I just want to make a little point about
spelling and pronunciation before we start. Because Cornish is a revived
language there are some variations within the language community in the way we
write things and the way we say things. No group is fully right or fully wrong!
The sources we have used for our vocabulary and grammar cover a wide range in
terms of age and geography, from a limited number of Old Cornish texts and
“fossilised” place names in the east of Cornwall, to a much larger number of
Middle Cornish (mediaeval) texts in the form of poetry and mystery plays,
penned at Glasney in the middle of Cornwall, through some Tudor sermons to a
folk tale, letters and other assorted writings and place names which are much
later and from the far west.
All my lessons favour the later style and
vocabulary – Cornish as it was last spoken. Spelling (SWFLt) is the late
variant (mostly post-Tudor) of the “Standard Written Form” with
“traditional” graphemes (like those in Penwith place-names). Where I
consider it appropriate I also give the SWFM version (spelling based on
mediaeval Cornish from what some people consider to have been the “literary
peak” of the language).
We can learn a new language, such as
Cornish, in a variety of ways. One way is the phrase-book method, building up a
supply of stock expressions that can be used in a variety of situations. This
is what many of you have already been doing. At some stage you (presumably) mastered
your mother tongue, so you should have a sense of grammatical structure which
can be transferred to our new language.
We want to build up our own sentences in
Cornish from scratch, so it helps to know what we are doing. If you already
know some Cornish you can treat this as a bit of revision. If you are an
absolute beginner this will lead you in gently.
We start
off with a single word, e.g. a
noun or a verb.
If we
group several together we can make a phrase, e.g. a
noun + an adjective or a verb + an adverb or a verb + an object. You can have a
phrase that does not include a verb.
The next
step up is to construct a clause. A
clause contains a subject (a person
or thing that is doing or being something) and a predicate (that
includes a verb and indicates what the subject is doing or being). A phrase
does not contain a
subject together with what that subject is doing or being.
A simple sentence consists
of a single clause. The simplest sentence in
English is a single clause with a one word subject and a one word verb, e.g.
“Dogs bite.” “Horses kick.” “Jesus loves.” Can we do this in Cornish? We will
see later!
So what
is a sentence anyway?
According
to Fowler it is a set of words complete in itself,
having
either expressed
or understood in it
a subject
and a predicate
and
conveying a statement,
a question,
a command
or an exclamation.
We will
learn to do all of these in Cornish. Then we can get more ambitious!
If our subject consists
of more than one parallel
noun, etc.,
or
our predicate contains more than one verb,
etc.,
it is a compound sentence.
If the
subject or verb, etc. is understood, rather
than expressed,
it is an elliptical sentence.
Both
subjects and predicates can be expanded by the addition of extra words, modifiers, to form a variety of phrases: noun phrases,
verb phrases, prepositional phrases, etc. These make clauses and
sentences more informative and more interesting. We will deal with them in
turn.
And,
finally, a complex sentence has more than one clause, one of
which will be the main clause and any
others will be subordinate clauses.
Stick
with me and you will be writing your own literature!
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