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486 THE BRYTHONIC LANGUAGES

—— (1986) A Grammar of Modern Breton, Berlin, New York and Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter.

—— (1995) ‘Barriers to the standardization of the Breton language’, Transactions of the Philologi-

cal Society, 93–1, pp. 51–93.

—— (2004) Standard Breton. Background, Context, and Grammar. Munich: LINCOM Europa.

Press, I. and ar Bihan, H. (2004) Colloquial Breton, London and New York: Routledge (available

with or without 2 cassettes and 2 CDs).

Sinou, A. (1999) Le breton de Léchiagat – Phonologie, Lannuon: Hor Yezh.

—— (2000) Brezhoneg Lechiagad – Geriaoueg, Lannuon: Hor Yezh.

Sommerfelt, A. (1920) Le breton parlé à Saint- Pol- de- Léon, Rennes: Imprimeries Réunies (or 1921;

new edition by F. Falc’hun and M. Oftedal: Oslo, Bergen and Tromsø: Universitetsforlaget,

1978).

Stephens, J. (1990) ‘Non- ﬁ nite clauses in Breton’, in Ball et al. (1990), pp. 151–65.

—— (1993) ‘Breton’, in Ball with Fife (1993), pp. 349–409.

Ternes, E. (1970), Grammaire structurale du breton de l’Ile de Groix, Heidelberg: Carl Winter

Universitätsverlag.

—— (1992) ‘The Breton language’, in Macaulay (1992), pp. 371–452.

Timm, Lenora A. (1980) ‘Bilingualism, diglossia and language shift in Brittany’, International

Journal of the Sociology of Language, 25, pp. 29–41.

—— (1984) ‘The segmental phonology of Carhaisien Breton’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie,

40, pp. 118–92.

—— (1987a) ‘The verb morphology of Carhaisen Breton’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, 42,

pp. 242–92.

—— (1987b) ‘Cleft structures in Breton’, Word, 38, pp. 127–41.

—— (1988) ‘Relative clause formation in Breton’, Word, 39/2, pp. 79–107.

—— (1989a) ‘Word order in twentieth- century Breton’, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory,

7, pp. 361–78.

—— (1989b) ‘The problem of VP in a VSO language’, General Linguistics, 29/4, pp. 247–71.

—— (1990) ‘Some observations on the syntax of the Breton verbal noun’, in Ball et al. (1990), pp.

189–208.

—— (1991) ‘The discourse pragmatics of NO- initial sentences in Breton’, in Fife and Poppe (1991),

pp. 275–310.

—— (1992) ‘Bretons’, Encyclopedia of World Cultures, New Haven, CT: Human Relations Area

Files.

—— (1994) ‘The limits of code- switching constraints, with some evidence from Breton/French

switching’, Journal of Celtic Linguistics

, 3: 95–134.

—— (1995) ‘Pronominal A-

forms in Breton: a discourse- based analysis’, Journal of Celtic Linguis-

tics, 4: 1–33.

Trépos, P. (1957) Le pluriel breton, Brest: Emgleo Breiz.

—— (1968) Grammaire bretonne, Rennes: Simon (unﬁ nished, posthumous; reprinted 1980 Rennes:

Ouest- France and Brest: Brud Nevez, 1994).

Tricoire, J. (1963, 1974), Komzom, lennom ha skrivom brezoneg. Parlons, lisons et écrivons le

breton. Le breton par le disque, I– II, Brest: Emgleo Breiz (Part 1 originally Rennes: Imprimeries

Réunies, 1955; two volumes and two vinyl discs).

Troude, A. (1886) Nouveau dictionnaire pratique français et Breton du dialecte de Léon, Brest:

Lefournier (3rd edition. Online: < http://dico.troude.free.fr/>).

Urien, J.- Y. (1978), ‘Sav- poent ar yezhoniezh. Ar meizad a dalvoud strukturel: Skouer ar rann[où]

igoù- verb’, Hor Yezh, 119: 37–54.

—— (1987) La trame d’une langue. Le Breton, Lesneven: Mouladurioù Hor Yezh.

Waquet, H. and de Saint- Jouan, R. (1975) Histoire de la Bretagne, Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France.

