Michael Adams, editor of the excellent collection From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages
Revitalized languages, like Cornish, can cause political strife within the heritage group. As Romaine summarizes in From Elvish to Klingon, “In 2004, the installation of a welcome mat in Cornish at the Camborne county offices in southwest Cornwall sparked a heated dispute over how to spell ‘welcome.’ Although the county government tried to defuse the tension by installing signs using all the different spellings (e.g., dynnargh on the welcome mat outside the county offices, but dynargh on another sign inside the building), this approach did not bring the community to consensus.” Paradoxically, then, inventing language in order to define, enact, and empower a community, can fracture said community in the course of its creation.
Thanks, Paul!
The Cornish community was hopelessly fractured to begin with. It’s the Judaean People’s Front all over again, quite literally: Unified Cornish (1929), Common Cornish (1986), Revived Late Cornish aka Modern Cornish (about the same time), Unified Cornish Revised (1995), Standard Cornish (1st edition, 2007), the Standard Written Form (2008), Standard Cornish (2nd edition, 2012; defined as a variant of the Standard Written Form). Fortunately, all this basically only affects orthography, not the spoken language such as it is.
Well, why do they care so much about the spelling? Is there much Cornish literature? They should use the IPA.
What’s Cornish for “pasty”?
AJP:
Most of the literature we have is in Middle Cornish, which unfortunately is 1200-1600, so it’s stiff and archaic by the standards of modern cornophones (a word I just made up), somewhat as Chaucer is to modern anglophones. Late Cornish is sparse, as you’d expect for a language whose last monoglot speaker died in 1676. (It’s not well-defined who the last bilingual speaker was.)
The Cornish Mess is a complicated mix of scholarship, accessibility, and nationalism, plus the general tendency of Celts to engage in endless faction fights without or without reason.
Now if you are a stone-hard nationalist, for whom Corns (another word I just made up) aren’t English and Cornish shouldn’t be either, then you want to work from Middle Cornish, with its relative lack of loanwords and its autonomous though Welshy orthography. If you care more about getting people who, after all, are 100% of them literate in English to use the language, you’ll want something more like Late Cornish with its heavy loanword population and English-y orthography (“Manx is essentially Scottish Gaelic written in English”, that sort of thing). In any case, you have to update the language to handle the 20th century, and in order to do that, you have to understand the system you are updating, despite the fact that our grasp on those systems is hardly better than fragmentary. How would a Cornish-speaker transplanted to today naturally talk about atomic bombs, jazzercise, microwave ovens, and the Internet?
The Cornish for ‘pasty’ is pasti m., pl. pastow.
“cornophones (a word I just made up), ”
You just have no mercy, do you, John?
It sounds like someone who like to listen to jazz.
Despite my name, I am not Cornish, at least, not since the 15th century, as Cornish is not a Cornish name but a Devonian name — the same applies to the Warre-Cornishes (despite AJP’s implication), who are (if there are still any around, otherwise were) distant relatives of mine.
Anyway, enough of that. Some years ago I was in Chile at the time when a big row blew up between Microsoft and various opposing groups of Mapuche. I was in Valdivia, which is not right in the centre of Mapudungún speakers, but close enough for the matter to be well reported in the local newspaper. Microsoft is not a company I’m at all fond of, but in this instance they were the good guys. For reasons best known to themselves they decided the world needed a localized version of Windows in Mapudungún, but they found it impossible to get the Mapudungún speakers to agree on an orthography. Eventually they just went ahead and used what appeared to be the most widely used system. The majority probably were happy, but the minority were very vocal in their opposition, and I think they took Microsoft to court over it. Afterwards the world rather lost interest, so I don’t know what the final outcome was.
Anyway, I think that if they ever try to produce an operating system for a language with only two speakers left they’ll find that the two will be bitterly opposed as to the “correct” way to do it.
–i’ll buy it if they mention Lojban!
PS when i first looked at a Cornish vocabulary, i felt a sudden chill of recognition. i’d been making up words that looked like these all my life…
Cornish is to English as the Nag Hammadi scriptures are to the regular Bible, a kind of shadow.
“English and Scots! Welsh and Scots!! Scots and other Scots!!!”
– Janitor Willie about the Scots and their traditional enemies.
That was totally deliberate.
Thank you, John, for your explanation.
Athel, I may have mentioned I had Francis Warre-Cornish for a Latin master at school.
Damn those Scots!
The specific beef that certain Mapuche had with Microsoft was that the Mapuche owned their language (in the sense of intellectual property), that Microsoft needed their consent to use it, and that Microsoft had not received any such consent. This was only a small part of the orthography wars.
I have not been able to find out what has happened to the court case.
I have a great deal of sympathy for indigenous rights in general, but that specific claim is just stupid and I hope the courts reject it.
AJP: My 4th cousin twice removed — not a very close relation, therefore, and, of course, I never knew him.
I have a suspicion you may have mentioned him before.
I have a great deal of sympathy for indigenous rights in general, but that specific claim is just stupid and I hope the courts reject it.
I’m pretty sure they did. The journalist who wrote about it in El Diario Austral de Valdivia thought the same as you, as far as I remember, as did the people I was staying with. None of them were Mapuche, however.
Damn them indeed. Consider this:
In short, to him that hath shall be given, and to him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Or as the Englishman William Wordsworth reflected at Rob Roy’s grave: