@stella I’ve wanted for years to learn a rare/endangered language too and help to keep it from becoming extinct. I knew my dad’s ancestors were Cornish, but had heard years ago that the Cornish language was extinct. Then after I moved to Britain a few years ago (I’m Australian) and visited Cornwall, I was so excited to discover that not only has the language been fully revived, but there are more and more resources available for learning it!
I’d love to be able write to others yn Kernewek, but after only 10 SSiC lessons, I’m still not at the point where I could hold an extended conversation!! But I’ve found it very helpful to combine what I’ve learned from this course with some of the other useful Cornish websites you can find online. These are my favourites:
http://www.cornish-language.org/ This is Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek, the Cornish Language Fellowship. They publish a monthly magazine entirely in Cornish and sell lots of Cornish books - translated stories and novels for adults and children, as well as textbooks and so on. They also provide a transcript (with English translation) of BBC Radio Cornwall’s weekly news bulletin in Cornish (you can listen to it on iPlayer at any time). Worth looking into!
Look forward to hearing more from all of you - I’m so glad I’m not alone here after all!
Indeed, 'tis smashing that we seem to have a fair few common interests between us; I’m no kind of knowledgeable in them yet, however! A dw i’n hapis ymarfer Cymraeg, if ever you wish. Ere now I’ve only been able to practise with myself (and my somewhat bewildered ci ifanc).
@Courtenay, thank you so much for the links, they will be very useful. I hope I’ll start the course tomorrow:) i’m especially delighted with the fact there are many books available in Cornish - reading is my life and I of course want to read in the languages that I’m learning… Of course, it’ll take time to become as fluent in Cornish as is required for reading fiction, but I’m happy that there is a possibility and that books are written and translated into it. By the way, have you read Dapne du Maurier’s novels? They’re in English, but they’re mostly set in Cornwall, and they’re marvellously beautiful. Reading about the places where the languages that I’m learning are spoken helps me stay inspired.
You’ll be ahead of us all anyway:) And the thing is, I’ve only done 8 lessons from the Welsh course, but I’ve found that I can already compose some simple texts about myself or about my interests. I keep a diary in Cymraeg and write something every evening, and I also write small posts on Clecs. So the method really works splendidly and I’m sure we’ll be able to have small chats here!
I can’t help but instantly like someone who loves “The Mabinogi” and wants to learn the Middle Welsh!
I have only been able to practise with my giant snails Cordelia and Ophelia.They look very sympathetic and move their horns in response, but, alas, they can’t answer. So, I could create a separate thread on forum for us (and for someone who might care to join us in practising written Welsh, maybe) or we could just write messages?
Ah, I quite thoroughly agree. It would be splendid to hear which parts of Y Pedair Cainc Mabinogi you thought most enchanting, if ever you’ve time to talk about it.
I send kind wishes to both of the snails. My hound Merlin can likewise do naught but groan and whine in answer, alas.
I am willing to do whichever of those things you would prefer. From what you say we seem to be about the same place in Course I, as well, therefore hopefully shan’t have great hardship understanding one another.
I thank you on behalf of Cordelia and Ophelia, and we send kind wishes to Merlin. I’m reading a wonderful boon about the person he was named after right now: “The school in Carmarthen”.
I took the liberty to create a thread for us in the Welsh part of the forum, I very much hope that nobody would mind and that some people might care to join us. Ymarfer Cymraeg For people who are not fortunate enough to live in Cymru (as me) it might be the possibility to practise! And I am very much grateful for the possibility to speak about the Welsh culture, as I’m in love with it. I will write there as soon as I get home to my beloved geiriadur.
I’ve started the Cornish course today. I didn’t mix the words with Welsh words, as I was afraid I would, but it proved to be quite a challenge! I’d been learning Cymraeg myself before I did the first lesson, so the first lessons were not hard at all - the were a pleasure. With the Cornish it’s altogether a different thing - I seem to forget the owrds instantly, and they’re so hard to pronounce! I felt like Gwidion, the main character in the book I’m reading right now, when he was struggling with the history of Ireland: “All these Aeds, Conns and Donns seemed alien and obscure to him, and their names were unpronouceable - most unlike the dear and familiar Llawnrodded Cainfarfaug, Glewlwyd Gafaelfawr and Llewddin Eithoedd”. Sometimes I couldn’t even understand if I was hearing c or g. Which leads me to the question - is there something like a written guide to the lessons for Cornish, with all the expressions that appear in the lessons? (like the guide to the Welsh lessons) I promise I won’t write down anything during the lessons, I just want to check if I’m hearing the correct sounds.
