Page:The ancient language, and the dialect of Cornwall.djvu/41

 21 '' This is evidenced by the colloquial resemblance to this day (1790) subsisting betwixt the Cornish on the south-western margin of the County, and their opposite neighbours at Morlaix, and other parts of Bas Bretagne, where the low French and the Cornish seem almost one and the same dialect." Pryce remarks, that if he had not been otherwise well apprised of this fact, his opinion would have been confirmed by what he had heard from a very old man now (1790) living at Mousehole near Penzance, who as Pryce believed, was at that time, the only person capable of holding half an hour's conversation on common subjects in the Cornish tongue. The old man told Pryce '' that about three score years ago (in 1730) being at Morlaix on board a smuggling cutter, and the only time he was ever there, he was ordered on shore with another young man to buy some greens, and not knowing a word of French as he thought, he was much surprised to find that he understood a great part of the conversation of some boys at play in the street; and upon further inquiry, he found that he could make known all his wants in Cornish, and be better understood than he could be at home, when he used that dialect " Pryce, referring to a correspondence between Lhuyd and Tonkin, says that *^Mr. Lhuyd had gone great lengths towards the formation of a Cornish-British vocabulary, and he stated at the end of his Cornish grammar (Archseologia p. 253) that looking over the sheets of his grammar he must recall the promise made in his preface (p. 222) of a Cornish-English vocabulary, there being no room for it in