A copy of the full form of
it in Tonkin’s beautiful handwriting, a much more elaborate work, is in
Add. MS. 33,420 in the British Museum. According to this, the
inhabitants of the western promontories of Meneage and Penwith were in
the habit of speaking the language, so much so that the parson of
Landewednack, Mr. Francis Robinson, used to preach in Cornish down to the
year 1678, that being the only tongue well understood by his
parishioners. Scawen mentions the MSS. of the aforesaid “Anguin,” as he
spells him, and laments their destruction. He also speaks of a “Matins”
(possibly a Primer, or Hours of our Lady) in Cornish, which had belonged
to “Mr. Maynard.” {17}
In Bishop Gibson’s edition of Camden’s _Britannia_, published in 1695,
there is a short account of the Cornish Language, and the Lord’s Prayer
and Creed, the same versions as those given by Scawen, are given as
specimens. According to Gibson the language was confined to two or three
western parishes, and was likely to last a very little longer. He
mentions the _Poem of the Passion_, the _Ordinalia_, and the _Creation_
as the only books existing in the language.
The next authority is that excellent Celtic scholar, Dr. Edward Lhuyd,
who published his _Archæologia Britannica_ in the year 1707. He gives
the following list of the parishes in which the language was spoken:—St.
Just, Paul, Buryan, Sennen, St. Levan, Morva, Sancreed, Madron, Zennor,
Towednack, St. Ives, Lelant, Ludgvan, and Gulval, and along the coast
from the Land’s End to St. Keverne (this would also include St. Hillary,
Perran Uthno, Breage, Germoe, Mullion, Gunwalloe, Ruan Major and Minor,
Landewednack, Grade, and St. Keverne), adding that many of the
inhabitants of these parishes, especially the gentry, do not understand
it, “there being no need, as every Cornishman speaks English.” There is
a letter of Lhuyd’s to Henry Rowlands, author of _Mono Antiqua
Restaurata_ (1723), printed at the end of that work, in which similar
information, dated 1701, is given. Lhuyd in this letter relates his
adventures in Brittany, and remarks on the closeness of Cornish to
Breton.
Then the language quickly receded, until, in 1735, there were left only a
few people at Mousehole, Paul, Newlyn, St. Just, and other parishes along
the coast between Penzance and the Land’s End who understood it. It was
about this time that Gwavas and Tonkin finished their collections on the
subject, and the language they found seemed to them a most irregular
jargon—a peculiarity of which was a striking uncertainty of the speakers
as to where one word left off and another began.
In the early part of the eighteenth century there was a little coterie of
antiquaries at Penzance and the neighbourhood, who had busied themselves
much with the remains of the old language. The patriarch of these was
old John Keigwin of Mousehole, the translator of the _Poem of the
Passion_ and the play of _The Creation_. He was born in 1641, and died
in 1710, and, according to Lhuyd and Borlase, his knowledge of Cornish
was “profound and complete.” However, that did not prevent him from
making some extraordinary mistakes in his translations, which should
perhaps be set down to the archaic form of the language with which he had
to deal. He seems to have been a considerable if rather pedantic
linguist, being accredited with an acquaintance with Latin, Greek,
French, and even Hebrew, and in a translation into Cornish of the letter
of King Charles to the people of Cornwall, he made use of his Hebrew
knowledge when he failed to remember the exact Cornish word, writing
“milcamath” for “war.” Among the other members of this little party may
be mentioned William Gwavas, John Boson and his brother Thomas, Thomas
Tonkin the historian, Oliver Pender, and last (as probably the youngest)
Dr. William Borlase, the author of the well-known History of Cornwall.
It does not seem that any of these, except Keigwin, troubled themselves
much about Cornish literature, but they did good service in the way of
preserving words, proverbs, colloquial sentences, etc., and seem to have
found great enjoyment in translating various passages of Scripture,
songs, etc., into the Cornish that was current in their own day. These
being spelt more or less phonetically (as far as the writers knew how to
do so), and therefore varying a good deal in orthography, are now of
great value in determining the sound of the latest Cornish.
When Lhuyd was at work upon his Cornish Grammar, he received considerable
assistance from Keigwin, Gwavas, and Tonkin, and a vocabulary and
collection of Cornish fragments compiled by the last two under the title
of _Archæologia Cornu-Britannica_ were afterwards printed by Dr. William
Pryce in 1790, with Lhuyd’s Grammar, _under his own name_, with the same
title. {19} This fraud, if it really deserves so harsh a name, was
exposed by Prince L. L. Bonaparte, into whose hands the original MS. of
some of it fell; but though it certainly was not right of Pryce to act in
this manner, he does deserve some credit for having published the
vocabulary at all, and the service that he did in so doing may be the
better estimated by a knowledge of the fact that it was very considerably
through the medium of Pryce’s publication that Dr. Edwin Norris obtained
the acquaintance with Cornish necessary to enable him to bring out his
valuable edition of the early Cornish dramas. It is strange that so much
abuse has been heaped upon Pryce, while Davies Gilbert has escaped with
comparative freedom, in spite of a villainously careless edition of a
number of scraps of Cornish (printed at the end of his edition of the
play of _The Creation_), gathered entirely from Tonkin’s MS., the Gwavas
MS., or the Borlase MS., and inserted, with notes and all, without a word
of acknowledgment, and in such a manner as to lead one to think that the
translation and notes at any rate were his own doing. Pryce certainly
took the trouble to correct his proofs, and Davies Gilbert could hardly
have attempted to do so. Moreover, if Pryce’s preface be read carefully,
it will be seen that he by no means claims the whole credit for himself,
but gives plenty of it, though perhaps not enough, to Gwavas, Tonkin,
Lhuyd, and Borlase. The impression left by the preface is that Pryce was
a more or less intelligent editor who added a little of his own, the
amount of which he exaggerated.
In 1746 Captain (afterwards Admiral) the Hon. Samuel Barrington, brother
of Daines Barrington the antiquary, took a sailor from Mount’s Bay, who
spoke Cornish, to the opposite coast of Brittany, and found him fairly
able to make himself understood. 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 1776, 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 Barrington says that he received information that John Nancarrow of
Market-Jew, aged only forty in 1779, could speak it. Dolly Pentreath
died in 1777; but Pryce, in the preface to his book of 1790, part of
which is his own, though one knows not how much of it to believe, and
Whitaker, vicar of Ruan-Lanihorne, in his Supplement to Polwhele’s
_History of Cornwall_ (1799), mention that two or three people were still
living who were able to speak Cornish, though this was only hearsay
evidence.
In his _History of Cornwall_, vol. v. (1806), the Rev. R. Polwhele speaks
of one Tompson, an engineer of Truro, whom he met in 1789, the author of
the well-known epitaph on Dolly Pentreath, and says that he knew more
Cornish than ever Dolly Pentreath did. But Polwhele did not think that
at the time he wrote there were two persons living who could really
converse in Cornish for any length of time. Some years ago the present
writer came upon a letter in the British Museum addressed to Sir Joseph
Banks, and dated 1791, the author of which mentions his own father as the
only living man who could speak Cornish. Unluckily the reference to the
letter has been lost, and there is so much Banks correspondence in the
British Museum that it is almost impossible to find it again. 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 was 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.
Then it is considered that Cornish, as a spoken language, died out. The
process was gradual, though perhaps rather rapid at the last, and, as far
as is generally known, the old tongue finally disappeared in the earlier
half of the nineteenth century. 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. W. S. Lach Szyrma, then vicar
of Newlyn, and to the present writer the tradition of the numerals and a
few words and sentences, which may be found in a paper contributed by the
present writer to the _Transactions of the Philological Society_ in 1876,
and a few years later Dr. Jago received some of the same tradition. 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.
Mr. Hobson Matthews in his _History of St. Ives_, _Lelant_, _Towednack_,
_and Zennor_, has an interesting chapter on Cornish. He gives reasons
for supposing that the language survived in St. Ives, Zennor, and
Towednack even longer than in Mounts Bay, and states that the families of
Stevens and Trewhella were among the last to keep it up in Towednack. He
also mentions one John Davy, who was living in 1890 at Boswednack in
Zennor (a hamlet between the Gurnard’s Head and Zennor Churchtown), who
had some traditional knowledge of Cornish, knew the meanings of the
place-names in the neighbourhood, and “could converse on a few simple
topics in the ancient language.” Unless Mr. Matthews, whose judgment one
would trust in such a matter, actually heard him do so, the last
statement is not easy to believe.
CHAPTER II—THE LITERATURE AND OTHER REMAINS OF CORNISH
The following is a list, in order of date, of the known remains of
Cornish from the earliest times to the end of the eighteenth century.
There may be others of very early date, which have been hitherto
classified as old Welsh or Breton, such as the Lament for Geraint, King
of Devon, generally attributed to Llywarch Hen, and certain glosses in
Latin MSS.
1. _The Manumissions in the Bodmin Gospels_ (Add. MS. 9381, in the
British Museum). The MS. is of the tenth century, and belonged to St.
Petrock’s Priory of Black Canons, originally Benedictine, at Bodmin. At
the beginning and end are manumissions of serfs from whose names about
two hundred Cornish words may be gathered. These have been printed in
the _Revue Celtique_ (vol. i. p. 332), with notes by Dr. Whitley Stokes.