Wmffre, Iwan (1998) Central Breton, Munich: Lincom.

—— (2007) Breton Orthographies and Dialects. Volumes 1 and 2. The Twentieth- Century Orthog-

raphy War in Brittany, Oxford: Peter Lang.

BRETON 487

The Internet addresses of the Université de Haute Bretagne/Rennes 2 and the Université de Bretagne

Occidentale are, respectively: www.uhb.fr> and <www.univ- brest.fr>. Particularly useful is that of

the Oﬁ s ar brezoneg: <www.oﬁ s- bzh.org>. Well worth looking at are Gwagenn TV: <gwagenn.tv>,

<blog.gwagenn.tv> and Setu Breizh, the Tele Kreiz Breizh: <setubzh.blogspot.com>.

There are many more; input ‘kervarker’, ‘bremaik’, ‘Breton language’, ‘state of Breton’, etc. into

a search engine.

To learn Breton by correspondence, contact Skol OBER: <www.skolober.com/index.php?

yezh=0>

488 THE BRYTHONIC LANGUAGES

CHAPTER 11

CORNISH

Ken George

CHRONOLOGICAL PHASES OF CORNISH

The subject of this chapter is Traditional Cornish, which came into existence in about

AD 600, as a direct development of the south- western dialect of Late British; it was

spoken until about 1800, when it ceased to exist as a living community language. A resid-

ual knowledge of scraps of the language lasted throughout the nineteenth century (Lyon

2001). In the early twentieth century, Cornish was revived, and this form (Revived Cor-

nish) is dealt with in chapter 16.

It is usual to divide the history of Traditional Cornish into four phases:

1 Primitive Cornish (PrimC) is the name given to the earliest phase of the language,

approximately AD 600 to 800, which has no written records.

2 Old Cornish (OldC) refers to the phase from 800 to 1200, the later date being chosen

to be sure of including the Vocabularium Cornicum (see the section on sources

below).

3 Middle Cornish (MidC) lasted from 1200 to c. 1575. The second half of this phase

contains 75 per cent of the extant traditional corpus.

4 Late Cornish (LateC) lasted from c. 1575 to 1800. It is sometimes referred to Modern

Cornish, by analogy with Modern English, Modern French, etc., but this term is con-

sidered inappropriate, because of the special position of present- day Cornish as a

revived language. In this chapter the term Late Cornish will be used, in which the

word late means both ‘tardy’ (Fr. cornique tardif) and ‘defunct’. The boundary

between Middle Cornish and Late Cornish is not clear- cut: phonologically, the tran-

sition period was 1550 to 1600; orthographically (see section below on orthography),

there was overlap from about 1540 to as late as 1640. The play Creacon of the World

(1611) is treated here as belonging to Middle Cornish.

AN OUTLINE OF THE EXTERNAL HISTORY OF CORNISH

Other works

Brief histories of Cornish have been published by Hooper (1969), Simon Evans (1969)

and by Beresford Ellis (1971) in English, by Piette (1959) in Breton, and by Sutton (1969)

in Esperanto. More extended works are a semi- popular book by Beresford Ellis (1974)

CORNISH 489

and the ﬁ rst two parts of a projected trilogy (Fudge 1982 and Pool 1982). For general his-

tories of Cornwall, the reader may wish to compare the different approaches taken by

Halliday (1959), Payton (1992) and Angarrack (2002).

600 to 900: Celtic kingdom

The oldest part of the history of Cornish is also the most obscure, but useful references are

Pearce (1978) and Thomas (1986).

In 577, the Saxons won the battle of Dyrham, near Bath, and soon afterwards their

westward expansion cut communication by land between the Celtic speakers in Wales

and those in the south- west peninsula. The Saxons advanced south- westward, so that by

c. 725, the whole of the peninsula except Cornwall was occupied. The relative ease with

which this was achieved may be due to the partial depopulation of Devon as a result of the

second migration to Brittany, c. 650 (Fleuriot 1980).

