Funny you mentioned vowel sounds - while trawling I saw some curious research about the voice of Sean Connery - apparently amongst other things, the voice most likely to raise the most funds for children in need. The analysis of his voice started by analysiing his vowel sounds and the mix he had acquired from his working class Edinburgh background and later stage training - comparing the vowel sounds in received pronounciation, which apparently has a lot more than the dialect he grew up with. Apparently he just has that fusion that seems to apeal to to most people. Is it a case that more standardised forms of the dominant langauges generally have more vowel sounds and rely less on other things like volume and pitch?
Ooh, that’s interesting. I’m not aware of any studies on range of vowel sounds vs standardisation - it strikes me that it would require a fairly tricky set of definitions - but I’d be very interested if you find any…
Defining Britain’s most appealing voice: An accent profile of Sir Sean Connery
Also linied to this, there was some work done staging Shakespeare in reconstructed accents for performances at the globe. Some mention of how current American may actualy hold some aspects of English from that time and also how some of the rhyming in the original has now been lost by using RP
PS. I think in the Sean Connery text SSE refers to Scottish Standard English and not sign language, but may be wrong
Talking of accents, even just listening to the different presenters each week on An Nowodhow (Cornish language news bulletin on BBC Radio Cornwall), I find it interesting how much variety there is in their accents. I would guess it partly depends on what accent they have naturally when speaking English! In the SSiC lessons so far, too, the two tutors — Pol and Julia — have noticeably different accents as well. But that doesn’t really make it any harder to understand, for me at least; it’s good to hear different voices speaking the language so one can get used to little variations in pronunciation, just like we have in English.
Interesting to hear about Sean Connery having Britain’s most appealing voice. Maybe it’s because it’s the accent people still associate with… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jdRfe6f9YE
It probably is the James Bond connection - but is definately quite a unique voice - as have many others I guess that impersonators tend to enjoy, like Michael Cain etc
I wonder if anyone has ever attempted to strip out features of the strongest of Cornish accents, to identify any unique sounds such as vowel sounds, that are not present in RP for instance or other dialects of English. I know that the change in Scottish Gaelic has been analysed for certain features that are gradually dissapearing. I only wonder since it might give some clues to vowel sounds that resonate from a time.before English took over.
It did help that Edward Lhuyd, a Welshman and a linguist, went around Cornwall taking notes of the speech back when it was still spoken, and recording it in phonetic notation—a sort of early precursor to the International Phonetic Alphabet.
So I believe some of the revived pronunciation is based on the notes that he took, and some on the English accent of West Penwith, the area where Cornish survived longest, on the theory that the Cornish spoken there may have influenced the sound of the English there and that the typical English pronunciation heard there may give us clues to traditional Cornish pronunciation.
But actual sounds recordings we do not have, as you say, so we cannot be completely sure.
And so scholars disagree on some of the finer points of pronunciation, or things such as how many distinct vowel phonemes there are, or exactly what they sound like, or whether there were three length distinctions (short, half-long, long) or just two (short and long), and so on.
Hi madeupname_1,
Thanks for mentioning my course which is indeed based on what is usually referred to as Late Cornish, i.e. the Cornish written down in the 17th and 18th centuries. It differs in a few points from the reconstructed pronunciation of mediaeval Cornish (14th-16th). Both pronunciations are reconstructions, of course, and there will have been a broad transitional time period between where one pronunciation gradually developed into the newer form, or even where old and new pronunciations were used side by side. I will use the abbreviations MC for Middle Cornish or Mediaeval Cornish and LC for Late Cornish:
Some differences are:
-) ‹u› was pronounced [y] in MC (as in French ‹lune› “moon” or German ‹grün› “green”); in LC this had changed into the same sound used for ‹i›, that is like “ee” in English “green”;
-) The parallel case is the vowel written ‹eu›; in MC is was pronounced [œ] as in French ‹sœur› “sister” or German [ø] in ‹Größe› “size”. In LC this vowel came to be pronounced identically to what is spelt ‹e› in Standard Cornish.
