Cornish Bible History (3)

**List: Cornish Ministry the Bible ( the Bible ) Cornish... CORNISH. "THE Celtic dialect, once spoken in Cornwall, is now extinct as a living language.   Dolly Pentreath, who died at Penzance in 1778, aged 102, was then said to be the only person in Cornwall who could speak the aboriginal idiom of that province of ancient Britain.    One cannot see such relics of antiquity disappear from the face of the earth without regret.   The very fact that the dialect of the ancient British tongue spoken until lately in the southernmost county of England, was most likely the same in which its inhabitants bartered their tin for the purple of Tyre with the Phœnician traders who gave Britain its glorious name, cannot but make the complete annihi- lation of the Cornu-British dialect of the Celtic tongue, a source of regret for all who love antiquity.    The Cornish dialect, one of the three branches of the old British, bears greater affinity with the Breton, or Armorican dialect of Brittany, than it does with Welsh; although it properly forms the link of union between the Celtic dialect of France, and that of the Cambrian hills.   The nature of its inflexions, both in letters, and in tenses and cases, is generally speaking alike, allowance being made for dialectic variations arising from the nature of the country in which the dialect is spoken.   The only remains of the Cornish dialect are preserved in several MSS. kept in the Bodleian, in the British Museum, and elsewhere in this country.   Of these, several have been published, viz.: Mount Calvary, a poem in 259 stanzas; another called The Creation; both edited by D. Gilbert, in 1826-1827, and, lately, an ancient Cornish Drama, edited by Mr. E. Norris.   There is also a Cornish Grammar, by Dr. Pryce, printed at Sherborne in 1790, 4to, under the name of Archælogia Cornu-Britannica, and a smaller one by Mr. Norris.   The extract from the first chapter of Genesis given here is borrowed from the appendix to "The Creation of the World."   This, and the parable of the Prodigal Son, are the only portions of Scripture that have been printed in the Cornish dialect; and on this account it is remarkable as a curiosity."--The Bible of Every Land. (1860, Second Edition)   Samuel Bagster   [Info only] CORNISH.--1860   S. Bagster   [Info only: n.d. Genesis 1:1-13 unknown.]

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