During the period 700 to 900, Cornwall was ruled by a series of kings, among whom

we know the names of Gerent (ﬂ . 710), Dungarth (drowned c. 875), and ‘Ricatus’ (early

tenth century). The Welsh text Brut y Tywysogyon (see Phillimore 1888) tells of a battle

at Heil won by the Cornish c. 722; and the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle (Plummer 1892–99)

relates a Saxon victory over a combined force of Cornish and Danes at Hingston Down,

just west of the Tamar, in 838.

900 to 1050: Saxon province

In the year 936, Athelstan ﬁ xed the boundary between the Saxons and the Celts as the

River Tamar. In the north- east of Cornwall, however, the effective boundary was the

River Ottery; this is shown by the fact that only 5 per cent of the places in the triangle

between the two rivers and the sea have Cornish names (see Figure 11.1). In the tenth

century, the Saxon apparatus of local government was introduced: Cornwall was divided

into six hundreds, ﬁ ve of them having Cornish names. Although Athelstan appointed a

bishop with a Cornish name, the Bodmin Gospels (see sources section below) show that

the Roman Catholic rite now superseded the Celtic Catholic rite. The dominance of the

Saxon overlords is illustrated by the names of the masters and serfs in the glosses of the

Bodmin Gospels; most of the masters had Saxon names, and most of the serfs had Cor-

nish names.

1050 to 1300: under the Normans

The increasing dominance of English was halted by the Norman invasion. After 1066,

English found itself between the Norman- French spoken by the ruling classes and the

Cornish spoken by the mass of the population. Latin was used for ofﬁ cial documents, and

by the clergy in church services; but priests had to know Cornish in order to preach and to

hear confessions.

Cornwall was diverse, not only linguistically, but also demographically. Beside the

Cornish majority, there were English, Irish, Normans, Flemings and Bretons. In places,

the Bretons formed more than 10 per cent of the population; they were found not only in

positions of authority, since a great many had come over with William the Conqueror, but

subsequently among the lower classes, since wages were higher in Cornwall than in Brit-

tany (Jenkin 1992). This leads us to suppose that Cornish and Breton were still sufﬁ ciently

close as to be mutually intelligible. Communications between Cornwall and Brittany were

490 THE BRYTHONIC LANGUAGES

rapid (one day’s voyage compared with at least six days’ ride to London). Saunders (1984)

compared the Cornu- Breton linguistic continuum to Anglo- American which developed

half a millennium later.

1300 to 1500: the heyday of Cornish

The heyday of Cornish was the late Middle Ages. Mystery plays in Cornish were per-

formed at open- air theatres. The sites of about thirty of these plenys an gwary have been

identiﬁ ed in mid- and west Cornwall.

In the fourteenth century, English displaced Norman- French and to some extent Latin:

ironically, its cause was advanced by three Cornishmen.

During the same period, some twenty towns began to grow in Cornwall. Certain of

these in mid- and west Cornwall have Cornish street- names, indicating that the language

was not conﬁ ned to rural areas.

1500 to 1650: decline of the language

Maps produced during Tudor times, and expressions such as Anglia et Cornubia, show

that Cornwall was considered, at least by some, as separate from England. Three unsuc-

cessful attempts were made by the Cornish to assert their separate status (Stoyle 2002):

i the rising of 1497;

ii the Prayer- Book ‘Rebellion’ of 1549;

iii the War of the Five Nations (usually termed the Civil War), 1642–6.

10 km

Cornish in Scilly

died out c. 1660

1300

1400

1500

1600

1650

1700

1750

R. Tamar

R. Tam

1200

Figure 11.1 The westward retreat of traditional Cornish

CORNISH 491

The Reformation was the prime cause of the decline of Cornish, and marked the end of an

era. In particular:

a traditional ties with Brittany were severely reduced after 1532, when that country

was linked to France;

b the college of Glasney, where the mystery plays are believed to have been composed,

was suppressed in 1545;

c English was introduced into religious services in 1549.

In 1560, the Church recommended that the teaching of catechism in Welsh and Cornish

be made lawful. In the event, the necessary act was passed only for Welsh. The Bible was

never translated into Cornish.