2. _The Cottonian Vocabulary_ (Cott. MS. Vesp. A. xiv., in the British
Museum). This forms part of a MS. of the end of the twelfth century, and
consists of about seven pages, preceded by a calendar containing many
Celtic names, and followed by lives of Welsh and Cornish saints. The
words are classified under various headings such as heaven and earth,
different parts of the human body, birds, beasts, fishes, trees, herbs,
ecclesiastical and liturgical terms, and at the end occur a number of
adjectives. It has been printed by Zeuss in his _Grammatica Celtica_, by
Dr. Norris with the _Ordinalia_, and has been incorporated into Canon
Williams’s Cornish Lexicon. Many of the words in it were incorporated by
Dr. John Davies in his Welsh Dictionary, as coming from what he calls the
_Liber Landavensis_, and a quotation from the Life of St. Cadoc in the
same MS. is spoken of in Camden’s _Britannia_ as coming from the Book of
Llandaff. The MS. evidently bore that name for a time. It is probable,
from certain mistakes in it, that the vocabulary is a copy of an earlier
one, in which the letters _Ƿ_ and þ of the Saxon alphabet were used.
Of about the same date as this manuscript was a composition in Cornish,
of which the original is lost, except a few words. This was a _Prophecy
of Merlin_, which only exists in a translation into Latin hexameters by
John of Cornwall, who in his notes gives a few words of the original,
which are certainly Cornish. Like many of the so-called Merlin
prophecies, this relates to the struggle between Stephen and the Empress
Matilda, but it contains local Cornish allusions of great interest. The
only known MS. is one of the fourteenth century, in the Vatican.
3. The single sentence, _In Polsethow ywhylyr anetkow_, in the Cartulary
of Glasney College. If the writer of the history of the foundation of
the college is correct, this prophecy, “In Polsethow [the Pool of Arrows,
the old name of Glasney] shall be seen habitations,” is older than the
foundation in 1265. It is therefore the oldest known complete sentence
of Cornish, and is interesting as containing the inflected passive
_whylyr_. There is an abstract of the cartulary, by Mr. J. A. C.
Vincent, in the 1879 volume of the _Journal of the Royal Institution of
Cornwall_, and this sentence is given there, with an explanatory note by
the late Mr. W. C. Borlase. The original belongs to Mr. Jonathan
Rashleigh of Menabilly.
4. On the back of a charter in the British Museum (Add. Charter 19,491)
the present writer discovered in 1877 a fragment of forty-one lines of
Cornish verse. The writing was very faint, indeed the MS. had passed
through other and by no means incompetent hands without this precious
endorsement being noticed, and the finder might have missed it too had he
not been deliberately looking for possible Cornish words on the backs of
a number of charters relating to St. Stephen-in-Brannel, after he had
finished the necessary revision of the cataloguing of these documents.
The date of the document is 1340, but the Cornish writing on the back is
somewhat later, perhaps about 1400. The language and spelling agree with
those of the _Poem of the Passion_ and the _Ordinalia_, and the exact
metre is not found anywhere else. The speaker (it may be a part in some
play) offers a lady to some other person as a wife, praises her virtues,
and then gives the lady some rather amusing advice as to her behaviour to
her future husband, and how to acquire the position attributed in Cornish
folklore to the influence of the Well of St. Keyne and St. Michael’s
Chair. A copy of these verses was printed in the _Athenæum_ in 1877,
but, as the writer admits, his readings were not at all good, for the
writing was very faint. Dr. Whitley Stokes, who had the advantage of
working on a photograph, which brought out many letters which were
invisible in the original, published an amended version in the _Revue
Celtique_.
5. _The Poem of Mount Calvary_, or _The Passion_.—There are five MSS. of
this in existence. One is in the British Museum (Harl. 1782), and is
probably the original, said to have been found in the church of Sancreed.
It is a small quarto, on rough vellum, written very badly in a
mid-fifteenth-century hand, and embellished with very rude pictures. Of
the other copies, two are in the Bodleian, an incomplete and much
“amended” one in the Gwavas collection of Cornish writings in the British
Museum, with an illiterate translation by William Hals, the Cornish
historian, and one is in private hands. It has been twice printed, once
with a translation by John Keigwin of Mousehole, edited by Davies Gilbert
in 1826, and by Dr. Whitley Stokes for the Philological Society in 1862.
There is very little in this poem beyond a versified narrative of the
events of the Passion, from Palm Sunday to Easter morning, taken directly
from the four Gospels, with some legendary additions from the Gospel of
Nicodemus and elsewhere, preceded by an account of our Lord’s fasting and
temptation. The metre consists of eight-lined stanzas (written as four
lines) of seven-syllabled lines. There are two hundred and fifty-nine of
these stanzas.
6. _The Ordinalia_.—These consist of three dramas collectively known
under this title. The first play, called _Origo Mundi_, begins with the
Creation of the World, the Fall of Man, Cain and Abel, etc.; this being
followed by the building of the Ark and the Flood, the story of the
temptation of Abraham closing the first act. The second act gives us the
history of Moses, and the third represents the story of David and of the
building of Solomon’s Temple, curiously ending with a description of the
martyrdom of St. Maximilla as a Christian (!) by the bishop placed in
charge of the temple by Solomon. The second play, _Passio Domini_,
represents the Temptation of Christ, and the events from the entry into
Jerusalem to the Crucifixion; and this goes on without interruption into
the third play, _Resurrectio Domini_, which gives an account of the
Harrowing of Hell, the Resurrection, and the Ascension, with the Legend
of St. Veronica and Tiberius, and the death of Pilate. As in the _Poem
of the Passion_, the pseudo-Gospel of Nicodemus and other legendary
sources are drawn upon.
But running through the whole and interwoven with the Scriptural
narrative comes the beautiful and curious Legend of the Cross. The
legend, most of which is in the dramas, is this. When Adam found himself
dying, he sent his son Seth to the Gates of Paradise to beg of the angel
that guarded them the oil of mercy, that his father might live. The
angel let him look into Paradise, where he saw many strange and beautiful
foreshadowings of things that should be upon the earth; and the angel
gave him three seeds from the Tree of Life, and he departed. When he
came to where his father was, he found that he was already dead, and he
laid the three seeds in his mouth, and buried him therewith on Mount
Moriah; and in process of time the three seeds grew into three small
trees, and Abraham took of the wood thereof for the sacrifice of Isaac
his son; and afterwards Moses’ rod, wherewith he smote the rock, was made
from one of their branches. And soon the three trees grew together into
one tree, whereby was symbolised the mystery of the Trinity; and under
its branches sat King David when Nathan the Prophet came to him, and
there he bewailed his sin, and made the Miserere Psalm. And Solomon,
when he would build the Temple on Mount Sion, cut down the tree, which
was then as one of the chiefest of the cedars of Lebanon, and bid men
make a beam thereof; but it would in no wise fit into its place,
howsoever much they cut it to its shape. Therefore Solomon was wroth,
and bid them cast it over the brook Cedron as a bridge, so that all might
tread upon it that went that way. But after a while he buried it, and
over where it lay there came the Pool Bethesda with its healing powers;
and when our Lord came on earth the beam floated up to the surface of the
pool, and the Jews found it, and made thereof the Cross whereon Christ
died on Calvary.
The metres of these plays are various arrangements of seven and
four-syllabled lines, of which more anon in the chapter on prosody.
There are three MSS. of this Trilogy in existence, 1. The Oxford MS. of
the fifteenth century, from which the others were copied, and from which
Dr. Edwin Norris edited the plays in 1859. 2. Another Oxford MS.,
presented to the Bodleian by Edwin Ley of Bosahan about 1859, with a
translation by John Keigwin. The copy of the text is older by a century
than the translation. 3. A copy in the library of Sir John Williams,
Bart., of Llanstephan, Carmarthenshire, with an autograph translation by
Keigwin. This was Lhuyd’s copy.
7. _The Life of St. Meriasek_.—This play, the MS. of which was written
by “Dominus Hadton” in the year 1504, as appears by the colophon, was
discovered by Dr. Whitley Stokes some thirty-two years ago among the MSS.
of the Peniarth Library, near Towyn in Merioneth. It represents the life
and death of Meriasek, called in Breton Meriadec, the son of a Duke of
Brittany, and interwoven with it is the legend of St. Sylvester the Pope
and the Emperor Constantine, quite regardless of the circumstance that
St. Sylvester lived in the fourth century, and St. Meriasek in the
seventh. The play contains several references to Camborne, of which St.
Meriasek was patron, and to the Well of St. Meriasek there. It is
probable that it was written for performance at that town. The language
of the play is later than that of the _Ordinalia_, the admixture of
English being greater, while a few of the literal changes, such as the
more frequent substitution of _g_ (soft) for _s_, and in one instance
(_bednath_ for _bennath_) the change of _nn to dn_, begin to appear. The
grammar has not changed much, but the use of the compound and impersonal
forms is more frequent, and the verb _menny_ has begun to be more
commonly used as a simple future auxiliary. The metres are much the same
as those of the _Ordinalia_. The spelling is rather more grotesque and
varied. But, since this play (or combination of plays) is to a large
extent on local Cornish and Breton, rather than on conventional
Scriptural lines, it has an interest, full of mad anachronisms as it is,
which is not to be found in the Biblical plays. Some passages are of
considerable literary merit, and a good deal of early Cornish and Breton
history is jumbled up in it, and yet remains to be worked out, for Dr.
