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.