#CornishLanguage / #Kernewek, #16mm, and horror? You bet I'm in!

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The 80th most common surname in Victorian Cornwall was Taylor, an ubiquitous name found across southern Britain. This was already the case in Cornwall in the early 1500s when it appeared from the far east along the Tamar to West Penwith. But in Cornwall Taylor had a competitor.

In the Cornish language the word for tailor was trehar or treher. We find Trehar, spelt eight different ways, in a number of parishes in mid and west Cornwall at this time. These indicate districts in which Cornish was spoken in the 1520s and 1540s. However, even in those areas the number of Trehars only just outnumbered that of Taylors.

Does this mean that mid and west Cornwall was effectively bilingual at this time? No, as we don’t know how many men known as Trehar had their name translated into English by the clerks, minor landlords and clergy who compiled the records. These men were more likely to be proficient in both languages. Furthermore, we have no idea how many of those only officially recorded as Taylor were known in their communities as Trehar, people such as John Taillor in Ruan Major in 1524, but recorded as John Trehar in 1543.

Whatever the case in the early 1500s, the number of Trehars had undergone a steep decline by 1641/42 as Cornish language occupational names succumbed to the advance of English.

Here’s another set of surnames taking us to Taylor/Tailor at number 80. You can check out the early maps of these here.

Further details of most of these names can also be found in my The Surnames of Cornwall.

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https://bernarddeacon.com/2024/10/22/tailors-and-bilingualism-in-16th-century-cornwall/

#CornishLanguage #familyHistory #Tailor #Taylor #Trehar

From around 1100 to the 1330s Cornwall’s population tripled, from under 30,000 to a peak of around 100,000. After a few decades of stability, the Black Death in the middle of the 1300s turned population growth into fall. In fact numbers in Cornwall steadily declined to a low of around 60,000 by the beginning of the 1500s.

During the period of agricultural expansion and population growth between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries new farms and hamlets were established. Often, this involved dividing existing settlements. When this happened, a descriptor might be attached – such as, in Cornish, mur/byan (great/little) or wartha/woles (upper/lower). In English the equivalents were over/nether or muchel/little. In addition, in English points of the compass were used – north, south, east, west – a fashion that was not adopted in Cornish-speaking districts.

If we map the language of the names of these divided settlements we can reconstruct the linguistic geography of Cornwall. I’ve taken all those settlements where the first evidence appeared in the period 1200-1500. Obviously, the names would have been present before they were first recorded in writing but the lag between formation and record would presumably vary in a random fashion. That said, for some of the smaller places it could be a century or more before we find evidence of their existence. And for some that evidence may never have appeared.

Therefore, a map of the names recorded in 1200-1500 is more likely to reflect the situation on the ground between 1100 and 1400. Moreover, given the demographic context outlined above, we would expect it to be centred in the growth period before the mid-1300s.

We might take two things from this map. First, in most parishes, the divided settlements were either all named in English or all in Cornish with little overlap. The number of parishes with examples of both languages is relatively small. Given that the map encompasses a 200-300 year period this implies that the language divide in Cornwall at that time was very stable.

Second, the absence of any Cornish names in large swathes of east Cornwall suggests that Cornish was no longer being used for naming new settlements in those areas from at least 1200. Yet, most of that same area is dominated by Cornish placenames apart from the far north beyond the River Ottery. We don’t know exactly when those names were coined but it’s unlikely to be much later than the 800s.

Previously, I’ve argued that the loss of the Cornish language in east Cornwall was somehow linked with the population growth and the associated colonisation of new land. The chronology above strongly suggests this is mistaken. The Cornish language had already been replaced by English in most of east Cornwall by 1200, before the period of demographic growth. The reasons for the loss of Cornish in east Cornwall must lie elsewhere, perhaps in English settlement in the tenth and eleventh centuries or the political and administrative take-over of Cornwall in those same centuries or with other socio-economic changes in that earlier period.

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https://bernarddeacon.com/2024/10/15/where-was-cornish-spoken-in-the-middle-ages/

#CornishLanguage #placeNames

#Cornish language revives on back of psych-pop and Covid

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jun/16/cornish-language-revives-on-back-of-psych-pop-and-covid

#Cornwall #CornishLanguage #Kernewek #languages #linguistics #CelticLanguages

From Kernow/Cornwall

#BledhenNowydhDa
Good New Year!

#Kernewek
#CornishLanguage

Porth Gwarra: 'Cove by wooded slopes'

#Kernewek
#CornishLanguage

The following set of verses is a collection of #Cornish language place names arranged in alternate rhyme by Mr Davies Gilbert (1767-1839) born at St. Erth, to show the euphony of the Cornish tongue.

#Kernewek #CornishLanguage

Good morning Cornwall!

#CornishLanguage
#Kernewek
#Kernow #Cornwall