CORNISH
CORNISH.
1. The ancient Celtic language of Cornwall: ‘In Cornwall is two speches: the one is naughty Englyshe, and the other is Cornyshe speche’ ( Andrew Boorde, Introduction of Knowledge, 1547). The language began to decline during the Reformation, and its last known fluent speaker, Dolly Pentreath of the village of Mousehole, died in 1777.
2. Also revived Cornish. The partly ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGE administered by the Kesva Tavas Kernewek (Cornish Language Board), set up in 1967 ‘to promote the study and revival of the Cornish language’. This medium is sometimes referred to by scholars as pseudo-Cornish. The revival began with A Handbook of the Cornish Language (1904) by the Cornish nationalist Henry Jenner, followed by Robert Morton Nance's Cornish for All: A Guide to Unified Cornish (St Ives, 1929), Nance's dictionaries published by the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies, and A. S. D. Smith's grammar Cornish Simplified (1939). The revivalists claim that the traditional accent of English in Cornwall provides a key to Cornish pronunciation. The orthography was developed by Nance from the surviving texts, and vocabulary is extended by analogizing from Breton and Welsh and forming compounds from existing words. See CELTIC LANGUAGES.
1. The ancient Celtic language of Cornwall: ‘In Cornwall is two speches: the one is naughty Englyshe, and the other is Cornyshe speche’ ( Andrew Boorde, Introduction of Knowledge, 1547). The language began to decline during the Reformation, and its last known fluent speaker, Dolly Pentreath of the village of Mousehole, died in 1777.
2. Also revived Cornish. The partly ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGE administered by the Kesva Tavas Kernewek (Cornish Language Board), set up in 1967 ‘to promote the study and revival of the Cornish language’. This medium is sometimes referred to by scholars as pseudo-Cornish. The revival began with A Handbook of the Cornish Language (1904) by the Cornish nationalist Henry Jenner, followed by Robert Morton Nance's Cornish for All: A Guide to Unified Cornish (St Ives, 1929), Nance's dictionaries published by the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies, and A. S. D. Smith's grammar Cornish Simplified (1939). The revivalists claim that the traditional accent of English in Cornwall provides a key to Cornish pronunciation. The orthography was developed by Nance from the surviving texts, and vocabulary is extended by analogizing from Breton and Welsh and forming compounds from existing words. See CELTIC LANGUAGES.
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CORNISH