Point of view:

It's not just our problem - the Queen had it too

by S. Pathiravitana

For a change let us talk about the 'ethnic' problems in other countries. Cornwall, for instance, is one of the least publicised counties in England. Unlike the other English countries like Yorkshire or Lancashire it is hardly in the news; the cricket it plays is only at the minor counties level. It is trying to become a major county not to play cricket so much as to be a Major 'power' like some of the other Celtic groups in the United Kingdom - Scotland, Ireland and Wales. At present it is receiving some support from some of them because the Celts were the original inhabitants of England before the Anglo Saxons spread themselves all over driving the Celts into their present strongholds and consequent impoverishment. Cornwall, by the way, is the poorest country in the UK and is getting some sort of poor relief from the EU.

Man with seven wives

My own ignorance about Cornwall and its insignificant towns surfaced when a friend, with a penchant for making wisecracks, dropped in one day on me in the newly rented house I moved to. As he got down from his vehicle he asked, where is the man with seven wives. What do you mean? I asked him and he told me, "Look on your wall outside." And there for the first time I noticed the name of the house - St. Ives. The man in the St Ives town was actually going away from it with his seven wives each of whom had seven sacks and each sack had seven cats and each cat had seven kits. But the nursery rhyme wants to know, just to confuse you, how many, kits, cats, sacks and wives, were going to St Ives.

Those mathematically inclined have actually worked out how many would have gone had they gone to St. Ives, and has put this into a formula which runs like this: 74+ 73+72+7. While leaving them to check how many, let's get back to poor Cornwall. St. Ives, by the way, is no nursery fantasy.

Today it elects a representative to the UK Parliament. At the moment the Cornish people are trying to work out another problem and that is how to agree on which way to spell Cornwall in Cornish. The Cornish linguistic problem is pretty acute, because to prove your national identity you must have a language and if you are not agreed on how to spell it then what is your bargaining power. The present uncertainty is whether Cornwall should be spelt Kernowek or Kernuak or again Curnoack in Cornish. So, like another poor old country - Sri Lanka, Cornwall is divided on what is essential to win at the bargaining table - unity.

The beginning of the Cornish problem stretches to the days just before the first Queen Elizabeth. Earlier there had been a struggle in England to give the English language a more respectable position in national affairs, for up to that time Latin dominated as the first language of the country. The Norman occupation of England drove the English language further away from public life and into the huts of the humble peasants, while the upper classes took to French and Latin. It was to remedy this position that an act was passed in parliament to remove the Latin Prayer Book and replace it with an English version. This, however, was not approved by the Cornish people whose leaders then sent a protest to the authorities.

And this is what the note said: "We the Cornishmen (whereof certain of us understand no English) utterly refuse this new English Prayer Book." to which the Duke of Somerset replied asking, "Why are you offended by services in English when they had them in Latin which they also did not understand?" A fairly reasonable question, one should admit, but it didn't sound like that to the Cornishmen. You would think that the Englishmen, fair as they claim to be, would have settled the matter peacefully. When the Cornishmen felt they got no hearing there was disappointment in the whole of Cornwall that eventually led to a rebellion.

The King's Army of England intervened to quell the rebellion and the result was 4000 of the Cornish people were massacred. Then began a slow death of the Cornish language and 200 years later the last person who spoke Cornish fluently, Dolly Pentreath, died.

Her last words were, "Me ne vidn cewsel Sawznek!" ("I don't want to speak English!"). The Cornish language started picking up again at the beginning of the 20th century due to the efforts of two ardent Cornishmen. The revival has succeeded to some extent and the language is now recognised as one of the five languages of the British Isles. But the number of people who speak Cornish is still low and efforts are being made to use it to teach children as a home language to give the language a start from their birth.

A curious point is that the Cornish people or its culture don't seem to have come into the life of the English people the way the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish have done. There is hardly any mention in the dictionaries about Cornwall or its Cornish-ness striking enough to enter the English idiom. There is mention of a dish by the name of 'Cornish paste', not a pastry but a dish of meat and vegetables. The Oxford Reference Dictionary has this about Cornwall: "...a county occupying the extreme SW peninsular of England. The Celtic language of the ancient Cornish language was still spoken there until the 18th century."

Idiomatic expressions

But there are many expressions in the English language where the other Celtic groups are concerned. Irish doings in particular seem to meet the humour of the English often. One gets the feeling, however, when coming across those idiomatic expressions that a great cordiality, uncomfortably though, exists among a family of peoples with different habits and living styles. There is both approval and disapproval regarding their neighbours' mannerisms.

The Irish seem to be at the receiving end most of the time.

Their fondness for potatoes or rather, historically having no alternative but to like them, is something that their English neighbours seem to have been impressed with to refer to the potato as being the 'Irish apricot'.

According to the OED, from about the late 16th century an Irish statement or expression has been looked upon as "paradoxical, (apparently) illogical, self contradictory" and the example given is, 'Marcus wouldn't dare to tell a lie unless it was true!' 'Irish,' said Pasco. At the popular level, when there is a dead calm in the ocean, sailors refer to it as an 'Irish Hurricane' and also, an 'Irish promotion' is the expression used when somebody's wages have been reduced. Nobody seems to know why, when an open drain is cut across a road to enable waters to flow along it, it is called an 'Irish drain.'

Another ready source for the humour of the English are the Scots. The Scots are well known for their frugality and most things associated with the Scottish name have something to do with it. 'Scotch callops' is described as a stewed dish of meat cut into small pieces.

And 'Scotch coffee' is described as hot water flavoured with burnt biscuits while 'Scotch cloth' is described as a cheap version of lawn. There is another meaning to the verb 'scotch' and that is to haggle with a person over something. As for the word 'welsh' or 'welch' the origin, says the Shorter Oxford, is unknown, and to welsh on somebody is to cheat by failing to pay a debt or to evade an obligation.

As for the aspirations of the Cornish people the UK Government does not see them as being fit for self-government still. No wonder. Perhaps the UK is cautious after seeing where the Scottish aspirations are now moving towards - making a Scot the Prime Minister of the UK, which some English MPs are saying, is an unpalatable thought. This news was announced in the Telegraph just the other day under the headline, "Power of Scottish MPs 'a threat to UK'."