Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/27

8 and the Welsh of Glamorgan, once the classical form of the language, before the Cardiganshire Welsh of the translation of the Bible superseded it, is now tending to be a broken-down form of South Welsh. But all these spoken dialects of Welsh are kept together and their tendency to divergence is greatly checked by the existence of a very clearly defined spelling, grammar, and standard of style in the book language of what is far and away the most cultivated and literary of all the Celtic tongues. Breton has four well-defined dialects, those of Leon, Treguier, Cornouailles, and Vannes, besides the broken-down Breton of the Croisic district, the Vannes dialect differing from the others as much as Cornish does, and curiously resembling Cornish in some of its peculiarities. Here there is no one literary standard, but each of the four dialects has its own, though it is generally held, rightly or wrongly, that the Leonais dialect is the best, and the Vannetais the worst. An examination of the names of places in West Cornwall gives some indication that there was a slight difference of dialect between the Hundred of Kerrier, or perhaps one should rather say the peninsula of Meneage, and the Hundred of Penwith, but it amounted to very little, and the evidence is very scanty.

The difference between Cornish and its two sisters is not very easy to define in a few words. There are differences of phonology, vocabulary, and grammatical forms. In phonology the most marked difference from both is the substitution of s or z, with a tendency, intensified in later Cornish, to the sound of j or ch, for d or t of Welsh and Breton. Cornish agrees with Breton in not prefixing a vowel (y in Welsh) to words beginning with's followed by a consonant, and its vowel sounds are generally simpler and less diphthongalised than those of Welsh. It agrees with Welsh in changing what one may call the French u sound into î (English ee), going