Please reassure me that Welsh grammar can be like English grammar without being "bad Welsh"

Welsh General / Questions
#21

And there are some who want to defer that evolution indefinitely.

I got an email just the other day from one Cornish group with a little booklet attached containing errors found in the writing of some Cornish speakers which should be avoided, based on the fact that that grammatical construction is not found in the ancient texts (and so is not authentic); that a particular suffix is not needed; or that a word has been borrowed or calqued from Welsh, Breton, or English when a Cornish synonym exists.

sigh

Is Cornish a performance art where we reenact medieval passion plays? (Authenticity would make quite a bit of sense here.)

Or is it supposed to be a living community language that non-academics can use every day?

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#22

Iā€™ve never studied Cornish (although have briefly played with SSiC), but from reading around Iā€™d got the impression that progress in Cornish had stalled in the past over disagreements about orthography or whatever. A shame, but perhaps inevitable given that it has been in a sort of ā€œdark ageā€ for so long.

#23

I think that a big part of it was that spelling simply wasnā€™t standardised back then, nor of course was the spelling designed to be a phonemic orthography or something helpful for a second-language learner.

So thereā€™s a bit of competition between people who want something regular and phonemic on one side (that is both easily teachable and that will enable students to produce a correct pronunciation based on the spelling), and something that captures the ambiguous and inconsistent but ā€œauthentic and traditionalā€ spelling of old on the other.

Also, because the old spelling did not always represent different sounds differently, there can be differences of opinion how this word or that is supposed to be pronounced. (Or even how many distinct vowel sounds there are.)

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