Richard Gendall's Dictionary for Modern Cornish 5

THE NAME OF MODERN CORNISH

Modern Cornish as a name was first applied to the language in the first decade of the 18th century by Lhuyd and the late writers. In the academic world it has been wrongly assumed to apply simply to Lhuyd’s phonetic orthography as used in his Archæoligia Britannica, and when giving examples of Modern Cornish it is always Lhuyd’s orthography that is used, but Lhuyd’s sources were clearly the native writers and speakers, so that Modern Cornish was already in existence before 1700, or it could never have been named, and furthermore, Cornish writers applied it both to the written and the spoken word, and that it was not regarded simply as a spelling system may be judged from Gwavas’ observation written in 1736:

…and several Ancient persons in Paul, St Just, St Keverne etc., both men and women that could speak ye Moderne Cornish, altho’ they knew not how to write it…

It was called Modern Cornish simply because that was what it was, and it is certainly incorrect when any form of Cornish devised since is given the name simply for the purpose of acquiring credibility. There is only one Modern Cornish.

CORNISH IN THE 21ST CENTURY

The treating of the Cornish language as a fully modern vernacular for the 21st century presents enormous and often insuperable difficulties. A language that effectively died out three centuries ago simply does not possesss either the vocabulary or the idiom for many of the simplest situations of modern life, and efforts to provide convincing background jargon even for such a commonplace occasion as a football match can be ludicrous and unconvincing. What can be done?

First, one should use such genuine material as may be available and appropriate. There are words and phrases in the neglected field of traditional Cornish, including a certain amount of the small talk with which any occasion is normally punctuated, and which is not recorded in our Cornish literature. For the rest, there is simply no answer. We have no authentic words for such basic concepts as football, rugby, tennis, snooker, marathon, canoe, café, coffee, restaurant, lorry, motor-bike, bicycle, gas, electricity, motorway, policeman, traffic, strike, post office, cheque, stamp, immigrant, Indian, Asian, African, Chinese, not even for the Isle of Mann, Italy, Australia, Canada, America, New Zealand, nor even for newspaper, nor for a painting, not even for toast, marmelade or jam, let alone switch, plug, lead, fuse, micro wave, telephone, television, computer, knickers, pullover, lipstick, and all those words that are on everybody’s lips everyday, forming the very fabric of to-day’s social intercourse. For all these, words would have to be invented, and by whom? Cornish people? The so-called language revival has boxed itself into a corner where in order to survive as what it pretends to be it has to ruin what it purports to promote.

The first thing is to learn thoroughly the actual language that our forefathers spoke