Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/213

194 East Cornwall, where the language has been dead for three centuries, this accentuation is still preserved. If the epithet suffix is a monosyllable, the accent of the compounded word is on the last syllable; if not, the accent is usually on the last but one, but the intervening article or preposition is always a proclitic, and is disregarded as to accent. The same sort of thing happens in English. Thus, even if it were the custom to write Stratfordonavon all in one word, we should know by the accent that it meant Stratford-on-Avon; but one, say some German philologist, who had never heard it pronounced, and knew nothing of British topography and the distribution of surnames, might conjecture that it was Stratfor Dónavon, might compare it with Lydiard Tregoze, Stoke Dabernon, Sutton Valence, or Compton Wyniates, and might build thereon a beautiful theory of an Irish settlement in Warwickshire. Things every whit as absurd as this have been done with Cornish names.

3. The position and general features of the place. Thus when we find that a rather important town is situated at the innermost point of a bay called in Cornish (cf. Boson's Pilchard Song) Zanz Garrak Loos en Kûz, we may doubt whether its name signifies "the holy head or headland," and not "the head of the bay." In this case there is a slight complication, because there is actually something of a headland about the Battery Rocks, and the town arms are St. John Baptist's head in a charger; but when we find that Tremaine is some ten miles, as the crow flies, from the nearest point of the coast, we may be quite justified in doubting whether Pryce is right in calling it " the town on shore or sea coast."

The following specimens of names about whose meaning there can be no doubt, will serve as examples of the construction of Cornish place-names:—