Re: Reinventing NATLANGs

From: Damien Perrotin
"Aside from Hebrew, the best exemple is Cornish. Cornish died out as a
spoken language during the late eighteeenth century but was 'revived' during
the twentyth century. The problem was that the corpus was small. [...]"

Damien,
The corpus of Cornish isn't so small any more. Since the revival gained a
little pace in the 1930s two large later Middle Cornish prose texts were
discovered. And in 1998 a "new" two part play was discovered giving to the
revival a number of new words. Cornish is very much complete and it is quite
possible to express yourself using traditionally attested Cornish words and
grammatical forms. Of course vocabulary has to be invented or reconstructed
for modern usage, but Cornish is in the same situation as are other minority
languages who become Ausbausprachen to fit modern communicative desires and
reflect technological advances as well as cultural changes.
Dan