Re: Kernewek

Joe a wrug skrifa:

> Hooray! My cornish course came in the post today.
> Not any orthography I recognise though :-)
> Somewhere between Kemmyn and Unified.
Which course is it? If it's KDL (Kernewek Dre Lyther), it's virtually
always in Kemmyn, unless you specifically request otherwise. Or is it a
textbook that you ordered? If you tell me the title and/or author, I can
tell you what orthography it's in.

The thing is, though, that there's not at all as much difference between
all the systems as some folks would have you believe. I discovered in
Cornwall that virtually all Cornish speakers, regardless of how they
*spell* Cornish,  *pronounce* Cornish more or less the same way:
basically Unified (as Kemmyn didn't exist when most of the really fluent
speakers learnt it) with varying degrees of English accent. The
differences are largely cosmetic. Anyway, Kemmyn and (original) Unified
share a virtually identical grammar, syntax and lexicon. UCR and Modern
(Late) Cornish are somewhat more different as they are based on a later
period in the language's history, but still if you know one it's pretty
easy to pick up any of the others. And as I said, Cornish speakers all
*speak* pretty much the same.

> But one interesting thing, it's an OVS language.  IE.
> Joseph ov vy
> Joseph am I
Actually, Cornish, like all Celtic languages is VSO. In *affirmative*
sentences only, you can get sentences which show SVO or OVS word order,
but these all have an underlying VSO structure. Eg:

Lowen ov vy: "happy am I" (it is happy that I am) = I am happy (not sad,
angry, etc.).
My yw lowen: "I am happy" (it is I who am happy) = I (not you, or he, or
they) am happy.

Different emphases, see? You can also say "yth ov vy lowen" with the
verb first, though in affirmative sentences this word order is not as
common as the first two.

Negative and interrogative sentences are always VSO.

Os ta lowen?: Are you happy?
Nyns ov vy lowen: "not am I happy" = I am not happy.

> But anyway, should be fun to learn.
Cornish is immensely fun! Good luck with it.

> The main problem is the orthography.  I need to write down the
pronounciation
> and convert it to Kemmyn to get what I want.
I don't quite get what you mean. Could you give an example?

Oll an gwella,

Thomas
(Cornophile)