Saving Cornish

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the NYTimes,  November 17, 2005
Camborne Journal

Saving Cornish: But Stop. Isn't That Spelled With a K?
By SARAH LYALL

CAMBORNE, England - No one knows for sure who the last native speaker of
Cornish was, although some point to Dolly Pentreath, a resident of the
village of Mousehole who died in 1777, apocryphally uttering the Cornish
phrase for "I don't want to speak English." Whatever the truth, sometime
by the 19th century, the language fizzled out completely. Since then,
historians and linguists have tried to revive Cornish, one of a group of
old Celtic languages whose cousins include Gaelic, Welsh and Breton. But
the campaign is not going so well. For one thing, only about 200 people
currently speak it well enough to hold a conversation.

For another, there are four competing groups promoting the language, each
with its own spelling system. Even the word Cornish - spelled variously as
Kernewek, Kernowek, Kernuak and Curnoack - can cause bad temper and
disharmony in the small but passionate Cornish language community. It
might seem like a picayune matter, akin to the rivalry in the film "Monty
Python's Life of Brian" between the Judean People's Front, the Judean
Popular People's Front and the People's Front of Judea. But the issue is
deadly serious to Cornish speakers. This is, after all, the place where
the installation of a Cornish-language welcome mat at the county offices
last winter sparked a serious argument over how to spell "welcome."

"To external observers, it does look silly," said Philip Payton, professor
of Cornish studies at the University of Exeter in Cornwall. "There's
something quite 'Alice in Wonderland' about it. But it's also quite
tragic. But there are resources that could be made available, and there
are people who are proud of their Cornish identity and enthused by the
language and want to see this resolved." Cornwall has always felt like a
neglected stepchild in Britain, with a singular history and wild natural
beauty but a depressed economy and a tourism industry that is dependent,
in part, on its ability to promote its heritage. The county is hoping to
receive nearly $350,000 in local, national and European financing for each
of the next three years to teach and disseminate Cornish.

But until the warring groups can agree on a spelling, there can be no
standard teaching or promotion program - a situation that makes the
government reluctant to hand out the cash. "The government doesn't want
egg on its face by giving money, and then being pilloried by one group or
another for giving it to this form and not that one," said Andrew George,
a member of Parliament from St. Ives. Camborne, a lovely former mining
town in southwest Cornwall, is the scene of one of the most famous
spelling disputes. Some signs and official documents here use the Cornish
translation "Kammbronn," the spelling favored by adherents of the Common
Cornish system. But some people feel almost physically repulsed by the
word, with (as they see it) its clunky K and its offensive double
consonants.

"It made me sick," said Craig Weatherhill, the secretary of Agan Tavas, or
"Our Language," which promotes the Unified Cornish system (preferred
spelling: "Cambron"). "It really offended me. It has absolutely no
precedent in history." The groups - along with Unified and Common Cornish,
there are Late Cornish and Unified Cornish Revised - differ in several
important (to them) ways. Unified Cornish, and its revised form, takes as
its source the language as used in medieval Cornish texts, while Late
Cornish relies on texts from the 17th and 18th century. Common Cornish
relies on the medieval texts, too, but uses a completely different,
phonetic method of spelling devised with the help of a computer in the
late 1980's.

Its adherents, who have the most political power of any of the groups, say
it makes the most sense because the spelling so closely matches the
pronunciation. But other groups find the Common system - in which, for
example, hard C's have been changed to K's, and sibilant C's to S's -
bizarre and eccentric. The Unified, Unified Revised and Late groups say
they are willing to compromise, proposing that an independent panel of
linguists be appointed to arbitrate the dispute. The Common people, they
say, are stonewalling.

"The Common Cornish hierarchy seem to believe that, 'Yes, we will have a
standard form of Cornish - as long as it's ours,' " Mr. Weatherhill, the
Unified Cornish adherent, complained. "And they say, 'There aren't any
external experts - we are the experts.' " Maureen Pierce, secretary of the
Cornish Language Board, who favors Common Cornish, said, "If you can point
the way to impartial, independent language experts, then point the way."
George Ansell, a translator and the language board's publications
director, said he saw little room for compromise and did not want, as he
put it, to "horse-trade" letters.

"Consensus is not the way to devise a spelling system," he said. People
from various camps accuse their opponents of surreptitiously "whacking up
signs in their own system," as one put it. The county government,
meanwhile, has tried to finesse the matter by installing signs using all
the different spellings. Thus, "welcome" is spelled "dynnargh"  on the
welcome mat outside the county offices, but "dynargh," on another sign
inside the building. "Spelling is an important issue that will need to be
sorted out, but it's only part of the full picture of promoting Cornish,"
said Jenefer Lowe, arts officer for the county council.

Cornish speakers who do not favor one system or another say they are at
wit's end. "To me it is quite pathetic that a group of people who can
communicate quite easily without any problem are so upset about getting a
standard written form," said Rod Lyon, the grand bard of the Cornish
Gorseth, which promotes Cornish language and heritage. "But that's Celtic
for you." He told a joke about Celts: "A Celt is someone who, working in a
field on his own, falls out with himself." Among Cornish speakers, it can
be considered discourteous, even hostile, to send e-mail messages using
one's own spelling system to people from other spelling camps. So Cornish
speakers are often forced to do the thing they hoped to get away from in
the first place: correspond in English.

Although Reg Bennett, the Camborne town clerk, said people should stop
fussing about spelling and "get out and smell the roses," Ms. Pierce of
the Cornish Language Board was looking on the bright side. "There was a
time when we had something like seven different systems," she said. "At
least now we're down to four."



Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/17/international/europe/17cornish.html