Whitley Stokes’s excellent edition of 1872 does not go very much into
historical side questions. It is unlucky that this play was not
discovered until after the publication of Canon Williams’s Lexicon, but
his own interleaved copy of the Lexicon, with words and quotations from
_St. Meriasek_, is in the possession of Mr. Quaritch of Piccadilly, and
Dr. Stokes has published forty pages of new words and forms from the same
play in _Archiv für Celtische Lexicographie_.
8. The Cornish conversations in Andrew Borde’s _Booke of the
Introduction of Knowledge_, printed in 1542.—These consist of the
numerals and twenty-four sentences useful to travellers. They were
evidently taken down by ear, and appear in a corrupted form. Restored
texts, agreeing in almost every detail, were published by Dr. Whitley
Stokes in the _Revue Celtique_, vol. iv., and by Prof. Loth in the
_Archiv fur Celtische Lexicographie_ in 1898.
9. In Carew’s _Survey of Cornwall_, 1602, are the numerals up to twenty,
with a hundred, a thousand, and what is meant for ten thousand, but is
really something else. There are also ten words compared with Greek, a
dozen phrases, some more words, and the Cornish equivalents of twelve
common Christian names.
10. _The Creation of the World_, _with Noah’s Flood_, by William Jordan
of Helston, A.D. 1611. The construction of this play is very like that
of the first act of the _Origo Mundi_ (the metres are substantially the
same), and the author has borrowed whole passages from it; but as a whole
Jordan’s play possesses greater literary merit, and there are many
additions to the story in it, and much amplification of the ideas and
dialogue. Occasionally sentences of several lines in English are
introduced, and it is curious to note that whenever this is the case,
they are given to Lucifer or one of his angels, and in such a manner as
to seem as if the author meant to imply that English was the natural
language of such beings, and that they only spoke Cornish when on their
good behaviour, relapsing into their own tongue whenever they became more
than ordinarily excited or vicious. Five complete copies of this play
are known, two of which are in the Bodleian, one in the British Museum
(Harl. MS. 1867), and two are in private hands (one bound up with the MS.
of _The Passion_ already mentioned). Besides these there is a fragment
in a similar hand to that of the complete Museum copy (certainly not that
of John Keigwin, who translated the play in 1693 at the request of Sir
Jonathan Trelawny, then Bishop of Exeter, though it has his translation
on the opposite pages to the text) in the Gwavas collection in the
British Museum. In a list of books published in _Welsh_ (as it is
expressed), given in one of Bagford’s collections for a History of
Printing (Lansdowne MS. 808, in the British Museum), mention is made of
this play. No date is given, but the names of the books are arranged
chronologically, and this comes between one of 1642 and one of 1662. The
play has been printed (with Keigwin’s translation) by Davies Gilbert in
1827, and with a translation by Dr. Whitley Stokes in the Philological
Society’s volume for 1864. Of William Jordan, the writer, nothing is
known whatever. He may have been merely the transcriber, and it is
possible that the transcription may be connected with that revival of
Cornish patriotism which seems to have happened in the early seventeenth
century.
11. _Nebbaz Gerriau dro tho Carnoack_ (A few words about Cornish), by
John Boson of Newlyn. The only known MS. of this little tract in Cornish
and English was formerly among the MSS. of Dr. William Borlase in the
possession of his descendant, Mr. W. C. Borlase. The present writer had
it in his possession for a short time in 1877 or 1878, and copied about
half of it, but returned it to Mr. Borlase, who wanted it back, and it
was then printed in the 1879 volume of the _Journal of the Royal
Institution of Cornwall_. At the time of the sale of Mr. Borlase’s
library, this tract, which when the present writer last saw it used to
live between the pages of Dr. Borlase’s MS. Collections on Cornish, did
not appear, and its present ownership is unknown. It is in the
handwriting of the Rev. Henry Usticke, Vicar of Breage (died 1769), and
in the Gwavas MS. in the British Museum there are several pieces in the
same hand. As a copy of Boson’s original it is rather inaccurate, but
Boson wrote by no means a clear hand. It is of great interest as the
composition of one who, though he was brought up to speak English, as he
himself says, had acquired a thorough knowledge of Cornish as it was
spoken in his day, without having even looked at any of the literary
remains of the language. He was also a man of general education, and in
this tract and in his letters is rather fond of airing his Latin. Very
little is known of him except that he was the son of Nicholas Boson and
was born at Newlyn in 1655 and died some time between 1720, the date of
his last letter to Gwavas, and 1741, the date of the death of the latter,
who is recorded to have received a copy of verses in Cornish found among
Boson’s papers after his death. The date of the _Nebbaz Gerriau_ is
unknown, but it mentions a little book called _The Duchess of Cornwall’s
Progress_, which the author says that he wrote “some years past” for his
children, refers (though not by name) to John Keigwin, who died in 1710,
as being still alive, and does not mention Lhuyd’s Grammar, published in
1707, so that we may infer that the date is somewhere about 1700. _The
Duchess of Cornwall’s Progress_, which had at least thirty pages (for he
refers to the thirtieth page), was probably in English, with a few
passages in Cornish, which Dr. Borlase, who had seen two copies of it,
transcribed into his Cornish Collections. Judging from his letters and
from this tract, John Boson was a man of considerable intelligence, and
one about whom one would like to know more, and his Cornish writings are
of more value than those of the somewhat pedantic Keigwin.
12. _The Story of John of Chy-an-Hur_.—This is a popular tale of some
length, of a labouring man who lived at Chy-an-Hur, or the Ram’s House,
in St. Levan, and went east seeking work, and of what befell him. It is
the _Tale of the Three Advices_, found in many forms. It appears first
in Lhuyd’s Grammar, printed in 1707, where it has a Welsh translation.
Lhuyd says that it “was written about forty years since,” which dates it
_circ._ 1667. Part of it, undated, but in the hand of John Boson, occurs
with an English translation in the Gwavas MS. (Brit. Mus., Add. MS.
28,554). This, as appears by a note on the back of the first leaf, was
written out for Gwavas’s instruction in Cornish. The spelling is
altogether different from Lhuyd’s. Another copy in Cornish of Lhuyd’s
spelling, with an English translation, is in the Borlase MS., copied from
the lost MS. of Thomas Tonkin, with some corrections by Dr. Borlase. It
was printed with Lhuyd’s Welsh and an English version, in Pryce’s
_Archæologia Cornu-Britannica_ in 1790, and by Davies Gilbert at the end
of his edition of Jordan’s _Creation_, 1827, in Cornish and English. The
English versions of Borlase, Pryce, and Davies Gilbert are substantially
the same, and are probably Tonkin’s. An English version, translated from
Lhuyd’s Welsh, but pretended to be from Cornish, was printed in
_Blackwood’s Magazine_ in 1818, and again in an abridged and expurgated
form in Mr. J. Jacob’s collection of Celtic Fairy Tales in 1891. There
is a much amplified version of the story in English in William
Botterell’s _Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall_,
published at Penzance in 1870, and a short and rather foolish one in
Hunt’s _Popular Romances of the West of England_, 1865, 1871, 1881. The
language is a good specimen of the latest Cornish. The same story is
given as an Irish folk-tale in an early volume of _Chambers’s Journal_.
13. The Preface to the Cornish Grammar in Lhuyd’s _Archæologia
Britannica_. This consists of two and a quarter folio pages of close
print, and is written in the Cornish of his own day. It is the work of a
foreigner, but is nevertheless very well done. A not very good
translation, probably the work of Tonkin and Gwavas, is given by Pryce,
and reprinted by Polwhele in the fifth volume of his History.
14. The rest of the remains of Cornish consist of a few songs, verses,
proverbs, epigrams, epitaphs, maxims, letters, conversations, mottoes,
and translations of chapters and passages of Scripture, the Lord’s
Prayer, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, King Charles’s Letter, etc.
They are found in the Gwavas MS. (Brit. Mus., Add. MS. 28,554), a
collection made by William Gwavas, barrister-at-law, and ranging in date
from 1709 to 1736; in the Borlase MS. of the date of about 1750, in the
handwriting of Dr. William Borlase, Rector of Ludgvan, formerly in the
possession of his descendant, the late W. C. Borlase, F.S.A., M.P., but
now belonging to Mr. J. D. Enys, of Enys; in Pryce’s _Archæologia
Cornu-Britannica_, 1790, and in Davies Gilbert’s editions of the _Poem of
the Passion_ and Jordan’s play of _The Creation_, published respectively
in 1826 and 1827. Those in the Borlase MS. (except a few from a work of
John Boson), and those printed by Pryce and Davies Gilbert, were probably
taken from the Gwavas MS. and from Tonkin’s MSS. There is also one
epitaph dated 1709 in Paul Church, an epitaph on Dolly Pentreath, which
does not appear ever to have been inscribed on her tomb, and the letter
of William Bodenor in 1776.
These fragments may be classified as follows:—
Songs and Poems.
