Cornish Language Texts : Tekstow Kernewek
The aim of this site is to gather together the corpus of traditional Cornish language texts as fully and as accurately as possible, especially transcriptions of the original manuscripts in a format suitable for automatic processing. Many of these files were produced Keith Syed. They may contain scanning and other occasional errors, and were uploaded as a temporary measure, until properly edited texts are available on the web. Gonn meur ras dhe K. S. More recently most of the Ordinalia has been made available at : and I have used the manuscript text of Origo Mundi from that site to remove a number of errors from the text presented here. Gonn meur ras dhe Jim Hall, Kolji Aberfal, ragdho. Unfortunately, this site too seems to be no longer maintained, so for safty's sake I have presented the ms texts of Passio Christi and Resurrectio Domini below, together with about a quarter of Norris' English translation of PC. Of even more significance however is the availability now on the web of scanned images of all of the pages of two of the original Middle Cornish mss, the whole of the Ordinalia and Gwreans an Bys, which have been made available by the Bodleian Library at Oxford : http://image.ox.ac.uk/list-collection?collection=bodleian Be warned that these images are very detailed indeed and will therefore take a long time to load, and may crash a normal web browser. They are best downloaded to files and processed with image editing software such as GIMP. I would suggest cropping the margins, reducing the linear dimensions by a factor of four and enhancing the contrast slightly. This reduces the size of the files by a factor of ten without seriously imparing their value for linguistic research. The authorities at the Bodleian should be congratulated for putting this material online where it is once again accessible to Cornish speakers and language students. Following the lead of the Bodlian, the National Library of Wales have now made available images of the pages of the Beunans Meriasek and Bewnans Ke manuscripts : http://www.llgc.org.uk/drych/drych_s004.htm These images do not need to be resized, although you may find it helpful to enhance the contrast of some of them. The only significant Middle Cornish manuscripts not yet visible on-line are those of the Passion Poem, the Charter Endorsement and the Tregear Homilies, entombed somewhere in that well know repository of stolen property, the British Museum. The team involved in translating the Bible into Cornish have a website at : which includes reliable texts of various Late Cornish translations of Bible extracts, the Creed etc. Bewnans KePerhaps the most significant recent development in Cornish language studies has been the discovery of a previously unknown text from the Late Middle Cornish period, Bewnans Ke or the Life of St. Ke or Kea, by staff at the National Library of Wales (MS. 23,849D). This is a verse play similar in many ways to Beunans Meriasek, but in a later manuscript. Like BM it contains material only indirectly related to the saint in question, in this case King Arthur's dispute and battle with "Emperor Lucy" and the revolt of Modred in his absence. While new subject matter and vocabulary are intorduced into the corpus of traditional Cornish, it is important to realise that this section is derived mostly from the continental Arthurian "Matter of Britain", and so does not throw very much light on the native British traditions from which these stories sprang. The main exceptions are some Cornish place names, and the Cornish forms of the names Gwynnuwar (Guinevere) and Kalespol(gh) (Excalibur). Thanks to the good work of Dr. Oliver J. Padel (meur y vri), formerly of the University of Cambridge, a provisional transcription of the text was provided in pdf format. From this a plain text file has been produced formated to assist automatic processing. This is the bare ms text only, with a brief but valuable introduction by Dr. Padel. A first very provisional English translation has been provided by Michael Polkinhorn (gonn meur ras dhodho) and is available at : http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/grrraphics/BewnansKe.pdf The preliminary analysis and interpretation of a short extract has been included below. Editions :
For a brief introduction to the Middle Cornish texts see : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature_in_Cornish Further material will be added to this site as and when it becomes available. I'd particularly appreciate the ms text of the Beunans Meriasek in computer readable form. The main use of this material will be the gradual development of a publicly available database of traditional Cornish, along with the necessary software to search and manipulate it, reconstitute the original texts, generate concordances etc. See Towlenn Geskorrans Kernewek for some examples. Please send your comments and suggestions to kam@howlsedhes.co.uk ms : Manuscript spelling; kk : Kernewek Kemmyn; eng : English Translation
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