Modern Cornish (''Kernuack Nowedga'') is a variety of the revived

Cornish language Cornish (Standard Written Form: or ) , is a Southwestern Brittonic language, Southwestern Brittonic language of the Celtic language family. It is a List of revived languages, revived language, having become Extinct language, extinct as a livin ...

. It is sometimes called Revived Late Cornish (RLC) or ''Kernuack Dewethas'', to distinguish it from other forms of contemporary revived Cornish. When

Unified Cornish Unified Cornish (UC) (''Kernewek Uny '', ''KU'') is a variety of the Cornish language of the Cornish revival. Developed gradually by Robert Morton Nance during and before the 1930s, it derived its name from its standardisation of the variant spe ...

came under heavy fire in the early 1980s, various attempts were made to rectify its problems. While some supporters stuck with original or modified UC, two main schisms arose, that of

Kernewek Kemmyn Kernewek Kemmyn (Common Cornish or "KK") is a variety of the revived Cornish language. Kernewek Kemmyn was developed, mainly by Ken George in 1986, based upon George's earlier doctoral thesis on the phonological history of Cornish. It takes muc ...

led by

Ken George Kenneth John George is a British oceanographer, poet, and linguist. He is noted as being the originator of Kernewek Kemmyn, an orthography for the revived Cornish language which he claims is more faithful to Middle Cornish phonology than its precu ...

, and that of Modern Cornish, led by

Richard Gendall Professor Richard Roscow Morris "Dick" Gendall (12 April 1924 – 12 September 2017) was a British expert on the Cornish language. He was the founder of "Modern Cornish"/''Curnoack Nowedga'', which split off during the 1980s. Whereas Ken George ma ...

. Unlike

, which tended to go to medieval Cornish for inspiration, Modern Cornish uses the latest known forms of Cornish from the 17th and 18th centuries from writers such as

Nicholas Boson Nicholas Boson (1624–1708) was a writer in, and preserver of, the Cornish language. He was born in Newlyn to a landowning and merchant family involved in the pilchard fisheries. Nicholas's mother had prevented their neighbours and servants spe ...

John Boson John Boson was a cabinet maker and carver whose work is associated with that of William Kent. It is said that if he had not died at such a relatively young age then his place would have been assured in the history of furniture making in the Unit ...

, William Rowe, Thomas Tonkin and others, and

Anglo-Cornish The Cornish dialect (also known as Cornish English, Cornu-English, kw, Sowsnek Kernowek) is a dialect of English spoken in Cornwall by Cornish people. Dialectal English spoken in Cornwall is to some extent influenced by Cornish grammar, and o ...

dialect words of Brittonic origin. Proponents of

claim that the later forms of Cornish are corrupt and anglicised, but supporters of Modern Cornish such as

Cussel an Tavas Kernuak Cussül an Tavas Kernôwek (formerly ''Cussel an Tavas Kernûak''; the Cornish Language Council) is an association founded in 1987 to teach, research and further the Cornish language in Cornwall (Cornish: Kernow), UK. Since the adoption of a Stand ...

counter this by saying that they are continuing the natural evolution of the tongue where it left off. The

orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and mos ...

of Modern Cornish is a standardisation of the English-influenced orthographies of Cornish writers of the 17th and 18th centuries, and its grammar is more

periphrastic In linguistics, periphrasis () is the use of one or more function words to express meaning that otherwise may be expressed by attaching an affix or clitic to a word. The resulting phrase includes two or more collocated words instead of one infl ...

than that of Middle Cornish-based varieties. It retains a number of English borrowings discarded by Kemmyn and Unified, e.g. ''wolcum'' instead of ''dynargh'' for 'welcome'. It makes sparing use of accents and diacritical marks. For instance, the word for 'good' typically spelt ''dâ,'' could also be written ''daa,'' and the word for 'month' could be spelt ''mîz'' or ''meez''.

is the governing body of Modern Cornish. The need for standard spelling when learning a language has led Cussel an Tavas Kernuak to adopt the Modern Cornish spelling standardised by Gendall and Neil Kennedy. Modern Cornish provided a source of input into the creation of the Standard Written Form of Cornish in 2008.

Example text

The following is a letter by

William Bodinar William is a male given name of Germanic origin.Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, , p. 276. It became very popular in the English language after the Norman conquest of Eng ...

, written in 1776, translated into Modern Cornish.

References

* ''A Student's Grammar of Modern Cornish'' by R.R.M. Gendall (The Cornish Language Council, 1991) * ''Tavas a Ragadazow: The Language of My Forefathers'' by Richard Gendall (Teer ha Tavas, 2000)

External links

Cussel an Tavas Kernuak website
with information on Modern Cornish and learning materials {{Cornish language Cornish language Cornish language revival