Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/69

50 between Middle and Modern Cornish is not really very great, and comes to very little more than a difference of spelling, an uncertainty about the final letters of certain words, and a tendency to contractions, elisions, and apocopations in words, which, though recognised in their fuller form in the spelling of Middle Cornish verse, may have been nearly as much contracted, elided, and apocopated in Middle Cornish conversation. Dr. Whitley Stokes points out in his edition of Jordan's Creation certain changes, and though the language of that play is substantially Middle Cornish, the spelling is largely of the pre-Lhuydian popular Modern Cornish sort. Among these changes are the following:—

1. The final e becomes a. [This is perhaps only a question of spelling, and need not imply a difference of sound. Probably a sound as of the German final e is intended. ]

2. th and gh have become mute, and are often interchanged. [In Modern Cornish th is often omitted, or represented by h.]

3. m, n, become respectively bm, dn. [Probably the sounds existed long before they were recognised in spelling.]

4. s becomes frequently a soft g (j). [This j sound also may have existed long before it was written as a g or j. The s of the earlier MSS. was probably never intended to represent in these cases a true s. Dr. Stokes might also have mentioned the similar cases of she being used where the older MSS. write sy for the second person singular.]

The apparent changes of vowel sounds in the still later Cornish, more fully discussed further on, are mostly these:

1. a long sometimes becomes aw, especially before