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.
What we do with infinite labour in the upper and middle classes is to teach our children to acquire French and German as well as English, and this is not only because these tongues open to them literary treasures, but for educative purpose to the mind, teaching to acquire other words, forms of grammar, and modulation of sounds than those the children have at home.
By God’s mercy the Welsh child is so situated that from infancy it has to acquire simultaneously two tongues, and that in the lowest class of life; and this I contend is an advantage of a very high order, which is not enjoyed by children of even a class above it in England.
The West Cornish dialect is a growth of comparatively recent times. It is on the outside not more than four hundred years old. Whence was it derived? That is a problem that has yet to be studied.
Mr. Jago says:—
“We have in the provincial dialect a singular mixture of old Cornish and old English words, which gives so strong an individuality to the Cornish speech. As, in speaking English, a Frenchman or a German uses more or less of the accent peculiar to each, so it is very probable that the accent with which the Cornish speak is one transferred from their ancient Cornish language. The sing-song, as strangers call it, in the Cornish speech is not so evident to Cornishmen when they listen to their own dialect.”[28]