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--- Mermaid Productions
<info@hidden.email> wrote:
> Hi Padraic,
>
> As you may remember I've been a Kerno fan for
> some time; in fact your Kernu
> Grammar has pride of place on my bookshelf
> inbetween James Campbell's Jameld
> dictionary and Mark Okrand's Klingon
Dictionary.
Woohoo! I hope it proved useful in describing the
language a little. Admittedly, it's not too
helpfull any more, as I don't write in that
variety of Kerno anymore.
> A while back you made a comment or two on the
> Conlang list to the effect
> that colloquial Kerno is somewhat different
> from the language described in the grammar.
Yes. The language described in the grammar is the
literary register, which for several centuries
was the form one found texts written in (when
anything at all was written in Kerno) and it
differs from the common register, which is the
language of daily speech.
Up to about the late 13th century, Kerno was a
refined literary language in its own right,
easily able to hold its own alongside Provencal
and Brithenig. After the 14th century, Brithenig
became preeminent and was enshrined in national
Law as the official language of the Kingdom. Very
little was written in Kerno between the 14th and
19th centuries. When literature again became
written in Kerno, the language was identical to
that of the older texts; though no one who hadn't
studied it could easily understand it. It would
be like us speaking as we usually do, but writing
in a language more akin to Chaucerian era
English.
As the cultural renaissance took root in Dûnein
in the late 19th and into the 20th centuries, two
things were keenly felt by the intelligentsia.
One, there was an oceanic gulf between the
language of the ordinary Kerno speaker and the
language of his literary antecedants; and two,
there was no standardised Kerno language for
anyone to speak, let alone read or write. It was
decided that the schools could easily handle
teaching Good Kerno and that language boards
could be instituted that would be charged with
devising a Common Kerno language for the whole
province to speak.
The schools were actually quite successful in
their mission. While attendance was not high
(probably 40% of children were enrolled in
schools); at least the education was in Kerno,
rather than the Brithenig that had to be learnt
in previous centuries. And they were able to
produce a population of people who were quite
competent in the old language.
The language boards were an abject failure. All
they managed to do was enrich surgeons, who had
to patch up all the gentlmen scholars that
Disagreed with one another over how to spell
Kerno words, which dialect should be preeminent,
how best to create a "good" standard for writing
and speaking in gentle society, etc.
Their disagreements often included gentlemanly
things like sheleilies, knives and iron tipped
boots. If you said to a group of Dumnonian
scholars, a century ago, "The English really
aren't that bad a people", chances are good
they'd grunt and look at you like you'd had two
heads. On the other hand, if you said "The second
declension (-o stems) really should retain the -o
in all cases and numbers in the new standard
language", chances are quite good you'd have an
uproar of contention and cantankerous
disagreement within about 4 nanoseconds; position
papers and historical grammatical monographs
would be viciously waved about; voices would
rise; and then one scholar would get in the face
of another, he'd get pushed, and he'd push back,
then someone would whack his stick on a desk and
another would pull a knife and soon they'd all
commence to start a really good row. And that's
not a hyperbole, either. It was a fairly common
occurence in the meetings of various language
boards in the Province.
The end result is that a hundred years later,
there is still no official standard, no standard
spelling and no preeminent dialect. The language
boards were utterly abolished a couple years
back.
That said, and as you can see in Ill Bethisad
news stories from a couple years ago, Kerno is in
its last Summer. The dialect boundary between
Kerno and Brithenig is now west of Glastein and
is rapidly moving to the West. Most of Esca now
speaks Brithenig quite easily and as frequently
as they do Kerno (immigrants and traders who have
more competency with Brithenig than Kerno have a
lot to do with that). It is estimated that by
2020 or so, Kerno will only be spoken in Little
Britain, a few counties in Ter Mair (in the North
American League) and some regions of Australasia.
Blame generally falls to the language boards, who
failed in their task of stemming the incomming
tide of Brithenig that has swept across the
province.
> I was wondering if you would be
> able to provide any concrete
> details or examples. I would love to find out
> more about that.
