Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/68

 INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Cornish language divides very naturally into three periods, (1) Ancient, (2) Middle, (3) Modern.

1. The Ancient period is only represented by the Cottonian Vocabulary, which, though a MS. of the twelfth century, is probably a copy of a much earlier one, by perhaps a few glosses, and by the names in the Bodmin Gospels. It has no extant literature.

2. The Middle period is that of the Add. Charter fragment, the Ordinalia, the Poem of the Passion (fifteenth century), the Life of St. Meriasek (1504), and to some extent of the play of The Creation (1611), though the last is partly transitional. Judging from the few words preserved in John of Cornwall's twelfth-century translation of a prophecy of Merlin, the lost original of that was perhaps in an early form of Middle Cornish.

3. The Modern period begins with the few sentences in Andrew Horde's book (1542), and continues to the end.

As the whole of the extant literature of Middle Cornish is in verse, it gives us little help as regards the colloquial Cornish even of its own period, and judging from Andrew Borde's sentences, only some forty years later than the St. Meriasek and seventy years earlier than Jordan's play, Middle and Modern Cornish must have overlapped one another a good deal. It is probable that those who wrote verse would continue to use archaic forms long after they had been dropped in prose and in conversation. But the 49