1. Lhuyd’s Elegy on William of Orange, 1702. Sixty-three lines of verse
in rhyming triplets, in modern Cornish, with occasional archaic turns. A
copy occurs in the Gwavas MS.; it was printed by Pryce, with a Latin
version, as part of a correspondence between Lhuyd and Tonkin, and by
Polwhele in his fifth volume, with the same correspondence. There is a
copy with an English version by John Keigwin in the library of Sir John
Williams, Bart., of Llanstephan.
2. 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
again from Gwavas, whose is the translation. It is in idiomatic late
Cornish, in rather wild spelling.
3. Song on James II. and William of Orange, by John Tonkin of St. Just,
a tailor, who appears to have been a solitary Whig in a nation of
Jacobites, as with very few exceptions the Cornish certainly were. It
begins, “_Menja tiz Kernuak buz galowas_,” and consists of fourteen
four-lined stanzas of modern Cornish, probably composed in 1695, to judge
by the historical allusions. It is in the Gwavas MS. only, and has never
been printed.
4. A song of moral advice by the same writer, beginning “_Ni venja pea a
munna seer_,” and consisting of seven four-lined stanzas, only one of
which, beginning “_An Prounter ni ez en Plew East_,” has been printed
(from the Borlase MS.) in the _Journal of the Royal Institution of
Cornwall_ for 1866. The complete song is in the Gwavas MS., and has
never been published.
5. A song beginning “_Pelea era why moaz_, _moz_, _fettow_, _teag_”
(Where are you going, fair maid? he said). This consists of six
four-lined stanzas, the second and fourth lines of each stanza being the
burthen:—
“_Gen agaz bedgeth gwin_ (or according to Borlase, Tonkin, and
Gwavas, _pedn du_) _ha agaz blew mellyn_”
(With your white face, or black head, and your yellow hair)
and
“_Rag delkiow sevi gwra muzi teag_”
(For strawberry leaves make maidens fair).
The song was sung by one Edward Chirgwin or Chygwin, “brother-in-law to
Mr. John Groze of Penzance, at Carclew, in 1698,” as a note by T. Tonkin
says. Whether it was translated from English or whether the Cornish is
the original does not appear. The story is not quite the same (or quite
so scrupulously “proper”) as the English nursery version. There is a
copy in the handwriting of Chirgwin in the Gwavas MS., and one copied
from Tonkin’s MS. in the Borlase MS. It was printed by Pryce in an
amended form, and by Polwhele.
6. A song on the curing of pilchards (not a very poetical subject) by
John Boson. Twenty-six lines of rhyming couplets beginning “_Me canna ve
war hern gen cock ha ruz_” (I will sing, or my song is, of pilchards with
boat and net), and describing the process of bringing the fish ashore and
putting them into bulks and making “fairmaids” of them. There is a copy
with a translation in the Borlase MS., which was printed in the _Journal
of the Royal Institution of Cornwall_ for 1866, and Davies Gilbert
printed it at the end of his edition of Jordan’s _Creation_ in 1827, but
without any translation.
Verses and Epigrams.
1. Nine short sayings in verse, printed in Pryce and Davies Gilbert, and
copied by Borlase from Tonkin. The first, “_An lavar goth ewe lavar
gwir_,” etc., occurs also in Lhuyd.
2. Epigram on the verdict in the suit of Gwavas _v._ Kelynack,
respecting tithes of fish. Eight lines by W. Gwavas. It occurs in the
Gwavas and Borlase MSS., and in Pryce and Polwhele.
3. “To Neighbour Nicholas Pentreath,” by Gwavas. Six lines. In the
Borlase MS., and in Pryce and Polwhele.
4. “Advice from a friend in the country to his neighbour who went up to
receive £16,000 in London,” by John Boson. In the Borlase MS., and in
Pryce and Polwhele. Eight lines.
5. “On a lazy, idle weaver.” In the Gwavas and Borlase MSS., and in
Pryce and Polwhele. Six lines.
6. “Verses on the Marazion Bowling-Green.” In the Gwavas and Borlase
MSS., and in Pryce and Polwhele. Six lines by Gwavas.
7. “Advice to Drunkards.” Four lines, by Gwavas. In the Gwavas and
Borlase MSS., and in Pryce and Polwhele.
8. A Cornish riddle. Five lines. In the Gwavas and Borlase MSS., and
in Pryce, Gilbert, and Polwhele.
9. “Advice to all men.” Written by Gwavas to form part of his own
epitaph. Four lines.
10. “Another” [of the same sort], three lines, also by Gwavas.
11. “A concluding one,” four lines, also by Gwavas. These last three,
copied from the same page of the Gwavas MS., all occur also in the
Borlase MS., and in Pryce, Gilbert, and Polwhele.
12. “A Fisherman’s Catch,” given by Capt. Noel Cator of St. Agnes to T.
Tonkin, 1698. In the Borlase MS., and printed in the _R_. _I_. _C_.
_Journal_, 1866, and in Mr. Hobson Matthews’s History of St. Ives,
Lelant, Towednack, and Zennor.
13. Six lines of moral advice, found among the papers of J. Boson after
his death, and given to Gwavas. In the Borlase MS., and _R_. _I_. _C_.
_Journal_, 1866.
14. Certificate of Banns from W. Drake, Rector of St. Just, to Thos.
Trethyll, Vicar of Sennen. Two versions, one in the Gwavas MS. and one
in Pryce, the latter being also in the Borlase MS. Drake died in 1636.
15. Verses on a silver hurling ball given to W. Gwavas. Seven lines by
Thos. Boson, 1705. In the Gwavas MS. Unpublished.
16. Three couplets of verse, and a short piece of prose from J. Boson’s
_Duchess of Cornwall’s Progress_. In the Borlase MS. Unpublished.
17. Prophecy, attributed to Merlin, of the burning of Paul, Penzance,
and Newlyn. Two lines. In the Borlase MS., and often printed in Cornish
histories and guide-books.
18. Elegy on the death of James Jenkin of Alverton. Four verses of
three lines each, by John Boson, 17 Feb. 17 [11/12]. In the Gwavas MS.
Unpublished.
Proverbs, Mottoes, and Maxims.
1. From Scawen. Fourteen proverbs. In the Borlase MS.; printed in the
edition of Tonkin’s abridgment of Scawen’s _Antiquities
Cornu-Britannick_, 1777, and in Davies Gilbert’s History, and in his
edition of the _Poem of the Passion_. Also in _R_. _I_. _C_. _Journal_,
1866, with sixteen others from the Borlase MS.
2. Mottoes of the families of Gwavas, Harris of Hayne, {39} Glynne,
Tonkin, Godolphin, Boscawen, Polwhele, Noye, and Willyams of Carnanton.
All except those of Glynne, Noye, and Willyams are printed in Pryce. All
but Glynne and Willyams occur in Davies Gilbert’s edition of Jordan’s
_Creation_, and the Willyams motto, though it occurs as a Cornish phrase
in Pryce’s preface and in the Gwavas and Tonkin MSS., is only found as a
motto in pedigree books and on the sign-board of the inn in Mawgan
Churchtown. The Glynne motto, “_Dre weres agan Dew_” (Through the help
of our God), is given, with an incorrect translation, in Mr. Hobson
Matthews’s History.
3. Mottoes for bowls, occurring in the Gwavas MS., and some in Davies
Gilbert’s edition of _The Creation_.
4. Maxims, proverbs, etc., about thirty in number, in the Borlase MS.,
in Pryce, and in Davies Gilbert’s edition of _The Creation_, under the
title of “Sentences in vulgar Cornish.” Some of them are also in the
Gwavas MS.
Conversations and Phrases.
1. About seventy sentences, in the Borlase MS., in Pryce, and in Davies
Gilbert’s edition of _The Creation_, under the title of “Things occurring
in common discourse.” There are some additional ones in the Borlase MS.
2. About a hundred and fifty phrases, sentences, and idioms, copied by
Dr. Borlase from Lhuyd’s MSS. Some, but by no means all, are in Lhuyd’s
Grammar.
3. A considerable number of similar phrases scattered throughout
Borlase’s Cornish Vocabulary at the end of his History of Cornwall.
These are to be found, evidently copied from the Vocabulary, in a
manuscript which belonged in 1777 to Henry Brush of Carnaquidn Stamps (on
the road from Penzance to Zennor), which place belonged to William Veale
of Trevaylor, who married the daughter of Gwavas. The MS. is now in the
possession of a descendant of Henry Brush.
4. A few expressions and phrases scattered through the Gwavas MS., in
the letters of Boson, and in letters and notes of Gwavas.
Epitaphs.
1. On James Jenkins, by John Boson, 17[11/12], in the Gwavas MS. Four
lines. The Borlase MS., quoting the very letter in which it occurs, says
that it is on John Keigwin, which is a mistake.
2. On John Keigwin, by John Boson, 1715. In the Gwavas MS. Four lines.
3. On Capt. Stephen Hutchens, in Paul Church, 1709. The only Cornish
inscription in any church. Probably by John Boson. Two lines.
Frequently printed in guide-books, etc.
4. On William Gwavas, by himself. In the Gwavas MS., and in Pryce,
Polwhele, and Davies Gilbert. Partly in English.
These four are also in the Borlase MS., and are printed in the _R_. _I_.
_C_. _Journal_, 1866.
