Richard Gendall's Dictionary for Modern Cornish 1

The acknowledged "guru" of Modern Cornish is Richard Gendall. After many years of scholarship in the Cornish Language he has produced a new version of his dictionary. In the first few sections he explains, to my satisfaction at least, why Modern Cornish is the form we should be using in the Twenty-First Century.

Firstly, here is the Preface.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

After the Second Edition of this Dictionary was published in 1997 a great deal more information on the language became available through the study of several neglected manuscripts, notably Edward Lhuyd’s unpublished Geirlyfr Kyrnŵeig, rich in hitherto unnoticed vocabulary and instructive orthography, and of lesser account but still very useful the Aberystwyth NLW Bodewryd MS 5E, revealing much about late native word versions, while at the same time there has been a steady accumulation of new material from traditional sources. By the turn of the century it had become clear that the Dictionary needed not revising but rather re-writing.

The foundations of what after 1700 was to be known as Modern Cornish had already been laid during the 17th century, but the authors who were particularly active in preserving the language were dissatisfied with the current traditional spelling, and invited Dr Lhuyd to Cornwall to make recommendations which indeed they accepted and implemented. Lhuyd designed them an orthography that was particularly suited to Cornish, but was radically different from the old, inefficient and wayward English based system in which all Cornish literature had been written, in both the Middle and Late Phases, which was quite inadequate for the accurate representation of a British language.

There is currently much talk about the ″right″ sort of Cornish to teach to schoolchildren, and what sort of Cornish should be regarded as ″official″, a word that is meaningless in the context of the Cornish language which in the whole of its history and use by the native Cornish people on whose tongues it was formed never had any official form, so why three hundred years after it fell out of use should it now need one? There is only one Cornish, and no Cornishman ever referred to it as anything but simply Cornish. Though in the 18th century the term Modern Cornish was introduced, this is not a label, and is simply used in the same way we refer to Modern English, both being the end product of centuries of natural development. Even Jenner in his Handbook of the Cornish Language quite correctly only referred to our language as Cornish, though this was in fact Modern Cornish and the start of the language revival. No plain Cousin Jack to-day has any name for it but Cornish.

There are no other sorts of authentic, genuine, traditional, native Cornish, and where in the recent past labels have been attached, such as Unified, Phonemic, Common, Compromise etc., it is an admission that these are neither authentic, genuine, traditional or native, but irrelevancies produced since 1929 mostly by individuals who are not even Cornish.

Modern Cornish is clearly different from earlier Cornish but only for reasons of natural development, and it comes down to us as an inseparable entity embracing vocabulary, grammar, orthography and pronunciation, that is the subject of this Practical Dictionary of Modern Cornish.

Finally, the Editor would like to gratefully acknowledge the invaluable help afforded by many persons through the generous gift of books and photostats of material otherwise difficult to come by, or by facilitating access to these, in particular Betty Cooney for the four volumes of the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, Janet Gendall for the Geriadur ar Brezhoneg a-Vremañ, Colin Hancock for Y Geiriadur Mawr, Merfyn Phillips for The Academic Welsh Dictionary and Farher’s English-Manx Dictionary, Adrian Pilgrim for putting me in the way of Lhuyd’s Archæologia Britannica, Andrew Hawk and Oliver Padel for sundry useful photostats and discussions, and not forgetting all those too many to mention who have regularly supplied me with newly discovered dialect words, but especially Joy Stevenson, and the invaluable help supplied by Barry Mundy respecting the traditional pronunciation of words connected with fishing and the coastline.

Richard Gendall, Editor,
April 2007, tercentenary of Dr Lhuyd’s Archæologia Britannica and Cornish Grammar