-) a long ‹i›-sound which occurs at the end of a word is pronounced as “ee” in English “green” in MC, but in LC this has become a diphthong and pronounced a little like speakers of western traditional Cornish-English dialect speakers would pronounce the vowel in “try” or “eye”. This change doesn’t affect a huge number of words, but the words affected are quite common, such as ‹hi› “she”, ‹ni› “we”, ‹hwei› “you” and ‹i› they, as well as ‹chi› “house” and ‹ki› “dog”. In standard written Cornish these words may alternatively be written with ‹ei› rather than ‹i›.
-) Words spelt with ‹s› that correspond to Welsh and Breton ‹d› are more frequently pronounced with a j-sound, as in (“John” or “George”), for example: LC ‹kreji› “to believe” or LC ‹uji› “is” for MC ‹krysi› and ‹usi›.
-) Many instances of MC ‹y› become ‹e› in LC;
These are the main differences. It may sound a little different, but fluent Cornish speakers of both varieties can communicate without difficulty and the differences are no greater than between two dialects in another language, or say, between the the SSiW course versions based on Northern Welsh and Southern Welsh.
Dan
I object to labelling Cornish varieties that don’t strictly adhere to Maga’s Revived Middle Cornish as “esoteric”. The variety based on Late Cornish is recognised as an alternative pronunciation with some grammatical forms and constructions of its own as well as a few spelling variants officially sanctioned in the MAGA Standard Written Form agreement. For further questions in the matter I’m happy to provide more information.
Did Iestyn say that? I’ve a passing interest in learning Cornish, so have been following these threads. What I took away from what he said was “there’s not a lot of difference between the various forms of Cornish, so what we teach isn’t going to be an esoteric form” rather than saying that anything different to Maga is esoteric. I’m not trying to paraphrase him or put words in his mouth -or indeed saying that it is true- just saying that that is the impression I had.
A warm welcome to the forum, Dan - your input here will clearly be hugely valuable to Cornish learners looking for insight above and beyond the SSiCornish lessons…
Glad to see you’ve fine-tuned this a little with Owain’s useful input - we don’t host any confrontational stuff on this forum, which in practice usually means that we end up asking people who want to express differing opinions (which we value greatly) in a particularly careful, polite manner - it’s so easy for tone to be misconstrued in text-only conversations, and we find that generously over-egging the politeness is the most effective way to keep this environment warm and friendly…
I’m interested: is Cornish equally “first language” to you as German is as well? And, more curious: you speak German, English and Cornish obviously … any more languages?
I’m asking because I find it interesting how language-rich our community is. Many people here can speak or at least learn several languages at once and I always find it interesting what languages one can speak or they learn it.
I was raised to be bilingual in English and German. Cornish is an acquired language. I learnt French and Latin at school, forgotten most of my French, though I could probably get by in everyday situations, have reading knowledge of other Romance language such as Italian and Spanish. I’m fluent in Low German (which is a lot closer to Dutch than to German), and through that a fair command of Dutch. I’m conversant (but with limited vocabulary) in Icelandic, and I did the first course of the SSiW (North) in Welsh, I know enough Greek to get by on holidays. Dabbling in other languages include Romanian, Frisian (North and West), Latvian, Japanese, but never got very far with them.
WOW! Wide asortiment of languages. I was kind of hoping you’d include at least Serbo-Croatian in the mix (I can’t expect Slovene to be there if I’m honest, though). But, yes, great! I’m impressed!
Tatjana,
Funny you should mention Slovenian. It was actually the first Slavic language I considered looking into. I was living in Klagenfurt/Celovec for five years and tried to get in contact with the local Slovenian language organisations and inquire about courses and resources, but alas they were less than enthusiastic about supporting an outsider to the Slovenian community learning the language in their institutions as they wanted to focus in getting community members, especially children, speaking Slovenian. It put me off a little, though I do understand their goals. I always thought I must learn some Russian at some point… also Czech… especially with my name!
I wasn’t trying to brag about the number languages I speak, most of them are below conversation level and really just an assortment of phrases, knowing the phonology and how the grammar “works”. I’m comfortable in conversing in 5 on a good day…
Oh, yes, I completely understand you regarding Slovenian community in Celovec. There were quite strong Pro-Austrian forces in the past with Heider at the lead so people maybe this for wanted to focus exclusifely to native Slovenians who didn’t speak the language. I’m happy that Cymreig people are much wider opened to us - foreigners - for learning the language and much more supportive then Slovenians will ever be. Almost each of us in Slovenia speak at least one foreign language (most English, but there are other languages too) so we in general obviously don’t feel our language should be taught. But I - for a change - think it should be taught and in minority it even is. I know in the summer there is camp organized somewhere in Slovenia where those foreigners who’re learning language are gathering and spend a week or two (I dont’t know) in kind of educational “bootcamp” learning the language or upgrading their knowledge of it.