5. On Dolly Pentreath, by --- Tompson of Truro, engineer. Printed by
Polwhele, and later in Blight’s _Week at the Land’s End_, and other
guide-books. A variant occurs in John Skinner’s _Journal of a Tour in
Somerset_, _Devon_, _and Cornwall_, 1797, in Add. MS. 28,793, f. 62, in
the British Museum.
Letters.
1. William Gwavas to Oliver Pender, 11th August 1711. Partly in
Cornish.
2. Oliver Pender to W. Gwavas, 22nd August 1711. Mostly in Cornish.
3. John Boson to W. Gwavas, 5th April 1710. Nearly all in Cornish.
4. An unsigned letter, including a version of the “Old Hundredth.”
Partly in rhyme.
5. Note, addressed apparently to one going to America, by William
Gwavas, 1710, on the back of a copy of the Creed in Cornish.
These five are in the Gwavas MS., and have never been printed.
6. Letter of William Bodenor to the Honble. Daines Barrington, 3rd July
1776. Printed in _Archæologia_ (vol. v., 1779), in “Uncle Jan
Treenoodle’s” _Specimens of Cornish Provincial Dialects_, 1846; in a
paper on the Cornish Language by the present writer in the _Transactions
of the Philological Society_, 1873, and in _Archiv für Celtische
Lexicographic_, with notes and emendations by Prof. Loth, in 1898.
Translations.
Passages of Scripture.
_Genesis_ i. Two versions, one by John Boson and one probably by John
Keigwin. Both are in the Gwavas MS. One, Boson’s, with his name to it,
is in the Borlase MS. Boson’s was printed by D. Gilbert at the end of
his edition of the _Poem of the Passion_, and in a much revised form by
Canon Williams at the end of his Lexicon. Keigwin’s version was printed
by D. Gilbert at the end of his edition of Jordan’s _Creation_. There
are many verbal variations from the Gwavas copies in the printed
editions.
_Genesis_ iii., translated by William Kerew, in the Gwavas MS. Published
by Prof. Loth in the _Revue Celtique_, April 1902.
_St. Matthew_ ii. 1-20, translated by W. Kerew, in the Gwavas MS.
Published in the _Revue Celtique_, April 1902.
_St. Matthew_ iv., also by W. Kerew, in the Gwavas MS. Published in the
_Revue Celtique_, April 1902.
The last three were copied from a MS. of Matthew Rowe of Hendra in
Sancreed, by H. Usticke.
_Proverbs_ xxx. 5, 6.
_Psalms_ ii. 11; vii. 11; xxxv. 1, 2.
These are in the Gwavas MS., probably translated by W. Gwavas himself.
Unpublished.
_The Hundredth Psalm_, of the Sternhold and Hopkins version, literally
translated line for line, followed by an unsigned letter partly in rhyme.
In the Gwavas MS. Unpublished.
The Lord’s Prayer.
There are ten versions extant besides the modern one of Canon Williams.
1. In John Davies’s _Llyfr y Resolusion_ (a translation of Robert
Parsons’s _Book of Christian Exercise_), printed in 1632, and again in
1684. Translated from the Latin.
2. In Scawen’s _Antiquities Cornu-Brittanick_, circ. 1680. Printed in
Tonkin’s abridgment in 1777. The same version is given in Bishop
Gibson’s additions to Camden’s _Britannia_ in 1695, and by Polwhele.
3, 4. Two versions in John Chamberlayne’s _Oratio Dominica in diversas
linguas versa_, 1715, one of which is evidently meant for the version in
Scawen and Camden.
5, 6. Two versions by John Keigwin, one said to be in Ancient Cornish
and the other in Modern. Both are in the Gwavas and Borlase MSS., and
were printed by Pryce and D. Gilbert.
7, 8. Two versions, one by John and one by Thomas Boson, in the Gwavas
MS. Unpublished.
9, 10. Two versions by W. Gwavas, in the Gwavas MS. Unpublished. One
of these, nearly identical with Keigwin’s Modern, is said in a note to
have been collected from J. Keigwin, Thomas Boson, Captain Thomas Tonkin,
Oliver Pender, James Schollar, and T. Tonkin.
The first four are without the εκφώνησις at the end. All except the
first are from the English.
The Apostles’ Creed.
1. In the _Llyfr y Resolusion_, 1632, 1684.
2. In Scawen and in Gibson’s Camden.
3. In Hals’s _History of Cornwall_.
4, 5. By John Keigwin, one in the Gwavas MS. and both m the Borlase MS.,
and printed by Pryce and D. Gilbert.
6. By Thomas Boson, in the Gwavas MS. Unpublished.
7, 8. By William Gwavas, in the Gwavas MS. Unpublished.
There is a modern revised version in Williams’s Lexicon.
The Ten Commandments.
1, 2. By John Keigwin, one in the Gwavas MS., and both in the Borlase
MS., and in Pryce and D. Gilbert. One of these in a revised form is in
Williams’s Lexicon.
3. In the Gwavas MS., but without name. Unpublished.
4. By John Boson, in the Gwavas MS. Printed with notes by Prof. Loth in
vol. xxiv. of the _Revue Celtique_.
5. By William Kerew, in the Gwavas MS. Printed with the preceding.
6. By T. Boson, in the Gwavas MS. Unpublished.
7. By W. Gwavas, in the Gwavas MS. Unpublished.
The Words of Administration of Holy Communion.
These are stated to be the words used by William Jackman, Vicar of St.
Feock. They occur in Hals’s History.
King Charles I.’s Letter to the People of Cornwall.
This is a translation by John Keigwin of the Letter of Thanks from the
Martyr King to the People of Cornwall for their loyalty in 1643, still to
be seen in many churches in the Duchy. It occurs in the handwriting of
Keigwin in the Gwavas MS., and in Dr. Borlase’s hand in the Borlase MS.
It has been misprinted, with notes by the present writer (who had no
opportunity of revising the proofs), in the Rev. A. Cummings’s _History
of Cury and Gunwalloe_, 1875, and Mrs. Dent’s _Annals of Winchcombe and
Sudeley_ (the place from which the original Letter is dated), 1877.
* * * * *
The following grammatical and lexicographical pieces belong more or less
to the living period of Cornish:—
1. Lhuyd’s _Cornish Grammar_, printed in his _Archæologia Britannica_ in
1707, and reprinted by Pryce in 1790.
2. Lhuyd’s _Cornish Vocabulary_. The unpublished MS. belongs to Sir
John Williams, Bart., of Llanstephan, Carmarthenshire. Most of the words
in it are to be found in Borlase’s and Pryce’s Vocabularies (see below).
They were collected partly from the Dramas, partly from the Cottonian
Vocabulary, and partly from living people.
3. _The Gwavas Vocabulary_. This is a short vocabulary of the latest
Cornish (extending from A to O) in the Gwavas MS. The words were
incorporated into Borlase’s Vocabulary.
4. _The Hals Vocabulary_. This is a fragment (A to C) in the Gwavas MS.
It is fantastic and of little value.
5. _The Borlase Vocabulary_, compiled from the MSS. of Lhuyd, Gwavas,
and Tonkin, from Lhuyd’s _Archæologia_, from oral tradition, and from
other sources. The original MS. is in the Borlase Collection, now
belonging to Mr. J. D. Enys, and it was printed at the end of Dr.
Borlase’s _Antiquities Historical and Monumental of Cornwall_ in 1754,
and again, revised, in 1769. It is a copious vocabulary, but is rendered
rather less valuable by the inclusion of a large number of Welsh and
Breton words, gathered chiefly from other parts of Lhuyd’s _Archæologia_,
or from John Davies’s Welsh Dictionary.
6. _Pryce’s Vocabulary_, or rather that of Gwavas, Tonkin, and Pryce.
Printed, with Pryce’s edition of Lhuyd’s Grammar, at Sherborne in 1790.
Some of this vocabulary was collected from the literary remains of
Cornish, but a very large part was compiled from living tradition, not
much by Pryce himself, but by Gwavas and Tonkin.
Though some of these have been used by Canon Williams in his _Lexicon
Cornu-Britannicum_, by Dr. Whitley Stokes in his Supplementary Cornish
Glossary (_Transactions of the Philological Society_, 1868-9), and still
more in Dr. Jago’s English-Cornish Dictionary, they have not been
thoroughly exhausted yet, and a good many more words may be collected
from them, as also from the attempted interpretations of place-names in
Pryce’s book and in the Gwavas MS.
PART II—THE GRAMMAR OF THE CORNISH LANGUAGE
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The Cornish language divides very naturally into three periods, (1)
Ancient, (2) Middle, (3) Modern.
1. The Ancient period is only represented by the Cottonian Vocabulary,
which, though a MS. of the twelfth century, is probably a copy of a much
earlier one, by perhaps a few glosses, and by the names in the Bodmin
Gospels. It has no extant literature.
2. The Middle period is that of the Add. Charter fragment, the
_Ordinalia_, the _Poem of the Passion_ (fifteenth century), the _Life of
St. Meriasek_ (1504), and to some extent of the play of _The Creation_
(1611), though the last is partly transitional. Judging from the few
words preserved in John of Cornwall’s twelfth-century translation of a
prophecy of Merlin, the lost original of that was perhaps in an early
form of Middle Cornish.
