A Book of Cornwall

by S. Baring-Gould

Not in the church, with people great and high,

But in the church-yard doth old Dolly lie."

A word may here be added relative to the Cornish tongue. The Celtic language is divided into two branches, one represented by the Irish and Gaelic of North Scotland, and this is called the Goidhelic, or Gaelic; the other by the Welsh, old Cornish, and Breton, and this is called the Brythonic.

The main distinction between them consists in the Gaelic employing k or the hard c where the Welsh and Cornish would use p. Thus pen is used in the latter, and ken in the former. When the Irish adopted the word purpur, purple, they changed it into corcair; and when they took the low Latin premter for presbyter into their language they twisted it into crumthir. The Cornish was identical with old Welsh, and the Breton was originally identical with the Cornish; but in course of time some changes grew up differentiating the tongues, and forming dialects derived from the same mother tongue, that is all.

In or about 1540 Dr. Moreman, vicar of Menheniot, in the east of the county, was the first to teach the people the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Commandments in English.

Carew, however, in his Survey of Cornwall in 1602 says, "Most of the inhabitants can speak no word of Cornish, but few are ignorant of English, and yet some so affect their own as to a stranger they will not speak it, for if meeting them by chance you inquire the way, your answer will be, 'Meeg nauidna cowzasawzneck'--I can speak no Saxonage."

Carew's Survey was soon followed by that of Norden, who says that the tongue was chiefly confined to Penwith and Kirrier, and yet "though the husband and wife, parents and children, master and servants, do naturally communicate in their native language, yet there is none of them in a manner but is able to converse with a stranger in the English tongue, unless it be some obscure people who seldom confer with the better sort."

The Cornish was so well spoken in the parish of Feock till about the year 1640 "that Mr. William Jackman, the then vicar, ... was forced for divers years to administer the Sacrament to the communicants in the Cornish tongue, because the aged people did not well understand the English, as he himself often told me" (Hals).

So late as 1650 the Cornish language was currently spoken in the parishes of Paul and S. Just; and in 1678 the rector of Landewednack "preached a sermon to his parishioners in the Cornish language only."

It may seem paradoxical, but I contend that for intellectual culture it is a great loss to the Cornish to have abandoned their native tongue. To be bi-lingual is educative to the intellect in a very marked degree. In their determination not to abandon their tongue, the Welsh show great prudence. I have no hesitation in saying that a Welsh peasant is much ahead, intellectually, of the English peasant of the same social position, and I attribute this mainly to the fact of the greater agility given to his brain in having to think and speak in two languages. When he gives up one of these tongues he abandons mental gymnastics as well as the exercise of the vocal organs in two different modes of speech.