6. _Pryce’s Vocabulary_, or rather that of Gwavas, Tonkin, and Pryce. Printed, with Pryce’s edition of Lhuyd’s Grammar, at Sherborne in 1790. Some of this vocabulary was collected from the literary remains of Cornish, but a very large part was compiled from living tradition, not much by Pryce himself, but by Gwavas and Tonkin.
Though some of these have been used by Canon Williams in his _Lexicon Cornu-Britannicum_, by Dr. Whitley Stokes in his Supplementary Cornish Glossary (_Transactions of the Philological Society_, 1868-9), and still more in Dr. Jago’s English-Cornish Dictionary, they have not been thoroughly exhausted yet, and a good many more words may be collected from them, as also from the attempted interpretations of place-names in Pryce’s book and in the Gwavas MS.
PART II—THE GRAMMAR OF THE CORNISH LANGUAGE
The Cornish language divides very naturally into three periods, (1) Ancient, (2) Middle, (3) Modern.
1. The Ancient period is only represented by the Cottonian Vocabulary, which, though a MS. of the twelfth century, is probably a copy of a much earlier one, by perhaps a few glosses, and by the names in the Bodmin Gospels. It has no extant literature.
2. The Middle period is that of the Add. Charter fragment, the _Ordinalia_, the _Poem of the Passion_ (fifteenth century), the _Life of St. Meriasek_ (1504), and to some extent of the play of _The Creation_ (1611), though the last is partly transitional. Judging from the few words preserved in John of Cornwall’s twelfth-century translation of a prophecy of Merlin, the lost original of that was perhaps in an early form of Middle Cornish.
3. The Modern period begins with the few sentences in Andrew Borde’s book (1542), and continues to the end.
As the whole of the extant literature of Middle Cornish is in verse, it gives us little help as regards the colloquial Cornish even of its own period, and judging from Andrew Borde’s sentences, only some forty years later than the _St. Meriasek_ and seventy years earlier than Jordan’s play, Middle and Modern Cornish must have overlapped one another a good deal. It is probable that those who wrote verse would continue to use archaic forms long after they had been dropped in prose and in conversation. But the difference between Middle and Modern Cornish is not really very great, and comes to very little more than a difference of spelling, an uncertainty about the final letters of certain words, and a tendency to contractions, elisions, and apocopations in words, which, though recognised in their fuller form in the spelling of Middle Cornish verse, may have been nearly as much contracted, elided, and apocopated in Middle Cornish conversation. Dr. Whitley Stokes points out in his edition of Jordan’s _Creation_ certain changes, and though the language of that play is substantially Middle Cornish, the spelling is largely of the pre-Lhuydian popular Modern Cornish sort. Among these changes are the following:—