3. The Modern period begins with the few sentences in Andrew Borde’s
book (1542), and continues to the end.
As the whole of the extant literature of Middle Cornish is in verse, it
gives us little help as regards the colloquial Cornish even of its own
period, and judging from Andrew Borde’s sentences, only some forty years
later than the _St. Meriasek_ and seventy years earlier than Jordan’s
play, Middle and Modern Cornish must have overlapped one another a good
deal. It is probable that those who wrote verse would continue to use
archaic forms long after they had been dropped in prose and in
conversation. But the difference between Middle and Modern Cornish is
not really very great, and comes to very little more than a difference of
spelling, an uncertainty about the final letters of certain words, and a
tendency to contractions, elisions, and apocopations in words, which,
though recognised in their fuller form in the spelling of Middle Cornish
verse, may have been nearly as much contracted, elided, and apocopated in
Middle Cornish conversation. Dr. Whitley Stokes points out in his
edition of Jordan’s _Creation_ certain changes, and though the language
of that play is substantially Middle Cornish, the spelling is largely of
the pre-Lhuydian popular Modern Cornish sort. Among these changes are
the following:—
1. The final _e_ becomes _a_. [This is perhaps only a question of
spelling, and need not imply a difference of sound. Probably a sound
as of the German final _e_ is intended. {50}]
2. _th_ and _gh_ have become mute, and are often interchanged. [In
Modern Cornish _th_ is often omitted, or represented by _h_.]
3. _m_, _n_, become respectively _bm_, _dn_. [Probably the sounds
existed long before they were recognised in spelling.]
4. _s_ becomes frequently a soft _g_ (_j_). [This _j_ sound also may
have existed long before it was written as a _g_ or _j_. The _s_ of
the earlier MSS. was probably never intended to represent in these
cases a true _s_. Dr. Stokes might also have mentioned the similar
cases of _she_ being used where the older MSS. write _sy_ for the
second person singular.]
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 _l_, _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_.
5. An open long _y_, which may have been sounded _ee_ (_î_) in Middle
Cornish, often later became _ei_ (or as _i_ in _mine_), though there
are inconsistencies in this respect, showing that the change was not
universal.
6. In a considerable number of cases short _o_ became the “obscure
vowel,” _o_ of _London_ or _u_ of _until_.
It does not follow that these were very distinct changes between Middle
and Modern Cornish. Possibly the change in sound was a good deal less
than on paper, and consisted in intensifying earlier changes. The Middle
Cornish system of spelling looks very like an inheritance from an earlier
time still.
The grammatical changes were few, and, except for a diminishing use of
pronominal suffixes, those, like the new preterite of _gwîl_, to do, were
chiefly false analogies, or else imitations of English. But it is to be
remembered that a great proportion of the remains of Modern Cornish
consists of translations and a few original compositions by persons whose
own language was English, who had in some cases learnt Cornish very
imperfectly. This would apply to most of the translations of passages of
Scripture, to Lhuyd’s Preface (though, of course, _his_ own language was
Welsh), and to Gwavas’s attempts. The really valuable specimens are the
writings of Boson, Bodenor’s Letter to Daines Barrington, some of the
Gwavas MS. letters and songs, and the story of John of Chy-an-Hur.
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. Words were spelt alike which should have
been differentiated—it was as though one should spell _avais_, _avait_,
_avez_, and _avaient_ all alike, and words were run together that should
have had at least apostrophes between them; but the grammar was not
always as broken-down as it looks, and by a comparison with the older
remains of Cornish it is not difficult to restore approximately the
proper spelling. 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;
but the spelling and the mediæval handwriting, which he could not always
read, put him out terribly, and some very weird forms and words are the
result. Also Keigwin had, or thought he had, a knowledge of Hebrew and
Greek, which he uses on occasions with dire results. Far be it from any
Cornish student to undervalue the usefulness of Keigwin. But for him,
and for Gwavas and Tonkin, the work of reconstruction would have been
much more difficult than it is, and these writers undoubtedly preserved a
great deal of most valuable matter that otherwise would have been lost,
but their work needs to be used with great caution, and the translations
and original compositions which they produced do not always represent
quite fairly the late forms of the language.
CHAPTER I—SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION
§ 1. On the Pronunciation in general.
In simple Cornish words of more than one syllable the stress accent is
generally, though not universally, on the last but one. {54} The vowel
of this syllable has usually its plain, clear _long_ or _short_ sound.
The vowels of the unaccented syllables are usually _obscure_ in the case
of two of the broad vowels (_a_, _o_), and _short_ in the case of the
thin vowels (_e_, _i_, _y_) and of _u_, unless they are combinations of
two vowels, in which case they are always long; but _e_ in a final
unaccented syllable is also generally _obscure_. The _obscure_ vowel is
the sound of _u_ in the English word _until_, or _o_ in _London_, and
there is very little, if any, difference in sound between the obscure
_a_, _e_, _o_, and _u_. When this sound occurs, as it occasionally does,
on an accented syllable, or anywhere where it might be mistaken for a
plain sound, it is written, according to the spelling of this book, _ă_,
_ŏ_, or _ŭ_.
In words of one syllable ending in a consonant the vowel is generally to
be taken as _short_, unless it is marked long (_â_, _ê_, _î_, _ô_, _û_,
_ŷ_), or is a combination of two vowels. In monosyllables ending in a
vowel, that vowel usually has its _long_ sound, but as Cornish is largely
accented in ordinary conversation by _sentences_ (as is the case in
Gaelic, and to a considerable extent in English), many monosyllables are
slurred over with no accent (as _enclitics_ or _proclitics_, according to
whether they follow or precede the word on which they depend), and with
more or less of the _obscure_ vowel. The modern Cornish intonation of
English is probably a very fair guide to the intonation of Cornish. {55}
The consonants, especially _f_, _v_, _dh_, _th_, are rather more lightly
sounded than in English. Any peculiarities of sound will be given under
each consonant.
During the period in which the existing remains of Cornish literature
were written, that is, between the twelfth and the middle of the
eighteenth century, the spelling was very unsettled. There were at least
six different systems, if no more.
1. That of the Cotton Vocabulary.
2. That of the _Ordinalia_, with a sub-variety in that of the _Poem of
the Passion_.
3. That of the _St. Meriasek_.
4. That of Jordan’s _Creation_.
5. That of Boson, Keigwin, and other seventeenth and eighteenth
century writers.
6. That of Lhuyd.
Not only did different writers differ from one another, but various ways
of representing the same sound were used by the same writer. The earlier
spelling shows a certain amount of Welsh, old English, and old French
affinities; the latest is evidently modelled on modern English, which
does not suit it very well, and the transition from one to the other is
not very abrupt. It is the object of the present book to represent the
probable pronunciation of Modern Cornish by a system fairly consistent in
itself, but not too startlingly divergent from those adopted by previous
writers (or from that of Breton, where coincidence occurs), and not too
much encumbered with diacritical signs. It is to some extent a following
of Dr. Edward Lhuyd, whose system, though rather clumsy and unnecessarily
puzzling in places, was on the whole very good and of great value.
§ 2. The Vowels.
Simple: _a_, _â_, _e_, _ê_, _i_, _î_, _o_, _ô_, _ŏ_, _u_, _û_, _ŭ_, _y_,
_ŷ_.
Compound: _aw_, _ei_, _ey_, _ew_, _oi_, _oy_, _ou_, _ow_.
a. Simple vowels.
1. _a_, short, as _a_ in _man_. Before _l_ and _r_ it is generally
sounded as _o_ in _not_.
2. _â_, long, the lengthened sound of _a_ short, _not_ as the English
broad _a_ in _father_, or long _a_ in _mane_, but as a broad _a_ is
commonly sounded in Cornish English. Thus _bâ_ would have something
between the sound of the English word _bare_ (of course without the _r_
trilled at all) in the mouth of a correct speaker, and the actual sound
of the bleat of a sheep. {56}
In some words, and especially before a liquid followed by a consonant,
_a_ tends to be sounded as _aw_ or short _o_. Thus _âls_, cliff,
_gwander_, weakness, _wartha_, upper, are sounded _awls_, _gwonder_,
_wortha_ or _worra_, and _brâs_, great, is sounded _brawz_.
In unaccented syllables _a_ represents nearly the sound of _u_ in
_until_, or, as a final, the English sound of _a_ at the end of proper
names, such as _Vienna_, _Maria_, etc., which is more or less the final
_e_ of German, _meine_, _deine_, etc., or perhaps the _e_ of the French
words _le_, _de_, _me_, etc.
3. _e_, short, as _e_ in _men_, _pen_, etc.
4. _ê_, long, as _ai_ in _main_, _ay_ in _say_. {57}
5. _i_, short, as _i_ in _in_, _pin_, etc.
6. _î_, long, as _ee_ in _seen_, etc.
7. _o_, short, as _o_ in _on_.
8. _ô_, long, as _aw_ in _dawn_, not as _o_ in _bone_.
9. _ŏ_, obscure, as _o_ in _London_, _ton_, etc.
10. _u_, short, as _u_ in _full_.
11. _û_, long, as _oo_ in _fool_.
12. _ǔ_, obscure, as _u_ in _until_.
