The Cornish Language
And what makes it so special
‘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.’
— Henry Jenner
I. Introduction and Brief History
Cornish is a Brittonic language which, unsurprisingly, finds its home in the Celtic nation of Cornwall, in the south-east of the United Kingdom. Cornish evolved from Common Brittonic (or Proto-Brittonic), which was the language of the Britons from around the 6th century B.C. until the 6th century A.D., during which time it obtained some influence in terms of vocabulary from Latin (‘Church’ is ‘Eglwys’ in Welsh, and ‘Eglos’ in Cornish’).
Cornish is quite close indeed to Breton, such that linguists such as Professor Kenneth Jackson affirmed that, had Cornish not died out for a time, they may have been mutually intelligible, to the tune of Ulster Irish and Gàidhlig in Scotland.
Owing to the expansion of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Wessex, Britons were pushed further south-west to the area now known as Cornwall, and it was during this period (800-1200) that Old Cornish, Kernewek Koth, began to develop. Cornish reached a peak of around 39,000 speakers in the 13th century, after which the number began to decline, but the heaviest blow ever dealt to the Cornish language was the English Reformation. The English-language Anglican Book of Common Prayer was made law, and Cornishmen responded with revolt against the heretical prayerbook, with one of the reasons being precisely that a foreign language was being forced upon them.
After the rebellion failed, Cornish began to be associated with sedition and rebelliousness, and the BCP was not translated into Cornish until the mid-20th century. The Cornish language went extinct at the end of the 18th century, and the last native speaker was traditionally seen as Dolly Pentreath, a fisherwoman, who died in 1777.
The revival of the Cornish language began when Henry Jenner published A Handbook of the Cornish Language in 1904, and the preservation of many works in Cornish has been credited with making its revival a linguistic success. The revival focused on (1) the reconstruction and standardisation of the language for modern use, and (2) the creation of educational materials in order to diffuse the learning of Cornish.
Henry Jenner was a scholar of the Celtic languages of Britain, a Jacobite, and a convert to Roman Catholicism. Pray for the repose of his soul.
The 2021 census listed the number of Cornish speakers at 563, and an estimated 3,000 people are able to say some phrases or hold a simple conversation in Cornish. In 2010, UNESCO recognised that the label of 'extinct' was no longer an accurate description of the Cornish language, and the language is now taught at the University of Cambridge, as well as Skol dy'Sadorn Kernewek, Cornwall's first Cornish-language crèche.
II. Grammatical features
Cornish has no indefinite article, but rather the definite article an, which does not decline for number or gender. Verbs, as in many languages, are declined for tense, mood, number, and person. Cornish makes use of inflected prepositions, which are inflected for person and number. For example, gans, a preposition meaning 'with' or 'by, and be inflected as genev ('with me'), or genowgh ('with you [plural]').
Morphology
As in Breton, there are four types of initial consonant mutation in Cornish, compared to three in Welsh.
There is lenition, or a 'soft' mutation, in feminine singular nouns after the definite article ('an'): kath (cat) > an gath (the cat)
There is spirantisation, or an 'aspirate' mutation, after the possessive ow ('my'): tas (father) > ow thas (my father)
There is provection, or a 'hard' mutation, after the verbal particle ow, which in this context creates a gerund form of the verb: gweles (see) > ow kweles (seeing)
Mixed mutation:
type 1 occurs after the affirmative particle y: gwelav > y hwelav (I see)
occurs after the 2nd person singular pronoun 'th: dorn (hand) > y'th torn (in thy hand)
Syntax
Cornish is largely a verb-subject-object language, but, as with other Celtic languages, this is fluid and subject to change for various emphases. Cornish very frequently engages in fronting constituents, which is to say that parts of the sentence are moved to the start of the sentence for emphasis. For example:
Merryn ov vy. I am Merryn. Literally, ‘Merryn am I’.
Cornish lacks a verb meaning 'to have', and as a result possession is usually indicated through a dative construction, such as:
'ma 'gen ehaz nyi dhen. We have our health. 'ma is the 3rd person singular present tense conjugation of 'to be', 'gen and nyi are first person plural particles, ehaz is 'health' and dhen means 'to us'.
Nouns usually precede the adjective, as in many Romance languages:
Benyn vas. [A] good woman.
III. The Importance of the Cornish Language
Why should Cornishmen learn Cornish? Henry Jenner answered: because they are Cornishmen. Henry Jenner, a true British patriot, knew and affirmed that a Cornishman had ‘as much a 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, 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.’
In other words, to be Cornish truly does mean something important and distinct from being a Herefordshire man or a Warwickshire woman. It means to have a unique Celtic identity, even if it has been shrouded and concealed over the passage of centuries. A collorary of this is indeed that a Cornishman should learn Cornish, because he is Cornish, and Cornish is his. It is very much not a practical thing; neither is it practical to learn Welsh, Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic or Breton. But if we were to rid ourselves of all sense of sentimentality and of the magic of awe and wonder, what a miserable world would be our inheritance.
Is there, though, any value to the Englishman in learning or acquiring a part of the Cornish language, if not its whole? I believe so. There is not the duty in the Englishman to become fluent or even advanced in Cornish; far from it. But there is, I believe, in every educated inhabitant of our island kingdom, the duty to know at least a little of the language which our brothers in the south-west of our isle speak, in which their mothers spoke to their babies, in which their priests instructed their faithful, and in which friends bonded with friends over a pint of beer.