Today's notes come from Norris' "Sketch of Cornish Grammar" in his _The Ancient Cornish Drama_ volume 2, pp 232-234. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To show the interrelationships between nouns, Cornish uses prepositions. However, the genitive deserves a bit more attention due to some peculiarities involved. One purpose of our word "of" is to show that a quality is an attribute of something or someone. This is the good old genitive of attribution that I had to teach myself because Latin courses are scarce over here! Cornish shows this particular relationship by using the preposition _a_; which causes the soft mutation to the word following: arluth a ras lord of grace (gracious lord) tas a nef father of heaven (heavenly father) myghtern a gallos king of power The ordinary possessive is formed by apposition with the chief word comming first: myghtern yethewon King of the Jews mab den son of man coys Penryn wood of Penryn taves den tounge of man pen mys the end of a month pen myghterneth head of royalty One peculiarity found by Norris and Lhuyd is a trace of an inflected genitive formed by internal vowel change. While only traces of what must have been an ancient system, the changes tend to be: a > e and e > i,y, or ey. Examples are: merh > an vyrh daughter > of the daughter pen > er dha byn head > "against you" hue+l > mein hueyl stone > work stones (for building) kre+s "the midst" > In kreys an dre "In the midst of town" I will make note, as of genders and plural forms, of genitive forms as I run across them to note in any vocabularies I may post. I have no idea how widespread this inflected genitive is but Norris mentions that "...it certainly existed in the modern Cornish a century and a half ago..." (Norris, 1968v2:233). That would place the fully formed Cornish genitive in existance at the turn of the 18th century, or very much close to the time the language faded away. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'll look into the genitive some more in my other sources and as soon as I find out more, I'll be sure to post. Anthony Velasquez Oregon State Univeristy (E-mail) velasqua@ucs.orst.edu ========================================================================= My a vyn gruthyl castel ha drehevel thy'm ostel ynno jammes rang trege =========================================================================