Henry Jenners Handbook of the Cornish Language
Cód:
491_9781904808374
This new edition of Jenners classic Handbook of the Cornish Language appears more than a century after the books first publication. Now that the Cornish Revival has weathered many storms, it is well worth making Jenners ground-breaking work available again, copies of the 1904 edition having become rare and expensive. The book is not a mere facsimile. It contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), to assist the modern reader in understanding exactly which sounds Jenner was recommending. It also includes three articles he published between 1873 and 1877, near the beginning of his researches into Cornish, reproduced for comparison with the main text from 1904. The orthographic system which Jenner used in 1904 was the culmination of many years of work, but it is important to notice that Jenner was aware three decades earlier of Bells Visible Speech, and of Ellis Palæotype and Glossic. Jenners familiarity with these precursors of the IPA is significant. It shows him to have had real phonetic training. It places his work in the context of modern linguistics. Jenners achievement as a linguist was remarkable. Synthesizing the texts, the description in Lhuyds Archaeologia Britannica (1707), Norris Sketch of Cornish Grammar (1859), Williams Lexicon Cornu-Britannicum (1865), and Jagos English-Cornish Dictionary (1882), Jenner sorted it all out: he devised a system which was practical enough to use to begin to revive the language. He uses an orthography that supports Late Cornish while retaining a connection to the orthographic forms of the Middle Cornish scribal tradition. Jenners Cornish looks Cornish. His orthography provides a good, clear relationship between sound and spelling without diverging drastically from that of the traditional texts. He used diacritical marks for precision where necessary. His section on grammar is wide-ranging and largely reliable. Jenner appears to regard the differenc
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