13. _ŷ_, long, as _i_ in _mine_.
14. _y_, short, as _y_ in _carry_, _marry_, etc. This is used chiefly
as an unaccented final in a word of more than one syllable.
In the case of the letter _y_, there is a variation of sound in such
monosyllables as _nŷ_, _whŷ_, _jŷ_, _hŷ_ under certain circumstances. In
this system of spelling the circumflex is omitted when these words are
enclitic.
b. Compound vowels.
Of these, _aw_, _ai_, _ei_, _ay_, _ey_, _ou_, are only repetitions of the
simple vowels _ô_, _û_, and _ŷ_. The other four have sounds not
otherwise represented.
1. _aw_ has the same sound as _ô_. It is very rarely used.
2. _ai_, _ay_, _ei_, _ey_, have nearly the same sound as _ŷ_, rather
more diphthongalised.
3. _eu_, _ew_ have the sound of _ew_ in the English word _dew_, the
usual English long _u_. This sound is also represented in Cornish by _y_
consonant followed by _u_, as in the word _yu_, is, which has exactly the
sound of the English personal pronoun _you_.
4. _oi_, _oy_ have the sound of _oy_ in _boy_.
5. _Ow_ has two sounds—(1) as an unaccented final, as _o_ in _bone_.
This is also its sound when it occurs without any consonant, in the
possessive pronoun _ow_, my, and the participle particle _ow_; (2) in
other cases it sounds as _ou_ in _you_, and rarely as _ow_ in _now_.
6. _Ou_ has the same sound as _û_, and as the second sound of _ow_. It
is the regular symbol for that sound in Breton, and very commonly in the
Cornish dramas, where, as in Breton, _u_ commonly represented,
approximately, the French _u_, which later became _î_ or _ew_.
General Remarks on the Vowels.
In the Middle Cornish manuscripts the vowels are represented in various
ways, and there is a special uncertainty about unaccented and obscure
vowels.
Vowels were sometimes lengthened by doubling, or by adding a _y_, and
rarely, until Jordan’s _Creation_, by adding a mute _e_ after the closing
consonant; but often quantity was not indicated at all.
Long _î_ (_ee_ in _see_) was more often than not represented by _y_, but,
as in Welsh, _y_ not infrequently represented the obscure vowel (_u_ in
_until_), and often a sound which later became a short _e_, but in
unaccented syllables was, as is not unusually the case in English, more
of the nature of the obscure vowel, or perhaps something between that and
a short _i_. Indeed all unaccented vowels tend to become obscure, very
much as they do in English, and hence are variously expressed.
The _u_ of the earlier MSS. probably once represented approximately the
French _u_ or the German _u_, the _u_ of Devon and East Cornwall English,
or the _ao_ of Scottish Gaelic, not exactly the same sounds, but very
near to each other. As in Greek and Welsh, this sound approached nearer
and nearer to _î_ (_ee_ in _seen_), until in Cornish it ceased to be
recognised as having any _u_ sound in it at all. In Welsh it is still
written as _u_, and in carefully spoken Welsh is quite distinguishable
from _î_. In Breton the sound is still approximately that of the French
_u_. In some words in Cornish this sound became _ew_ (as in the English
word _few_) and rarely _û_ (_oo_ in _moon_), but generally it became _î_
(English _ee_). {59a}
What was once the sound of the French and Breton _eu_ or the German _o_,
was represented in the MSS. by _u_, _eu_, _ue_. Later this became _ê_
(_ay_ in _may_). Thus, _dueth_ or _duth_, “came,” became _dêth_; _luen_,
_leun_, “full,” became _lên_; _due_, “comes,” became _dê_; _mur_, _meur_,
“great,” became _mêr_. This change is found occasionally as early as the
_Poem of the Passion_. The rhythm shows that _ue_ and _eu_ form only one
syllable. In the case of _lues_ (=_luas_), many, which later became
_lîas_ (or _leeas_), the rhythm shows that the _u_ and _e_ did not form a
single vowel. Occasionally, as in the second person plural of certain
tenses, _eu_ of the early MSS. became _ew_, which it was probably
intended to represent, but was often confused with _ou_ (=_û_ or _oo_).
{59b}
The sound of _ô_ or _aw_, as it certainly became in later Cornish, was
represented by _e_, _o_, _oy_, _a_, _oa_, _ao_, _au_, _aw_. The tendency
to pronounce _a_ as _aw_ or short _o_ before _l_, _n_, _r_, doubled or
followed by a consonant, and sometimes single, is very marked in the
spelling of late Cornish, and in the present pronunciation of
place-names. There is no evidence of its age in Cornish; but it is very
common in English and Irish, though unknown in standard Welsh or Breton.
There seems no doubt, by the same evidence, that a long _y_ of older
Cornish often became _i_, as in the English word _mine_. Vulgarly, as
with the English long i, it sometimes even became _oy_. Boson writes
_choy_ for _chy_, house, but Lhuyd writes it _tshẏi_ or _tshei_, which
last is its usual modern sound in place-names. _Nŷ_, we, _whŷ_, you,
_jŷ_, they, and _hŷ_, she, are written _nei_, _huei_, _dzhei_, _hei_, by
Lhuyd, and Jenkins of Alverton, using the earlier form of the third
person plural, written _y_ in the Dramas, spells it _eye_. Yet there are
cases where the older pronunciation is retained, and probably this was
always the case when the words were enclitic. Prof. Loth has pointed out
a similar change in the Quiberon sub-dialect of Vannetais Breton, and
that in some of the same words.
In the unscientific spelling of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
that is to say, in the system of every one except Lhuyd, and occasionally
of Gwavas and Tonkin when they followed Lhuyd, the English values of the
period were often given to the letters; but the following were vowel
symbols in general use:—
For _â_ of the _a_, _aa_ Lhuyd _â_.
present system
,, _a_ ,, _a_, _u_, _e_, _o_ ,, _a_.
,, _ê_ ,, _ea_ ,, _ê_.
,, _e_ ,, _e_, _i_ ,, _e_.
,, _î_ ,, _ee_ ,, _î_, _ŷ_.
,, _i_ ,, _i_ ,, _i_.
,, _ô_, _aw_ ,, _oa_, _o_, _aw_, Lhuyd writes an inverted
_au_, _ao_ _a_ or _ô_.
,, _o_ ,, _o_ Lhuyd _o_.
,, _ŏ_, _ŭ_, _ă_ ,, _o_, _u_, _a_, _e_ ,, _ẏ_.
,, _ŭ_, _ou_ ,, _u_, _oo_, _ou_ ,, _ụ_, _û_.
,, _ow_ ,, _ô_, _ow_, _ou_, _au_ ,, _oụ_, _o_, _ô_.
,, _u_ ,, _u_, _oo_ ,, _u_.
,, _ew_, _yu_, _eu_ _ew_, _yu_, _yw_ ,, _iụ_, _yụ_, _eụ_.
,,
,, _ŷ_, _ei_, _ay_ ,, _y_, _ei_, _ay_ ,, _ei_, _y_, _ẏ_.
,, _y_ ,, _y_, _i_, _e_ ,, _y_, _i_.
A final _e_ mute was often used to lengthen a vowel, as in English. Many
names of places and persons retain this _e_ mute at the present day, and
when the preceding vowel is _a_, educated persons generally give it the
sound of the English long _a_ in _mane_, but that is a change analogous
to the modern vulgarism of pronouncing _clerk_ as _clurk_ instead of
_clark_. The proper sound of the Cornish _â_ is still heard in such
words in the mouths of the peasantry. Compare such a name as _Polglaze_
in the two pronunciations.
§ 3. The Consonants.
Simple: _b_, _c_, _d_, _f_, _g_, _h_, _j_, _k_, _l_, _m_, _n_, _p_, _q_,
_r_, _s_, _t_, _v_, _w_, _y_, _z_.
Compound: _bm_, _ch_, _dh_, _dn_, _gw_, _gh_, _ng_, _qw_, _sh_, _th_,
_wh_, _zh_, _gwl_, _gwr_, _qwr_, _wl_, _wr_.
a. Simple consonants.
1. _b_ has the same sound as in English.
2. _c_ is always hard, being used only before _a_, _o_, _u_. The same
sound before _e_, _i_, _y_ is represented by _k_.
3. _d_ before _a_, _o_, _u_ is usually hard, as in English, but, as in
Gaelic, before _e_, _i_, _y_ it has a sound approaching to _j_, or like
_di_ in _soldier_. In the MSS. a soft _g_ was often written for _d_ in
such cases. It is a common change in many languages. Cf. the Italian
_oggi_, to-day, for the Latin _hodie_.
4. _f_ has the same sound as in English. In the MSS. it is often
confused with _v_. As a final it is very lightly sounded.
5. _g_ is always hard, as in _get_, _go_. The soft _g_, as in _gin_, is
here represented by _j_, but in the MSS. _g_ was often used for it.
6. _h_ has two degrees of sound. As an initial it is rather more
lightly sounded than in English, except when it is a mutation of _c_ (see
Chapter II.), when it is more strongly sounded. Then, and when it occurs
in the middle of a word, it represents in a lighter form the guttural
_c’h_ of Breton, the _ch_ of German, Welsh, and Gaelic, or the guttural
_gh_ of older English. At the end of a word this is to be written _gh_.
