This year, I started learning Cornish. To clarify, I’m not Cornish and I don’t live in Cornwall. I’m a Berkshire girl with a Brighton postcode.
However, as a freelance communications consultant, I have an insatiable appetite for learning. Learning how to run a business, learning about my clients, learning how to build a website (the one you're on now!), learning how to troubleshoot IT issues, learning how to manage the emotional peaks and troughs of self-employment...And, learning a niche Celtic language!
I have to give a nod to my lovely Cornish (and Cornish-speaking) partner as the spark of inspiration. He started learning the language as an adult, to help connect him to his heritage. Since then, he's gone on to champion a resurgence of the language, including making an award-winning short film in Cornish. So, the more time I spent visiting him in Cornwall – a place I already knew and loved fairly well – the more intrigued I became about Kernewek (Cornish for Cornish).
I’ve never been a natural linguist; I dropped languages as soon as I could at school, after limping my way through German GCSE. Then, aside from the odd “Un cappuccino per favore,” or “Merci, Madame” muttered on trips abroad, I've communicated largely in boring old English. But I had a different motivation to learn Cornish. I wasn’t doing it to pass an exam, or to try and feel like a slightly less awkward Brit abroad. I wanted to get to know more about a community and its culture.
Cornish is a very old language. Like, pre-Roman old. It has roots in the Celtic ‘Common Brythonic’ language, that was spoken in the Iron Age and also diverged into Welsh and Breton. At its peak in the middle ages, it was spoken by 39,000 people, the vast majority of the population of Cornwall at the time. Then, it became extinct - in the sense of there being no first-language Cornish speakers left.
You can google the reasons why (headline: Blame The Tudors), but since the middle of the 20th century, Kernewek has been having a comeback. Today, an estimated 3,000 people speak the language and it’s taught in more than 50 schools in Cornwall. In recent years, this revival has been driven by passionate individuals, like the Cornish-speaking musical artist Gwenno and actor/comedian Kernow King. Not to mention the efforts of organisations like Golden Tree, who create projects that celebrate Cornish language, heritage and identity.
So, my curiosity piqued, I signed up for an Introduction to Cornish online evening course, run by Exeter University. Every Monday evening for the past ten weeks, under the expert guidance of Dr. Kensa Broadhurst, I’ve been getting to know the basics of the language.
I don’t think learning any language is easy. But Cornish brings additional challenges. It has its own alphabet that doesn’t include the letters ‘c’, ‘q’, ‘x’ or ‘z’. It has some mind-bending grammatical rules (for example, masculine plural nouns only mutate if they are people, stones or horses). And as it’s a minority language, DuoLingo and Google Translate haven’t deigned to include it on their platforms (yet). That said, there are some great online resources like Cornishdictionary.co.uk and Go Cornish.
However, it’s also wonderful and beautiful in its quirkiness. The Cornish word for prawn is ‘bibyn bubyn’. ‘Splann’ represents about ten different words in English, including ‘super’, ‘shining’, ‘terrific’, and ‘gorgeous’. There is no word for ‘yes’ or ‘no’. There are multiple words for green, and the word ‘glas’ represents all the colours of the sea – blue, green and grey.
Indeed, I fell so hard for Cornish that I decided to incorporate it into my business name, ‘Tell Me Mor’. 'Mor' is the Cornish word for ‘sea’.
Despite butchering the pronunciation of every Cornish sentence I utter, and still trying to untangle ‘unn ki’ (one dog) from 'tri hi' (three dogs), I’ve readily signed up for Introduction to Cornish Part 2, starting in January.
Learning Cornish may not future-proof my career, or give me a competitive business edge. But it’s worth more to me than that. It helps me understand people and culture, makes me laugh with its eccentricities and brings me closer to the people and places I love. That’s the kind of learning I want to fill my life with.
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