The image above comes from a paper by Henry Jenner entitled Traditional Relics of the Cornish Language in Mounts Bay in 1875 published in The Transactions of the Philological Society. Jenner, along with the surprisingly named Rev. W. S. Lach-Szyrma, the vicar of Newlyn, visited some old people in Newlyn Parish and in Mousehole to record the scraps of Cornish remembered by them.
Jenner chose to use Glossic, one of a number of transcription systems developed by Alexander Ellis, to record the pronunciations of the words he heard. Here are Jenner’s transcriptions of the numbers 1-20, as remembered by members of two different sets of informants, both of Newlyn, John Kelynack and his wife, and Mrs Soady. Mrs Kelynack had learned the words from her father, John Tremethack, who died in 1852 aged 87, which means he was born in 1765, making him a contemporary of Dolly Pentreath, purportedly the last monoglot native speaker of Cornish. Dolly died in 1778.
| The Kelynacks | Mrs Soady | |
| 1 | on | on•un |
| 2 | doo | deu |
| 3 | trei | traiy |
| 4 | paj | paj•u |
| 5 | pemp | pemp |
| 6 | weth | eth |
| 7 | saa•yth | saa•yth |
| 8 | eith | eith |
| 9 | noun | nou |
| 10 | deg | deg |
| 11 | ig•nak | ig•unak |
| 12 | dau•dhak | dau•dhak |
| 13 | tau•dhak | tau•dhak |
| 14 | bizwau•dhak | bizwau•dhak |
| 15 | pemp•thak | pemp•thak |
| 16 | wedh•ak | wedh•ak |
| 17 | saa•ydhak | saa•ydhak |
| 18 | ei•dhak | ei•dhak |
| 19 | noun•jak | noun•jak |
| 20 | ig•uns | ig•uns |
I don’t know what the • signifies. If it is meant to be a syllable divider, it is certainly used rather inconsistently. The numbers 11-19 show some interesting alternations.
Many thanks to Michael Ashby for sending me a PDF of the Jenner article.
I encourage you to get hold of my new edition of Jenner’s Handbook, to which I have added phonetic notation throughout in IPA, along with various notes where appropriate. The paper you site above is also included, as well as two others of the same vintage; I give IPA readings of the Glossic.
The book was launched last Friday in Waterstones Truro.
See http://www.evertype.com/books/jenner.html
Will getting hold of your new edition enable us to be enlightened as to what the • does in fact signify? Could you not perhaps enlighten us in the interim?
One might guess it indicated an accent on the preceding syllable. The syllabification is not all that implausible, but what of Mrs Soady’s on•un? Could it just be a corruption of a hyphen, tilde, or even slash when the article was digitalized?
No, it’s definitely a centred dot, but the suggestion that it indicates accent on the preceding syllable is a good one. Why didn’t I think of that?