Revived Middle Cornish
I, Qwynegold, am writing this article while self-studying Cornish online, as a way of sorting out what I have learned. Maybe others will have use of this as well? I'm expanding the article little by little as I progress in my study. I'm using the online course Kernewek Dre Lyther (KDL), so most references will be of that. There are also some references to the PDF An Outline of the Standard Written Form of Cornish.
| Revived Middle Cornish Kernewek | |
| Spoken in: | Cornwall, United Kingdom |
| World: | Earth |
| Total speakers: | 3,500 (all varieties) |
| Genealogical classification: | Indo-European
|
| Basic word order: | |
| Morphological type: | |
| Morphosyntactic alignment: | |
Phonology and Orthography
*sigh*
Initial Mutation
In Cornish, some words cause the initial consonant of the following word to change. This is called mutation. There are five different types of mutation in Cornish, called soft, breathed, hard, mixed and mixed after Th, referring to the sound changes involved. These are numbered 2-6, and are usually just referred to by their number.[1] For example dhe2 means that the word dhe causes soft mutation in the following word. This table shows which sounds change into what in different mutation states. An empty cell means that no change happens, and a dash means that the sound is elided. For example the word gramasek becomes ramasek in second state (soft) mutation.
| 1 Unmutated |
2 Soft |
3 Breathed |
4 Hard |
5 Mixed |
6 Mixed after Th |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| B | V | P | F | V | |
| Ch | J | ||||
| D | Dh | T | T | T | |
| G+{a, e, i, y} | - | K | H | H | |
| G+{o, u, ro, ru} | W | K | Hw | W | |
| G+{l, r} | - | K | |||
| Gw | W | Kw | Hw | W | |
| K | G1 | H2 | |||
| M | V | F | V | ||
| P | B1 | F | |||
| T | D1 | Th |
1No change if the previous word ends with S or Th.
2No change if followed by L, N or R.
