Cornish lingo gets standard written form

Ooh Arr Ay

Should make that bunch of evil terrorists, the CNLA (Cornwall National Liberation Army, AKA the Ooh Arr Ay) a bit happier.

Mine's the Oggy shaped one with the clotted cream trimmings.....

but does this mean

that we'll be able to understand the comments from amanfrommars now?

rydhsys rag Kernow lemmyn!

Paris, because she supports the cause...

300 fluent speakers...

... and now they can have road signs? There's more people fluent in Klingon than that. Or management speak, actually.

Can we start up a boutique to get every road sign re-labled, so it refers to roundabouts as "cirular-path exit strategem realisers"?

To borrow an old joke- is the main aim of the various cornish language* pressure groups to support indigenous sign-writers?

* It's English really, right?

@Lyndon Hills

Don't be silly, he's from another planet entirely.

It's the one with the radio active granite in the pocket.

Written?

I was under the impression that most native cornish were illiterate anyway, communicating with various grunts and pointing.

And before anyone flames me, I have a long history of cornish history, so far traced back to the 12th century (records are pretty scant back then!). I also visit family in kernow at least twice a year.

"lingo"??

Cornish is a language, not a lingo. A "lingo" is a pejorative term for a specific vocabulary or a language used by some identifiable sub-group (such as programmer's "lingo"). Computerese 3-letter Acronyms constitute a lingo. Cornish is definitely NOT a lingo.

Language by comittee

My god, it'll be like esperanto. As others have said, Cornish as we know it now is an almost entirely made up language. Let's loose the chains and let Cornwall float off into the Atlantic if they want independence. They can keep that bloody awful Land's End theme park too.

@Saucerhead: on a matter of pedantry, modern English is Engish (language) as well as English (belonging to the English people), but it's origins are more of a Heinz 57. You have to define a country's language as that spoken by the plebs at any given period. So Chaucer's English was English when Chaucer was writing in it.

Mine's the one with the English Language degree certificate from an online "university" in the pocket.

Let's get the silly Klingon references out of the way

To those who insist on ridiculing minority languages by saying "more people speak Klingon than X", where X might be Welsh, Scots, Esperanto, Nynorsk, or in this case Cornish, I refer you to Lawrence Schoen, the director of the Klingon Language Institute, who is quoted as saying, "All the fiuent Klingon speakers can comfortably go out to dinner together." (All right, that was in 1996, but I'm not aware of any hundred-fold increase in speakers since then.)

A language is far more than just a tool for communicating -- it's an embodiment of identification within a group, and ridiculing the language or denying its right to exist is akin to doing the same to the group it represents.

Now, maybe you *want* to ridicule the Cornish people -- they can defend themselves against all the "oo-ar, get orf my laaand" you can throw at them, I'm sure -- but the belittling of other people's languages as if they were worthless playthings... well, it gets on my tits, that's all.

@written

"most native cornish were illiterate anyway, communicating with various grunts and pointing"

No, those are the people from outside of the county that have been moved here because their local councils have issued them more than 25 ASBO's and have given up trying to work with them.

Or they are the emmits that clog up the roads with their caravans as they search for a shop that sells "genuine Devon cream teas" (hint; not a typing error)

Or they are the surfing wannabees that can't afford to go to a beach where you don't have to wear 5 layers of neoprene to protect you against the cold.

Or they are Janners that didn't want to pay the parking fees at Drake's Circus and got lost looking for a parking space out of town.

I did ask the local council about levels of literacy amongst native Cornish; they said that they will get back to me drekkly.

Why cant we just just let these old languages die?

I really annoys me that so much effort is spent to artifiically keep languages alive. Welsh is of course the classic example, would have died out years ago were it not artificially resusitated by law. Surely the fewer languages in the world, the better we can all communicate, and as the mobile phone companies are so fond of telling us - communication is good. A language is just a tool to communicate, it has nothing to do with 'culture'.

If Cornish is pretend...

Does that means Welsh is the same? That might explains a *few* things about that part of Britain... >)

Mine's the parrot print one with the bottled margarita and salt shaker in the pocket, please. Ta!

@Cornish is english

O RLY? Then read this:

http://kw.wikipedia.org/wiki/

1'539 articles... Which means that each of the 300 people wrote 5 pages. Not bad, considering there are "only" 2 millions pages in English!

huh

I don't know why people get so fussed about other countries and languages, everyone knows the whole world understands English if you shout it loud enough.. although if you want to show the proper respect to a foreign culture you should add suitable language modifiers at the end.. "EL PINTO BEERO, IS THAT SO DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND!?"

Jovial comments about saving them/beating them in WWII always go down well too, as does a healthy mistrust of anything on a plate not recognisable as coming from your average chippy.

@ Pretend Language

A dead language? Like, er, Hebrew, then?

@Andy Bright

Fabulous!

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Have to agree - waste of money

Sorry have to agree this is a waste of money. Whilst i have no problem with spending money keeping alive a langauge that was still in regular use (welsh, celtic, etc) reviving a language that has been dead for 200 years is a complete waste of taxpayers money. If people want to do it off there own bat like Tolkein invented Elven, good luck to them. But why should i pay for it? I'm certainly not Cornish!

And as for those that compare cornish to latin, latin is not a true dead language. It has been the lingua franca for scientific research in other languages since roman times, so it has never truly been dead, it has been in continuous use and still is today (just not in a form that would be recognisable to an ancient rome - but then neither would modern english be comprehensible to an early english speaker!).

