lydgate@reed.UUCP (Lydgate) (12/24/84)
Does any netizen out there speak the ancient tongue of Cornish? This language is related to, but quite different from, Welsh, Breton, Manx, etc. I have some text books and even a cassette, but it would certainly be encouraging to find living, breathing beings who knew how to speak it. I hope that we can find more topics than Irish politics to discuss in this group. Chris Lydgate
ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis) (01/08/85)
Where did you ever locate such a thing as a Cornish grammar? Good luck finding living speakers... I recently located a Breton grammar (for english speakers). Unfortunately, most introductory texts for Celtic languages are frightfully incomplete. As a minimum, I'd hope to find accurate phonetic transcriptions for every word presented. Texts concerning Celtic languages are so hard to find! (my grammar is apparently out of print) It's a pity this newsgroup isn't used for the purpose implied by its name. I'd enjoy hearing anything about Cornish, such as a description of its orthography, phonemes, initial consonant mutations, syntax and grammatical peculiarities, comparison with other Celtic languages, etcetera. -michael
valenz@bnl.UUCP (Greg Valenzuela) (01/15/85)
When I was in Britain this summer, I heard that the last native speaker of
Cornish had died. If this is true, then the only surviving Cornish speakers
would be University professors, on whom the responsibility falls for preserving
the language. If this is not depressing enough, several people I talked to
estimated that of all the Celtic languages, only Welsh had the chance of
surviving well into the future. The reason for this is that Wales is more
economically self-sufficient than, say Ireland or Scotland. Apparently more
and more young people are leaving the poorer regions of Ireland and Scotland,
where they might have spoken Gaelic, for the cities, where the common language
is English.
Anyway, at least we can count on these languages being preserved in folk
music recordings, a good excuse for building up my collection of Celtic music.
Greg Valenzuela
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