During the war of 1642–6, Cornwall, for the most part Royalist, was invaded thrice by

the Parliamentary forces (Coate 1963). The consequent disruption is sometimes held to be

a factor in the decline of Cornish, but it should be remembered that all but the last inva-

sion affected only the east of Cornwall, where Cornish was no longer spoken at this date.

Interestingly, Cornish was used as a ‘secret’ language by troops in the war.

1650 to 1750: the Newlyn School

Sermons in Cornish were preached at Landewednack until about 1678; about this time the

last of the monoglots were dying out, so that subsequently there was no need to preach

in Cornish. It was to be over 250 years before the language would again be used in a

sermon.

A group of educated men living in and around Newlyn realized that Cornish was

doomed, and worked during the years 1660 to 1730 to record its last stages. They col-

lected songs and stories, wrote poems, translated portions of scripture, and corresponded

with one another in Cornish. Into their midst came in 1701 the great Celtic scholar Edward

Lhuyd. He spent four months in Cornwall, collecting as much of the language as he could

(Williams 1993); and later he published some of his ﬁ ndings (Lhuyd 1707).

1750 to 1800: demise

Cornish speakers were so few in number that Borlase (1758) wrote that the language

had ‘altogether ceased, so as not to be used anywhere in conversation’. Had he ventured

but ten kilometres from his home in Ludgvan, he could have heard Cornish still in use.

This was left to an English antiquary, Daines Barrington, who ‘discovered’ a number of

Cornish speakers in Mousehole, notably Dolly Pentreath (d. 1777), reputedly the last

traditional native speaker. She was, however, outlived by speakers such as William Bod-

inar, who had learned Cornish as a second language. In 1776 Bodinar wrote the poignant

comment:

Nag es moye vel pager po pemp en dreau nye ell clapia Cornoack leben,

pobel coath pager egence blouth, Cornoack ewe all neceaves gen poble younk.

‘There are no more than four or ﬁ ve in our village who can speak Cornish now,

old folk of fourscore years. Cornish is all forgotten by young people.’

Evidence on the ﬁ nal expiration of traditional Cornish is lacking. By 1800, at the latest,

the language had ceased to be used as a means of communication.

492 THE BRYTHONIC LANGUAGES

Demographic history of Cornish

Table 11.1 (taken from George 1986b) gives an estimate of the number of Cornish speak-

ers. Figure 11.1 shows the westward retreat of the eastern boundary of the area where

Cornish was spoken; the western part is based on Spriggs (2003), and the eastern part

(which is less deﬁ nite) on George (1986b) and Holmes (2003). The map and table

indicate:

a the early settlement by the Saxons in the north- east of Cornwall;

b the faster rate of retreat during the phase of Late Cornish (~ 30 km per century) com-

pared with that during the Middle Ages (~ 10 km per century);

c a maximum of between 30,000 and 40,000 Cornish speakers during the period 1200–

1550, that is, a sufﬁ ciently large number to support the performances of the mystery

plays.

Table 11.1 Estimated numbers of Cornish speakers

Year P Q C Year P Q C

1050 16,000 15,000 95% 1450 62,000 33,000 54%

1100 21,000 20,000 94% 1500 69,000 33,000 48%

1150 28,000 26,000 93% 1550 76,000 30,000 40%

1200 35,000 30,000 86% 1600 84,000 22,000 26%

1250 43,000 34,000 79% 1650 93,000 14,000 15%

1300 52,000 38,000 73% 1700 106,000 5,000 5%

1350 48,000 32,000 67% 1750 140,000 very few >0%

1400 55,000 34,000 61% 1800 192,000 nil 0%

Key: P = estimated total population of Cornwall; Q = estimated number of Cornish speakers; C =

estimated percentage of population who spoke Cornish.

SOURCES

A full description of the extant Cornish literature then known is to be found in Jenner

(1904: 24–46). The following is a list of the more important sources, with their usual

abbreviations.

Old Cornish

‘List of Saints’ (c. 925): a list of forty- eight Brittonic names;

‘Bodmin Manumissions’ (c. 950–1150): the names of Cornish people, written in the mar-

gins of a Latin Bible dating from the tenth century;

Vocabularium Cornicum (VC.) (c. 1200): a Latin–Cornish glossary containing 961 entries

arranged thematically, based on a Latin–English glossary written about 100 years

earlier by Aelfric.