I’m not planning to do the Welsh course myself (it’s enough to get my head around Cornish at the moment!), but @Elswyth and @stella I wish both of you lots of further enjoyment and success with it! There are surviving medieval Cornish texts I’m sure we can one day enjoy too.
The unusual thing I’ve found about the SSiCornish course (at least the existing 10 lessons) is that it teaches you a lot of very useful basic sentence structures - I want/I don’t want, I can/I can’t, I need/I don’t need, I like/I don’t like, etc. - and how to fit different words into them to make lots of new sentences. But it doesn’t go into the other things you’d expect to find in a beginner’s course: hello, goodbye, please, thank you, how are you, talking about oneself and asking about others (family, work, hobbies, etc.). There’s not much in it, on the whole, that you could string together into a normal everyday conversation with a real person.
In other words, I find it’s a great start and an interesting and fun challenge - well worth doing - but it seems to need lots of other learning resources to supplement it if you want to learn Cornish properly, at least at this stage of the course’s development.
MAGA also has a sort of audio phrasebook online here - http://www.learncornishnow.com/first-steps.html - that’s very helpful for words and sentences you would use day to day in real situations.
Just saw your post now, Stella. The link I gave in my previous reply to the Learn Cornish Now site shows the written words as well as giving the pronunciations - it doesn’t have all the same words as in the SSiC lessons, but it gives you an idea of many of them.
The drawback is that there are at least four existing spelling systems for Cornish, and different writers and organisations use different ones, so sometimes you can run across more than one way of spelling the same words!! But they’re usually pretty easy to figure out. The Standard Written Form (which MAGA uses) and Kernewek Kemmyn/Common Cornish (which Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek uses) are the most commonly used and are very similar - and both are phonetic spelling systems, which makes life a whole lot easier!
Thank you so much, Courtenay, I was feeling a bit lost, really. I’m a visual type of learner, so I already find it a challenge to study without writing down things (though as a language teacher myself I fully support the idea behind it and I try to follow all the SSI method instructions), but at least Cymraeg I’m more familiar with so I can normally at least figure out which sounds I’m hearing. With Cornish it’s all a bit more difficult at the moment. But, well, I’ve only just started.
I’m sure that when the Cornish course is fully developed here there will appear all the colloquial expressions that we require (in the Welsh course they’re taught only in lesson 6). But right now it probably has to be supplemented by some other courses. I’ve been browsing through the Learn Cornish now website and it seems very helpful. Do you study just using the online materials or do you maybe have some coursebooks (printed) as well? Or maybe you know of some printed dictionare that you could recommend? (I have a thing for real paper dictionaries, they remind me of my school days when I had to carry two 5-kilo dictionaries of Latin and Ancient Greek to school every day)
By the way, which spelling system should we use here when we start chatting? The MAGA one?
I haven’t yet got hold of any printed coursebooks or dictionaries, but I’d like to. There are quite a few available from Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek and a few other organisations. I’m hoping to visit a couple of places where they sell them in Cornwall, when I have a holiday over there in early October, as I’d like to look through the books before I buy any, rather than buying them online without seeing them first. (That will also save paying postage! ) Once I’ve seen them and chosen some, I’ll be happy to let you know which ones I like.
I can relate to the huge dictionaries - I did Biblical Hebrew and New Testament Greek at university, and the Hebrew dictionary especially would have been a few kilos too!!
I’m probably slightly more familiar with Kernewek Kemmyn, as I’ve been practising reading the Kowethas’ magazines, and that’s the system they mostly use. But the two systems are so similar that it’s easy to figure one out if you know the other. A few examples I know of: “new” is “nowydh” in KK and “nowyth” in SWF (the MAGA system); “child” is “flogh” in KK, “floh” in SWF. The pronunciation is meant to be the same in both cases, so I don’t think it matters too much which we use, provided we all know what we’re talking about
Wonderful, I’d be very grateful if you recommend me some printed coursebook. I could ask my cariad to bring it from Cornwall to me ( and maybe at last trick him into learning it with me!)
Oh, it seems to me that not only are we (partly) fellow Slavic people, but that we also did similar courses at university! What did you study? I did history and theory of cultures. Did you find Hebrew hard to learn?
Speaking of Kemmyn, what do you think about the Kesva an Taves Kernewek website? They’ve got a free textbook there which seems to be quite nice, but as a new learner I will wait to know what you think about it.
