Variants Put simply, the written sources for Cornish span several centuries and reflect different periods in the life of the language. In reviving Cornish, spelling systems have been devised which reflect different ideas on how we should use this knowledge to take Cornish forward into the future. The majority of Cornish literature appeared in the 1400s to 1500s and took the form of religious plays. Prose writings in Cornish date from 1550 to the end of the 1700s. The four current forms of Cornish put varying weights on this corpus of historic Cornish. A very simple guide to each one follows:
Unified Cornish
This was introduced in the 1920s and was based on the grammar and spelling of the literature of the medieval period.
Common Cornish
Common Cornish was developed from Unified Cornish during the 1980s, following a long period of discussion and research into traditional texts. The greatest changes were made to the orthography or written form. Common Cornish is phonemic – what most people would call phonetic – in that each sound in the spoken language is represented uniquely by a letter or group of letters.
Unified Cornish Revised
A revision of Unified Cornish, UCR has amended the spelling to avoid potential confusions and to reflect further research. UCR takes as its source the Cornish of the Tudor texts rather than the mediaeval texts.
Modern Cornish
Modern Cornish aims to pick up the project of those who tried to save spoken Cornish in its latest phase. It is based on the period when prose writings appeared and on the pronunciation of the early 1700s. There are therefore some differences in both pronunciation and spelling between Modern Cornish and the three other dialects.
All forms, however, are mutually intelligible in the same way as dialects within English.
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