But, I’d be happy if you’d be encouraged one day to try to learn Slovene again. I’d be glad to asist the course if it ever comes to development so we’d have one SSiS more - SSiSlovene.
As Aran has already said - welcome to the forum: expertise on a language learners’ forum is gold dust!
And please let me apologise for a slighty clumsy use of language: I certainly didn’t intend to label Cornish courses other than ours as esoteric, but I can understand how what I wrote could be interpreted to say that. My intention was to reassure the original poster that we weren’t teaching some made-up form that would be different to whatever else they came across in real life.
I’m really excited about the potential future of Cornish, and particularly proud that SSi can make a contribution to it. The last thing I’d want is to contribute to some of the negativity that can become part of any minority language scene, and that Cornish has certainly suffered from in the past.
Meur ras dhewgh a’gas geryow cüv! Thank you for your kind words. I have said above that I may have been a little blunt in my reaction to your use of “esoteric” and slight misunderstandings of the sort do crop up more often in on-line conversations than they would in a face-to-face encounter, so I’ll just say, let it be water under the bridge…
The Cornish language community is a small network of people and of course I was very enthusiastic when I got wind that a SSiC course was in preparation and I volunteered to help wherever I could. Since I was familiar with the excellent SSiW course I was hoping to help out in with the Late Cornish based pronunciation/accent/dialect in the way that SSiW offers a course for Northern and Southern Welsh learners. The MAGA people involved however said that this was not desired. Fair enough, so I went off and did my own thing. The method of my course is similar, comparable also to the Pimsleur method, but of course I didn’t want to get into trouble with possible copyright infringements. I changed the pace of my course and concentrated on teaching along the usual path in the Revived Late Cornish community - a small but loyal bunch of people.
For fluent speakers the differences between the Revived Late Cornish and Revived Middle Cornish varieties are easy to get used to, and I had no trouble making myself understood within the wider community of Cornish speakers. Learners who have only been confronted with one variety may find the other a little unusual at first, but the differences aren’t too difficult to overcome. The relationship between Revived Middle Cornish and Revived Late Cornish are similar to the way standard literary Welsh, based on the first Welsh Bible, relates to the modern colloquial dialects. The relative “raciness” of Revived Late Cornish is what initially attracted me to learning this variety, but of course it was also the variety that Richard Gendall, my first Cornish teacher, spoke and as in all things educational, the teacher is very important, and Gendall being a very friendly, charismatic person surely influenced me in my preferences.
If you want to find out a little more about my course, feel free to visit my website:
Another thought on accent in Cornish is that English in Cornwall came from the West Saxons, so although a modern Cornish accent would be closer to a pre-Saxon accent than Queen’s English is, we can’t say that all the differences between a modern Cornish accent and Queen’s English are from Cornish originally.
Hello Daniel Prohaska
Yes, I like your audio course, because of how you try to make your pronunciation authentic. I like the idea of speaking medieval Cornish, because it’s older and there are elements that were lost later, so it would be speaking a language that’s degenerated less, bringing back what was lost. I would also find it fun to be speaking medieval English. I prefer your course though, because of the pronunciation. You said you chose early modern Cornish to continue the language where it left off.
I’m a bit concerned that if the Cornish language is brought back in the wrong accent, then it’ll be hard to then correct the accent, if people want to say it how it’s said in modern day, rather than how it used to be said, like how in Historical Fencing a lot of people call a two-handed sword a longsword, they think that’s the proper name, and think using longsword for a long one-handed sword is a modern invention, even though that’s not true, and using “longsword” for a two-handed sword is a direct translation from the German “langen schwert” that was used by people translating medieval German books on fighting with the two handed sword, but people can get used to it and not want to use the older names for different types of swords any more, even though they originally changed what they called it because they thought it was authentic, but now they just want to say what other people are saying, even if it’s not authentic.
