Richard Gendall's Dictionary for Modern Cornish 2

Here is the Introduction to this authoritative dictionary.

INTRODUCTION

Cornish is not in the same category as French or German which are foreign languages, nor English which was a foreign language to our Cornish-speaking forefathers. Our language emerged some thousand years ago from Dumnonian British, itself a descendant of the language our ancestors spoke during the Iron Age, perhaps even earlier, and then passed through centuries of natural development, formed on the tongues of Cornish people, until it culminated as Modern Cornish in the 18th century. It is our own native language that has come down to us in a direct line of descent with no arguments, controversy or invention. Cornish character and history are built into it.

Cornish fell out of general use during the 18th century, though individuals possessed considerable practical knowledge of it till the end of the 19th century. Whether we have had a chance to learn it or not, we are surrounded everyday by Cornish, for virtually all the names of our farms, villages, towns, hills and other features, and even some of our surnames are actually Cornish, and indeed what is referred to as ″Cornish dialect″ contains many words from the language itself, and represents the echo of it.

Cornish people have been so tenacious of their language that it took some eight hundred years to die out, and that is quite remarkable considering that the largest number of people who spoke Cornish at one time was no more than 40,000, and it has had to compete with the advance of English, used by millions. Furthermore, all our historical Cornish literature proceeded from a small area no more than thirty miles long by twenty miles wide, about the same as the Isle of man or Anglesey, yet half of which is sea. This comprises the hundreds of Penwith and Kerrrier, and coincides with the area where Modern Cornish developed, and where the language held out longest. It was this same area that gave birth to the Cornish religious Drama and verse, so that it is rightly to be regarded as the heartland of our language.