It is a smooth guttural, as in Scottish Gaelic, without the rasping sound
which it has in colloquial Welsh or in German.
7. _j_ is sounded as in English. It generally represents what was once
written _s_. Lhuyd writes _dzh_ for this sound, and the MSS. often
represent it by _g_.
8. _k_ is generally only used before _e_, _i_, _y_, or as a final. It
has the same sound as in English. It often happens in grammatical
inflections that a broad root vowel is changed to a thin one. In such
cases if the preceding letter is a _c_ it must be changed to _k_.
9. _l_ has the ordinary English sound. Sometimes a double _l_ of
earlier Cornish was written _lh_ (_telhar_, place, for _teller_). This
may perhaps represent the aspirated _ll_ of Welsh, or (as in Portuguese)
the _l mouillé_ (as _li_ in _valiant_).
10. _m_ has usually the same sound as in English. When it follows a
_short_ vowel in an _accented syllable_ or a _monosyllable_, it has a
peculiar sound as though a _b_ were prefixed to it, or as though the
speaker had a slight cold in the head. This _b_ was frequently written
in the later MSS., and in the mouths of less educated persons the _b_
supplanted the _m_ altogether. Thus _lemmyn_, now, became successively
_lebman_ and _lebban_. The vanishing of the _m_ altogether did not occur
in monosyllables, and it is undesirable to imitate it in other words. In
the system of spelling adopted in this book, the _b_ will be written in
cases where it was habitually written in later Cornish, but even when it
is not written it is always to be sounded in the case of _short_ vowels
in _accented_ syllables or _monosyllables_.
11. _n_ is usually sounded as in English. When it follows a _short_
vowel in an _accented_ syllable or in a _monosyllable_, a _d_ sound
(analogous to the _b_ sound with _m_) precedes it. This _d_ is often
written in the later MSS., and will be used in this book in cases where
it is regularly found in later Cornish, but it is to be pronounced even
where it is not written. In words of more than one syllable {63} the _d_
often supplanted the _n_ (e.g. _henna_, that, became successively _hedna_
and _hedda_), and monosyllables were sometimes made into dissyllables by
it (e.g. _pen_, _pedn_, _pedden_); but both of these are vulgarisms not
to be imitated.
12. _p_ is sounded as in English.
13. _q_ is sounded as in English, and is always followed by _w_. It is
generally used in an initial mutation (see Chapter II.) of _gw_, but
occurs occasionally, followed by _w_, as a radical sound.
14. _r_ has the same sound as in correct English, that is to say, it is
very slightly heard when followed by a consonant or at the end of a word,
unless the next word begins with a vowel, but, as in English, it often
influences the preceding vowel. Its full sound is trilled, not guttural.
15. _s_ is the most puzzling of the consonants. It had probably four or
five different values in the MSS., and might represent _s_, _z_, _sh_,
_zh,_ _j_ according to circumstances. As an initial, or before _c_, _k_,
_f_, _l_, _m_, _n,_ _p_, _q_, _r_, _t_, _w_, it was generally _s_, as in
_so_; as a final, and before _b_, _d_, _g_, _j_, _v_, it was normally _z_
or as _s_ in _rose_. But between two vowels in the same word, or coming
after another consonant and followed by a vowel, or as a final followed
by a word beginning with a vowel and closely connected grammatically with
its predecessor, it had commonly the sound of _j_, so much so that _g_
soft was often substituted for it, and there are cases where even an
initial _s_ must have meant _sh_ or _zh_. Thus we find _cowsesow_,
speeches, written _cowgegyow_, _carensa_, love, _carenga_ (for
_carenja_), and in place-names, though we find _Nanskeval_, _Nanspean_,
_Nanswidn_ when the epithet begins with a consonant, when it begins with
a vowel we find _Nanjizel_ (=_Nans isal_, the lower valley). Sometimes
in late Cornish the definite _j_ sound so completely superseded the _s_
or _z_, that it or its equivalent, _g_ soft or _dzh_, was always written
for it, and in such cases it is written _j_ in the present system of
spelling, but in other cases the best rules will be to pronounce _s_
1. As an initial; before _c_, _k_, _f_, _l_, _m_, _n_, _p_, _q_, _r_,
_t_, _w_; or when doubled, as _s_ in _so_.
2. As a final, except when the next word, grammatically connected,
begins with a vowel; or before _b_, _d_, _g,_ _j_, _v_, as _z_ or _s_
in _rose_.
3. Between two vowels in the same word; after another consonant and
followed by a vowel; or as a final followed by a grammatically
connected word, such as an epithet, beginning with a vowel, as _j_.
For the last rule compare Mrs. Gamp’s pronunciation of English (in
_Martin Chuzzlewit_). There seems to have been an inherent tendency to
the _j_, _sh_, or _zh_ sounds in every Cornish _s_, {64} but especially
in those which represent a _d_ or _t_ of Welsh and Breton. The writer is
aware that this is a very inadequate discussion of the question, but he
does not wish to be unduly intricate, or to enter into a deep phonetic
explanation. Those who would study the question more minutely are
referred to an article by Prof. J. Loth in vol. xviii. of the _Revue
Celtique_.
16. _t_ before _a_, _o_, _u_ is hard, as in English, but before _e_,
_i_, _y_ has a sound approaching to that of _ch_ in _church_, or to _ti_
in words ending in _tion_. Sometimes _ch_ is written and fully
pronounced where a _t_ was formerly written. Thus _chŷ_, house, was
formerly _ty_, and in the eighteenth century _tî_, thou, was pronounced
and often written _chee_.
17. _v_ is sounded as in English, but is often nearly inaudible at the
end of a word, unless the next word begins with a vowel. Thus _ev_, he,
is often written _e_ in later MSS.
18. _w_, except in compound vowels, is always a consonant, and has the
same sound as in English. For its sound before _l_ and _r_ see Compound
consonants.
19. _y_ consonant is sounded as _y_ consonant in English, or as _j_ in
German. It is always consonant when it precedes a vowel, unless it is
written _ŷ_, when it is a vowel, as in such words as _crŷes_, _tŷak_,
etc.
20. _z_ is only used as an initial, but it is seldom used at all. The
sound is that of an English _z_.
b. Compound consonants.
1. _bm_, _dn_ represent respectively the sound of _m_ and _n_ after a
short vowel in an accented syllable or monosyllable (see _m_, _n_).
There is no vowel sound between the two letters.
2. _ch_ is always sounded as in _church_. It usually represents a
former _t_, or else occurs in borrowed English words.
3. _dh_ is sounded as _th_ in _thy_, _the_, etc., the Welsh _dd_, the
Old English and Icelandic ð, the Modern Greek δ. In the MSS. it is
represented by _th_ or [Picture: Letter]. Lhuyd writes it δ. {65}
4. _th_ (written [Picture: Letter] by Lhuyd) is sounded as _th_ in
_thin_, _thick_, etc., the Welsh _th_, the Old English and Icelandic þ,
the Greek _θ_. At the end of a syllable, especially after _r_, the
sounds of _dh_ and _th_ are very light and tend to become inaudible, and
are often represented by _h_, or omitted altogether. Thus, _gwartha_,
_porth_, _barth_, _lowarth_, _gordhya_, _gortheb_, _kerdh_ often appear
as _gwarha_, _gwarra_, _por_, _barh_, _lowar_, _lowarh_, _gorria_,
_gorreb_, _kerr_. Thus also, _Porthgwartha_ (in St. Levan), is now
written _Porthgwarrah_ and pronounced nearly _Pergworra_.
5. _gh_ is used at the end of words for the strong or guttural _h_.
Lhuyd writes a Greek χ for this sound.
6. _ng_ (written by Lhuyd with an inverted Irish _g_) has the sound of
_ng_ in _singer_, not as in _finger_ or _manger_.
7. _sh_ has the same sound as in English. It is only used in a few
words of English derivation.
8. In _wh_ the _h_ is always sounded. This combination represents the
Welsh _chw_. Lhuyd writes it _hu_.
9. _zh_ has the broader sound of _sh_, or that of the French _j_.
10. In _gwl_, _gwr_, _qwr_, _wl_, _wr_ there is a very light but quite
audible sound of _w_ before the _l_ or _r_. So light is the _w_ that it
was often omitted in the MSS. Thus _gwlasketh_, kingdom, _gwrîg_, did,
and the mutation _wrîg_ were sometimes written _glasketh_, _grîg_, _rîg_.
But this was incorrect.
* * * * *
There must have been among Cornish speakers a tendency to a somewhat
blurred sound of certain letters, as though there were an obstruction of
some sort in their vocal organs, not altogether unlike that attributed on
the stage and in fiction, with some foundation in fact, to the Hebrew
race. This is shown by the tendency to turn _s_ and _z_ into _sh_ and
_zh_, and to insert _b_ before _m_, and _d_ before _n_. In the English
spoken in Cornwall at the present day this tendency has quite
disappeared, and the pronunciation, though not always the same as the
standard English, is remarkably crisp and clear. Readers are solemnly
warned against attempting to base or support any theories of Jewish or
even of Phœnician influence in Cornwall on the above coincidence.
These directions for pronunciation must needs be only approximate. The
exact phonetics are not attainable. 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.