LL-L "Language contacts" 2003.01.06 (02) [E/Cornish]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: Daniel Prohaska <daniel at ryan-prohaska.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language contacts" 2003.01.05 (01) [E/Gaelic]

Crisdean Wheg,

   Gas vy dhe`th leverel `tr`of pur lowen dhe weles nebonen ow screfa an
Godhalek Alban war an roster ma. Practysys yn ta of vy y`n tavosow
Brythonek, bytegens, ny wruga vy whath byth whythra aberth y`n yethow
Godhalek. Kynth eja ow les vy elvennys ow touchya an Manowek der
hevelepter an stuth dhe`n Kernowek.

   Cornish and English have been in close Contact for almost one and a
half millenia. It is natural than there are a lot of language contact
phenomena to be seen in Cornwal, Cornish and the English of Cornwall.
The overwhelming amount of influence came from English, of course, as
the dominant language. Cornish apparently left its mark in the
intonation of traditional Penwith and Kerrier dialect speech, and in
various dialect words, which were borrowed from Cornish into English
(collection of some of these forthcoming).

   Many people who are first confronted with the Cornish language today
wonder at the fact, that despite the small number of speakers, three
different orthographical systems are in use. These differences are not
so much dialectal, but have to do with the date upon which a certain
variety of revived Cornish is based. The three orthographies are based
on three different time periods:

1. Kernewek Kemmyn (KK), or Common Cornish (phoneme system of
ca.AD 1500), devised by Dr Ken George;
2. Kernowek Unys Amendys (UCR), or Unified Cornish Revised
(ca.1550- 1650), original system by Morton Nance and
revised by Dr
Nicholas Williams;
3. Revived Modern Cornish (RMC), (ca-1610-1790), traditional
Late Cornish spellings standardised by Richard Gendall;

   The significance of this debate revolves around the so-called
"prosodic-shift" in Cornish, a process in which the old common British
three partite rules of vowel and consonant quantities shifted towards a
twofold system which brings Cornish phonology closer to the English,
regarding prosody. It is reasonable to assume that this shift occured
owing to English influence and long-term bilingualism.

   Dr Nicholas Williams dates this prosodic-shift to have occured around
around AD 1300, whereas Dr Ken George proposes the change to have
happend by 1600-1650. (My peronal belief is, that it occur sometime
inbetween, 1300 seems a little too early and 1600 far too late judging
by the spellings in the manuscripts).

   I aslo believe that the prosodic shift is something that was an
ongoing process affecting three or four generations of speakers. Not all
changes happened at once.

   Williams suggests that English had advanced well into the East of
Cornwall by the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066. Along with William
the Conqueror came to Cornwall a disproportionately high amount of
Breton nobles who acquired estates in Cornwall. The Cornish/Breton
language situation at this time was comparable to the English/American
language situation. Though differnt in accent and vacabulary, theses
varieties were simply dialects of one mutually comprehensible language.
There seems to have been a period of re-Celticisation in the East of
Cornwall, as the language is later attested there again and some
place-names take on a less archaic form. When English gained social
respectability again in post-Norman England, Cornish again bagan to
retreat.

   So in effect, what Williams is claiming, is that an English
substratum was to be found in the Cornish of eastern Cornwall. Since
most of the centres of leaning will have been in central and eastern
Cornwall the influence would have been transported to the West.

   The main effects were that half-length was lost and fell in with the
short vowels. Stessed syllables were able to have full length (in
monosyllables), half-length (in open polysyllables) and short vowels (in
monosyllables followed by 2 or more consonants, in closed polysyllable,
and unstressed position). Long-vowels must be imagined as having 3
morae, half-long 2 morae an d short 1 mora. Both long and halflong
vowles lost one mora in the prosodic shift. The older system had weak
primary stress and a pitch accent in the unstressed position (as in
modern Welsh), the new system shifted towards a strong stress accent,
with the result that unstressed vowels lost their pitch and becam schwa
in most positions. Pre-occlusion of /nn/ and /mm/ to /dn/ and /bm/ in
<pen> "head" /pedn/ and <mam> "mother" /mabm/ seems to be a compensatory
effect to keep the syllable structure.

Best wishes, and off-list Cornish questions to daniel at ryan-prohaska.com

Dan

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