CORNISH 493

Middle Cornish

‘Charter Endorsement’ (c. 1375): forty- one lines of verse, which were discovered by

Jenner in 1877, written on the back of a land- charter dated 1340;

Pascon agan Arluth (MC) (c. 1400): a moving poem describing the Passion of Christ,

referred to in English as ‘The Passion Poem’, or as ‘Mount Calvary’, a name given

by Davies Gilbert (1826);

‘The Ordinalia’ (Ord.) (c. 1425): a cycle of religious plays, originally apparently four in

number, but only three of which are extant. These are:

Origo Mundi (OM): a sequence of scenes from the Old Testament, from the Creation to

the building of Solomon’s Temple;

Passio Christi (PC): the Temptation of Christ, and the events of Holy Week as far as the

Cruciﬁ xion; six short passages were extracted from MC., as described by Murdoch

(1979).

Resurrectio Domini (RD): the Resurrection, Ascension, plus the Death of Pilate.

The fourth play (if it ever existed) concerned the childhood of Christ. This gap has been

ﬁ lled by a recent composition (George 2006b). The Ordinalia were almost certainly

written at Glasney College, Penryn. They have received more attention than any

other Cornish literature, for example, in the form of modern translation (Harris 1969,

Kent 2006) and dramatic criticism (Longsworth 1967, Bakere 1980, Murdoch 1993).

They contain material from extra- biblical sources, particularly the Legend of the

Rood (Halliday 1955).

Beunans Ke (BK) (?c. 1450): a recently discovered work (incomplete), based on the Life

of St Ke, patron saint of Kea parish, apparently a two- day play; the ﬁ rst day concerns

Ke in Cornwall, and the second is about King Arthur, being based on Geoffrey of

Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae.

Beunans Meriasek (BM), by Radulphus Ton (1504): a dramatized account of the Life of St

Meriasek, patron saint of Camborne, designed for a two- day performance. The play

is set in Brittany, Cornwall and Rome, and its themes are intertwined in an apparently

disjointed manner.

‘Tregear Homilies’ (TH) (c. 1558): a translation from English of twelve Catholic homilies

written by Bishop Bonner in 1555, and the most extensive piece of Cornish prose in

the traditional corpus.

Sacrament of the Altar (SA), a thirteenth homily, probably translated from English by

Thomas Stephyn in 1576.

Creacon of the World (CW), by William Jordan (1611): the ﬁ rst part of a play meant to

last for two (or more) days. It covers the events in Genesis, from the Creation to the

Flood, and includes a few passages taken from Origo Mundi.

Late Cornish

‘John of Chyannor’, by Nicholas Boson (c. 1660): a version of the international folk-

tale ‘The Servant’s Good Counsels’. A manuscript of sections 1 to 14 exists in John

Boson’s hand, and the whole tale was printed by Lhuyd (1707: 251–3) in his own

orthography, with a translation into Welsh;

Nebbaz Gerriau dro tho Carnoack, by Nicholas Boson (c. 1670): a description of the con-

temporary plight of Cornish, with a translation into English;

494 THE BRYTHONIC LANGUAGES

Translations from the Bible, by William Rowe (c. 1690): translations of Genesis 3, the

Ten Commandments, Matthew 2 and Matthew 4, by a native Cornish speaker;

Translation of Genesis 1, by John Boson (c. 1720);

Letter of William Bodinar (1776): letter about the state of the language, and how Bodinar

came to learn it.

In addition, mention must be made of the dictionaries by Lhuyd (1707) and Pryce (1790);

although not works of literature, they contain words not found elsewhere. Lhuyd’s work

is based partly on his research among Cornish speakers in 1701; Pryce’s work is substan-

tially that of Tonkin, whom he plagiarized.

Secondary sources

VC, MC, the Ordinalia and CW were known to Lhuyd, and Tonkin’s hand- written copies

of them were used by Pryce (1790) in his dictionary. Stokes and Norris published

printed editions of these works, and of BM, in the nineteenth century. Nance pro-

duced typescript editions of the plays, but published only extracts. In the magazine

Old Cornwall he published numerous pieces from Late Cornish. More recent edi-

tions of the Cornish texts are listed in Table 11.2.

