Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/13

x a necessity. The present system is not the phonetic ideal of "one sound to each symbol, and one symbol for each sound," but it aims at being fairly consistent with itself, not too difficult to understand, not too much encumbered with diacritical signs, and not too startlingly different from the spellings of earlier times, especially from that of Lhuyd, whose system was constructed from living Cornish speakers. The writer has arrived at his conclusions by a comparison of the various existing spellings with one another, with the traditional fragments collected and recorded by himself in 1875, with the modern pronunciation of Cornish names, with the changes which English has undergone in the mouths of the less educated of Cornishmen, and to some extent with Breton. The author suggests that this form of spelling should be generally adopted by Cornish students of their old speech. The system cannot in the nature of things be strictly accurate, but it is near enough for practical purposes. Possibly there is much room for controversy, especially as to such details as the distribution of long and short vowels, the representation of the Middle Cornish u, ue, eu sometimes by î, sometimes by ŷ, and sometimes by eu or ew, or of the Middle Cornish y by i, e, or y, or occasionally by an obscure ă, ŏ, or ŭ, and it is quite likely that others might arrive at different conclusions from the same evidence, though those conclusions might not be any the nearer to the sounds which the Cornishmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries really did make. As for grammatical forms, it will be seen that the writer is of opinion that the difference between Middle and Modern Cornish was more apparent than real, and that except in the very