Page:The ancient language, and the dialect of Cornwall.djvu/78

 and the words become theek, theeng, and theen. This is apparently a transmitted peculiarity from the old Cornish language.

Williams in his Cornish Dictionary (Celtic) has no word beginning with th in the ancient language, and he says of the letter d, that in the Cornish, " when radical it changes its construction into dh which has the sound of th in the English words this, than." In some parts of Brittany, they pronounce dh as z to this very day.

It is well known how hard it is for foreigners, to pronounce th and the writer well remembers how great were the attempts of a Frenchman to say

"They think that they are thoroughly thrashed" after many efforts his despairing cry was "mais c'est impossible" and so it was to him ; but we know that it is not so with all foreigners. Four or five hundred years ago when the Cornish began to lose their ancient language, they may have had the same difficulty with th, and there is a trace of this in their manner of saying theeng for thing. Now, as a race the Cornish have no difficulty, perhaps time has overcome it, as it might in a race of Frenchmen after speaking English for centuries.

There is another very common phrase, viz: "How be'ee?" for. How are you? this is only, "How be ye?" making the y an i which in the Cornish dialect is pronounced like e. This is more common in the west after passing St. Austell. As we advance eastwards we find that the word yiew (you) is a very representative expression and increasingly so as we travel towards the Tamar where