If one compares the vocabulary laid out in the handbooks of revived
Cornish with the lexicon of the traditional texts, one is struck by how
different are the two. From the beginnings Unified Cornish in the 1920s
it appears that revivalists have tended to avoid words borrowed from
English, replacing them with more "Celtic' etyma". Indeed the more
Celtic appearance the vocabulary of both Welsh and Breton seens to have
been a source of envy to some Cornish revivalists. From Nance onwards
such purists have believed that English borrowings disfigured Cornish
and in some sense did not belong in the language. They considered that
revived Cornish would be more authentic, if as many borrowings as
possible were replaced by native or Celtic words. Such a perception is
perhaps understandable in the context of the Cornish language as a badge
of ethnic identity. From a historical and linguistic perspective,
however, it is misplaced. Cornish, unlike its sister languages, has
always adopted words from English. Indeed it is these English borrowings
which give the mature language of the Middle Cornish period its
distinctive flavour. Cornish without the English element is quite simply
not Cornish. Since there is no sizeable community speaking revived
Cornish as a native language, we are compelled to rely on the only
native speakers available to us, namely the writers of the traditional
texts. We must follow them as closely as we can. It is to be hoped that
this book will in some small measure assist learners of Cornish to speak
and to write a form of the language more closely related to what remains
to us of the traditional language.
