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The Revival of Cornish: An Dasserghyans Kernewek

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John J. Parry
John J. Parry*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois
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Extract

Among the Celtic tongues Cornish occupies a unique place. It is not a wholly dead language like Gaulish and Galatian, and neither is it an actively living one like Welsh and Breton, Irish and Scots Gaelic. Even Manx, few as the speakers of it may be, has maintained a living tradition. But Cornish was practically dead when the revival began in 1904, and it was well on its way to becoming a living language again when the second world war broke out. Whether this revival can survive amid the dislocation of total war remains to be seen.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 61 , Issue 1 , March 1946 , pp. 258 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1946

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References

1 Henry Jenner, A Handbook of the Cornish Language chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature (London: David Nutt, 1904), p. 22.

2 Not to be confused with his Glossary of the Cornish Dialect (1882) which deals with the English dialect of Cornwall.

3 Kernow, 3 (1934), 5-6.

4 Ibid., 8 (1935), 3-4.

5 Ibid., 5 (1934), 5-6.

6 The translation of the Song of Songs made for Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte and published by him in 1859 was in Anglo-Cornish.

7 Kernow, S (1934), 1.

8 Ibid., 7 (1934), 1.

9 Kernow, 12 (1935), 1.

10 Celtic Digest, i, 4 (1938), 20.

11 Kernow, 4 (1934), 2.

12 Ibid., 11 (1935), 10.

13 Kernow, 11 (1935), 1.

14 Caradar's first grammar, Redyans 10.

15 Kernow, 5 (1934), 2.

16 Ibid., 11 (1935), 8; 12 (1935), 11.

17 Kernow, 12 (1935), 2-3.

18 Ibid., 2 (1934), 4.

19 Kernow, 6 (1934), 4.

20 Ibid., p. 10.

21 Ibid., 1 (1934), 4.

22 Jenner has one poem in the form of the Welsh englyn, but with incomplete cynghanedd (Report of the Celtic Congress of 1917, p. 114), and Caradar has one in a form resembling the old warrior's triplet (Kernow, 3, 1). Otherwise Cornish poetry, so far as I am familiar with it, is based upon English models.

23 This paper was read before the Celtic Group of the Modern Language Association at its meeting in December, 1944.