This book brings together in one convenient volume eight articles by
Professor Nicholas Williams on Traditional Cornish. They include
"I-affection in Breton and Cornish" (2007), "The Cornish englyn" (2007),
"The preterite in Cornish" (2010), "Some Cornish plurals" (2011),
"Adjectival and adverbial prefixes in Cornish" (2013), "'If' in Cornish"
(2014), "Reflexive verbs in Cornish" (2014), and "Auxiliary verbs in
Cornish" (2016). These are presented in eight chapters; seven deal with
various aspects of the historical phonology, morphology and syntax of
traditional Cornish. One article examines the Cornish form of the
englyn, a three-lined stanza common to both Cornish and Welsh. The first
five of the chapters originally appeared as articles in "Cornish
Studies". Two further chapters were first given as short papers at the
Skians conferences of 2014 and 2015 respectively. The last chapter of
the book discusses the auxiliary verbs of traditional Cornish and has
not been published hitherto. Because the sections below were written at
different times and for varying purposes, there is a certain degree of
overlap in their subject-matter. Cornish lacks native speakers, thus
revivalists have no one whose pronunciation or idiom can serve as a
model for their own speech. It is therefore of vital importance that we
who attempt to use revived Cornish should be as familiar as is possible
with the traditional language as it survives in the Middle and Late
Cornish texts. Indeed reading those texts carefully can be both most
instructive. "Studies in Traditional Cornish" is a companion volume to
four other works on similar topics: "Cornish Today", "Towards Authentic
Cornish", "Writings on Revived Cornish", and "Form and Content in
Revived Cornish".