Table 11.2 Most recent editions of the principal Cornish texts

Year of

discovery

Cornish Language

Board’s editions

Other recent editions

‘List of Saints’ c. 1938 Olson & Padel 1986 TN

Vocabularium

Cornicum

c. 1695 Calvete 2005 TKEN Graves 1962 TEN

‘Charter Endorsement’ 1877 Edwards 1999 TKN Toorians 1991 TEN

Pascon agan Arluth

Edwards 1993

TKEN

Woodhouse 2002 TE

The Ordinalia Edwards 2004a

TKEN 1999b, 2000

Beunans Ke 1999 George 2006a

TKEN

Thomas & Williams 2007

TREN

Beunans Meriasek 1869 Edwards 1996

TKEN

Combellack- Harris 1985 TEN

Tregear Homilies 1948 Edwards 2004 TKE Bice 1994 T

Sacrament of the Altar 1948 Edwards 2004 TKE Bice 1994 T

Creacon of the World Edwards 1998

TKEN

Neuss 1983 TEN

Work of the Bosons Padel 1975 TEN

Bodinar’s letter Pool & Padel 1976 TEN

Key: T = original text; K = version in Kernewek Kemmyn; R = reconstructed version; E = English

translation; N = notes

CORNISH 495

Metrics

None of the extant texts shows such strict rules of versiﬁ cation as do Middle Breton verse

with internal rhymes and Middle Welsh verse with cynghanedd. Most of the lines are

hepta syllabic, but lines of four syllables are sometimes used to increase the pace, for dra-

matic effect. In BK, there are a few lines with ﬁ ve syllables. Most of the stanzas are based

on one of three rhyming schemes: abababab (all but one in MC have this pattern), aabccb

and ababcddc; for details see Bruch (2005). Over 25 per cent of the rhymes in BK are

double (i.e. the last two syllables rhyme); the number of double rhymes in each of the

other works is less than 5 per cent.

Most of the limited range of Late Cornish verse is in rhyming couplets. Only Lhuyd

seems to have been more adventurous, when he tried writing an englyn in Cornish.

Place- names

A considerable amount of information about Cornish is to be found in the historical forms

of place- names. These were collected by Gover (1948), not always accurately. The ele-

ments found in the names were discussed by Padel (1985), who has also examined the

origins of the names on the 1:250,000 map (Padel 1988).

ORTHOGRAPHY

Traditional Cornish had four distinct and different orthographies (those of Old Cornish,

Middle Cornish, Late Cornish and Edward Lhuyd), and the ﬁ rst three of these were based

to a greater or lesser extent on contemporary English orthography.

Until c. 1050, Old Cornish shared a common Brittonic tradition of orthography (ulti-

mately based on that of Latin) with Old Breton and Old Welsh, and it is in this system that

the Saints’ List was written. The Vocabularium Cornicum, however, shows the inﬂ uence

of Old English spelling, especially in the use of the graphemes <þ> (thorn) for /ð/ and <ƿ>

(wynn); see Table 11.3.

Table 11.3 Correspondences between phonemes and graphemes in VC

/i I ɛ a ɔ u œ y/ <i, y i, y e a o u u o, u, ue, e>

/ej aj ɔj uj/ <ei, ey ai oi, oy ui, uy>

/iw Iw ɛw aw ɔw/ <no data iu eu au ou>

/p t k/ <p t k before consonants and a, o, u; ch before e, i, y>

/b d g/<b d- ,- d- ,- t g- ,- g- ,- c>

/f θ x/ <f, ff, ph th, h, t, d, hth, ht, dth ch, h, gh, hc, g,þ>

/v ð ɣ/<u, f d, t, dh, th, þ g, h>

/m n l r/ <m n l r>

/mm nn ll rr/ <mm, m nn, n ll, l rr, r>

/s h j w/ <s h i þ>

Middle Cornish spelling (see Table 11.4) shows variations from text to text which reﬂ ect

the practice of the scribes rather than phonological changes; for example, for /ð/, MC uses