Well, Kerno is really almost two different
languages that share the same lexicon. As you
recall from the Grammar, the literary Kerno is
SOV, has a fairly complex and developped case
system, a Latinate declension scheme, relies
almost exclusively on simple verb forms in a
Latinate conjugation scheme, has a strong initial
mutation system and has a number of odd features
left over from Latin.
The spoken Kerno is VSO, has an entirely
unrelated declension scheme, a very weakened case
system, verbal conjugation that is about 50%
simple verb forms 40% noun-phrase-verbs and 10%
compound verbs, a conjugation scheme that is
moving away from the quadripartite Latinate
scheme, has a very weakened mutation system and
has dropped many of the overt Latinisms.
Specifically, the old Latin noun stems (-a, -o,
-i, -e, -u and consonant) divided into five
declensions have been replaced by a new series of
noun stems that really are descended from the old
noun roots, and was enabled by a large scale
reanalysis of root to stem. For example, old
words in -ano (like annum, cubano, etc.) have
long ago lost the stem vowel and have been
reanalysed as -n stems. So, "Cuban" and "hound"
end up in the -n declension with old -n stems
like "nation" and "virgin":
s. pl. s. pl.
NOM coubá chouván nació nacièn
OBL goubán chouván nacièn nacièn
Other old -o stems have remained -o stems, like
"cat" and "language":
s. pl. s. pl.
NOM cats chat cants chant
OBL gatte chattes gante chanttes
As you can see, the case system is largely
reduced to variation between -s and the "variable
e". By in large, all forms of "cat" are
pronounced /kat/, taking into account the
different mutated consonants. The -e can be
pronounced in poetry or song, or for reasons of
phrasal harmony (i.e., to prevent two consonants
from smashing together).
Verbal conjugation is actually quite
conservative. The endings I think are pretty much
the same as in the literary register:
ieo cantam nus cantámos
tu cantas vus cantaz
ys cantas ys chantont
sa gantas
The spoken variety has added several
conjugations, namely the -eir, -oir and -air
conjugations. Mostly these are from borrowed
words (almost all French and Brithenig verbs have
become -eir, for example). These are the so
called "mixt conjugations" as they take forms
from the -ir and -ar conjugations to make their
verb forms.
A couple of _extremely_ important irregular verbs
simply don't exist in the literary register.
Namely, feaire (do, make), puhoier (can, be able)
and the long forms of esser (be). The first two
were borrowed from Anglo-Norman and are very
strange, even for Kerno irregular verbs (even I
don't know the full conjugation of them yet!);
the long forms of esser are based on the roots
bi- and for-, and were derived from an old verb
that in fact meant "be", but became amalgamated
with esser. Thus, in speech you'd hear "viont sa
y 'c zoaneas n-Armór" (they're just a bunch of
hussies), while you'd have written it as "sa
ystes sont yn ngreck lor muyieronnes". Note also
the different register in vocabulary: the proper
word for prostitute is muyieró (sort of "popular
girl") while the common term is daonea n-Armór
(Armorican lady).
The noun-phrase-verbs are very frequent in spoken
Kerno. The present tense especially is replaced
with a verbal noun preceded by a preposition,
usually ar (on, about) and poz (along side of).
Thus, poz me cantant = cantam ieo (I'm singing).
Some things will be familliar, though. The spoken
language has adopted the (ultimately Greek)
middle participle with relish (ar me chantament =
I'm singing to myself); a bare noun in the
nominative in sentence initial position is most
likely an instrumental (brocks me attackasot = he
attacked me with a badger).
You can see texts (several previously
unpublished) at
<http://geocities.com/elemtilas/ill_bethisad/kerno_texts.htm>
There's also a reasonably up to date lexicon at
<http://geocities.com/elemtilas/ill_bethisad/kerno_vocabulary.htm>
There's only a couple hundred words missing from
this list.
I should have a couple more added this weekend. I
hope that explains a little! I have yet to
seriously work on making a description of the
spoken language, though. When that task is done,
it will be announced here of course!
Padraic.
=====
Ories-si la Sulis couant goueniont y vathin, levont y vus des al trefoelea, levont y vrum
des y vagges; aie! mays couant levab-el il mew cords?
-- per tradicièn Quemrech
.