By 'eck

Since when did the number of pagers in a given "language" on "wiki" become the measure of the human knowledge and achievement?

I dont deny its usefulness (well at least in debates on the level with "a man in the pub once told me....), but it is by no means the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the modern equivalent of the Great Library of Babylon?

At home i have over a 1,000 books, of which handfuls are German, French, Spanish and Arabic! Does that mean by this equally pointless measure that all other cultures and associated languages are bunk?

That said, at least these tribes in the 3rd world (e.g. Papua new guinea, not Cornwall - although easy mistake) have been actively using their languages for years up until present times.

At best then, where "lingos" like "Cornish" have been resurrected there has to be some doubt as to its validity? ok, it perhaps stand up better if as is claimed its is a version/dialect of the "Breton/Gaelic group" of languages?

That said there is perhaps similar argument with ancient Greek or Latin, although both of these have a form of currency in that there has been a continuous pool of people using this as a form of communication and study in an unbroken form.

Surely with the state of British schools (maybe I should exclude Scotland on the basis of the generous subsidies supplied by London) that the money should be spent on providing a better education system in English (or Chinese even) that will lead to these children having real economic advantages in life, I appreciate that “local” customs and traditions should be maintained, but even in the 1970s the Yorkshire Post used to print sections in the Local Dialect and this has long gone and most people I mention it too scoff at the thought of the thought of such a region as having their own dialect. These people however are often southern and benefit from having the south eastern dialect of English adopted into general use through the works of Chaucer etc!

A new language to learn!

Is it fully object-oriented?

Cornish could be usefully lethal to Alien Bogeys

The amount of money is miniscule. A single military subproject can cost millions more. US military toilet seats, frinstance. Or the flags to be flown by Trident subs. Even the US supports (often reluctantly -- they're as bone-headed as most of the numbnuts ranting against "small" languages here) native language research - often (as in Chomsky's case with other aspects of linguistics) with money from the defense budget (no offense ;-). They even made a film about how useful small languages could be in the field: Windtalkers. Flummoxed the Japs in WW2. And anything that can kill lots of Japs or Huns or Reds or Towelheads or Bogeys-of-the-Day must be good, right?

Attach a Cornish speaker or two to the Royal Marines - may god have mercy on their souls - and all these arseholes will immediately change their tune and start devouring Freedom Pasties instead of deep-fried Bogey Balls.

Myttin da

Myttin da, oll. Fatla genowgh?

Actually, Dolly Pentreath wasn't the last speaker of Cornish - there were a handful of others; in fact, some say the language didn't really die out at all.

A waste of money and/or time? It depends whether you think that language death is a good thing. I don't. I see language death in the same way as I see species extinction - a really sad thing, that is humanity's loss. Think of all the grammatical/linguistic features that we never knew about because some language somewhere died before we could examine it and record it. So sad.

Oll an gwella,

Pol

P.S. Kernow bys vykken!

So many retards in this thread

It amazes me that people get ants in their pants when tiny amounts of money are "wasted" on cultural projects, just because they don't happen to care about that particular part of our culture.... and yet if the same money is spent on a fancy bomb which destroys an iraqi school and rips a child's legs off, we all just carry on with our lives.

Native speaker vs speaker

The last native speaker may have died in 1777, but there were many bilingual English/Cornish speakers up until the last century. During the first world war Breton and Cornish soldiers could talk to each other in pidgin Breton/Cornish though neither spoke the others "native" English/French.

Bearing in mind that the Celts moved from Cornwall to Brittany shortly after the Angles and Saxons invaded from Germany/Holland/Denmark, that is some continuity of language. Imagine us English speakers being able to talk to Germans, both in our own language!

As has been stated, Welsh and Cornish also share much of their vocabulary. The Celtic/Gealic languages, maybe because of their isolation, seem to have more in common than, say, the latin (French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc) or Germanic (English, Dutch, German) groups of languages, which have diverged so much as to be mutually incomprehensible.

By the way, Latin is not dead; it lives in southern Europe and Latin America (the clue is in the name). It just evolved into French, Italian, etc., just as the Anglo-Saxon of Beowolf evolved into modern English, and Icelandic, for example.

Re Cornish is not Latin

"It wis publishit in February 2003."

Says it all...

Preserving language and culture

Unfortunately, "english-speaking" cultures have a rather bad track record of supressing and killing non-english speaking folks (around the world). The destruction of native languages on one small island in the north atlantic is rather well matched by their cousins in north america regarding the folks who emigrated there before them...

While I can't say I recommend wild expenditures of government (our) money on this, it surely can't rate with the far worse ways they have figured out to piss away our tax dollars.

I'm going, I'm going.

Foreign Celts

Sorry this is so late (the Cornish language not being at the top of my agenda), but I'd just like to correct P.Bowden. Celtic language and culture is generally regarded as starting with the La Tene and Hallstatt cultures, over in Europe. It was imported into Britain, where it replaced the indigenous languages and cultures. It was, in turn, replaced by Anglo-Saxon over much of the country. Anglo-Saxon then evolved into English, which holds sway over most of the globe (notice what happens when you write in Cornish on this board - you can write in a Celtic language can't you, otherwise exactly which bit of their culture are you happy about).

As for tracing your ancestors, how far back have you managed to get? Hope none of them pesky Normans/Vikings/Angevin/Huguenots/Eastern European Jews etc diluted your pure Celtic DNA.