I’m guessing cariad in Welsh is the same as karer in Cornish? (don’t have one of those myself at present, but who knows - I might even meet a nice Cornishman… )
I majored in history and religion studies at university. Hebrew - yes, quite hard. Not only because of the alphabet (which is completely unlike the Latin, Greek or Cyrillic alphabets!), but also, because it’s a Semitic language, all the grammar is completely different from any of our European languages.
Ah, I forgot to mention the Kesva. They hold the official exams that students of Cornish can take when they’ve advanced far enough. I do remember seeing some things on their site, but hadn’t looked into it properly. Thanks so much for reminding me!
Oh, the Cornishmen are at the top now - especially after this year’s BBC series “Poldark”. Well, the actor who plays the main character is Irish in reality, but my cariad/karer assured me they all look like this
That sounds somehow similar to what I did at university… Did you go to university in Australia? (I apologize for any irrelevant personal questions I ask, but I find that one of the best things about learning a language together is that you can get to know interesting people) Did you do Latin as well?
I will be waiting to hear your opinion, also because there seem to be some people (few, but still) in Russia who are interested in Kernewek so I might pass the reccomendation on.
Hi, I just saw this thread, thanks to Stella’s link in the Welsh forum.
I’m learning Kernewek, too, and I did all lessons that are available. I think it is hard to learn, the grammar is more difficult than the grammar of Cymraeg.
I’m waiting impatiently for new lessons.
Hi Brigitte! Do you speak Welsh as well? Are you a native speaker or did you learn it? We’ve been discussing here whether there are any troubles in learning these two languages (Cymraeg and Kernewek) at the same time, they are quite similar and so I was afraid to start mixing them up…
Hi Stella
I learn Welsh with SSiW, and after five years of learning and having been to five Bootcamps in Tresaith I can say I speak it quite fluently ( only in the scale of SSiW, of course; my vocabulary is very limited and my grammar is horrible, when I speak fast).
Cymraeg and Kernewek are definitely related; many words, like buy, learn, see etc are very similar, also mutations, that follow the same or similar patterns, but I never mixed them up.
I’m also learning Spanish with SSiS and here I sometimes struggle, because the words and patterns that are introduced in Level 1 new are mostly the same in Welsh and in Spanish and when Aran says a sentence in English I can always say it easily in Welsh, even if I do the Spanish lesson.
With Kernewek it’s different. The speaker’s voice and accent is very different from Aran’s and the lesson contents are not the same, so there’s no danger of mixing things up.
Diolch yn fawr! Is there something like a written guide to the Cornish lessons (like the one for the Welsh lessons)? I did the first lessons today and was very frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t understand which sounds I heard exactly…
In terms of learning Welsh and Cornish at the same time, I’d say it mostly depends on your confidence - it will definitely lead to some hiccups, but it will also definitely work out fine in the long run - so if you feel happy dealing with/laughing at the hiccups, then fine - if you think you might be knocked off balance, maybe better to do them one after the other…
Content lists - I’m not aware of anything like that for the Cornish lessons at the moment, but if we get somewhere with our plans to do some crowd-funding to take SSi out into all the Celtic languages, we’ll have content lists on the ‘to do’ list
Yeah, right. Whether or not any of these tall, dark, handsome Cornishmen would be interested in a short, blonde Aussie girl is another matter, but never mind…
Yes, I did go to university in Australia - I changed locations a few times, but ended up completing my degree at Deakin University, Melbourne. I didn’t do Latin, though. Where abouts did you do your studies?
I’ve had a look at the Skeul an Yeth free online textbook from the Cornish Language Board (Kesva an Taves Kernewek). It seems pretty comprehensive, but also a bit dry - no pictures, no really fun looking exercises. I think it must have been one of the first major textbooks published (it’s nearly 20 years old). There are probably more exciting ones available now, but this one is free and there’s a lot in it, so that’s good for a start.
It’s pretty long - 137 pages - so I’ve just printed off the first 20 pages to start working with and will do the rest in stages as I go!
I see Aran has replied to this - good to know it may happen some time - but I can give you the basic vocabulary from the first lesson.
my a vynn - I want my a yll - I can gul - to do gweles - to see My a vynn gul - I want to do My a vynn y wul - I want to do it My a yll gweles - I can see My a yll y weles I can see it ha (hag before vowel) - and kewsel Kernewek - to speak Cornish konvedhes - to understand dybri - to eat kavos - to have neppyth - something lemmyn - now diwettha - later res yw dhymm - I need da yw genev vy - I like
It’s nearly lunch time, so res yw dhymm dybri neppyth lemmyn!
But I’ve found it very helpful to combine what I’ve learned from this course with some of the other useful Cornish websites you can find online. These are my favourites:
