Dogav: Fill & Download for Free

I’m afraid the short answer is ‘I don’t know’. The longer answer involves something like ‘because I started doing so and then it just became something I did’.I sometimes describe myself as ‘try-lingual’ because I’m always trying out new languages. Roughly every two years or so, some language grabs hold of me and I make a small effort at learning it for a while, until the next language comes along and I have to put the previous one on the back burner since I would otherwise have to juggle too many languages at once. Never abandoned, just moved aside ‘temporarily’, to be taken up again once I have more time… at least, that’s what I tell myself.Which language comes along and chooses me seems to be fairly unpredictable and usually happens on a whim, in a sort of split-second decision that I can’t necessarily remember later on. Past such languages have included Niuean, Maltese, Romansh (Rumantsch Grischun), and Inuktitut (Iqaluit dialect)—and Cornish.So I’m not really sure what exactly led to my picking up Cornish; I just knew at one point in summer 2013 that Cornish was now the language at the front of my attention.So I bought a bunch of books about Cornish: first some of Nicholas Williams’s books for background reading on Cornish; the Skeul an Tavas language-learning course; the Desky Kernewek course; and probably a dictionary.I think I became aware of those books through Michael Everson’s web page; he is a person who pops up frequently in certain corners of the Internet related to languages, writing, and language encoding.After I had read up a bit on Cornish, I think I gave it my usual treatment for languages: read through the textbooks from beginning to end, without stopping to do the individual exercises, just to get a basic idea and let parts of it seep into my brain through osmosis.But what made Cornish different from my other languages was that I then went on to actually take a proper course.After reading around about the various orthographies in use or proposed for Cornish, I decided to go with the Standard Written Form with Traditional Graphs (SWF-T), and a target point of somewhere between Middle and Late Cornish: perhaps what some call Tudor Cornish.I asked the coordinator of the KDL (Kernewek Dre Lyther ‘Cornish by Letter’) course in October 2013 whether the course was also available in SWF. After a while, I got a response that the course itself was not available in SWF, but that he had found a teacher who was willing to mark SWF homework—and that he was confident that reading the lessons (in Common Cornish or Kernewek Kemmyn spelling; hereinafter “KK” for short) would not be particularly hard since the orthographic differences are not that profound.And that was the start of a language-learning journey that lasted for a year and a half.Having a teacher available who would answer questions helped me avoid making mistakes. Having homework forced me to use the language actively, first in answering questions, then in writing little essays using the vocabulary and grammar I had learned so far. And though the teacher used KK spelling in most of his work (and his replies to me were in KK in general), he was familiar enough with SWF (which he also used occasionally) to correct mistakes in my homework.About six months later (April 2014), I attended my first Cornish Language Weekend and also took the oral part of the Grade 1 exam there, with the written part a few months later in June.At this point, it was just something that I did; I had no particular goal in mind, and my motivation was partly the fun I had in learning, partly simply the habit of doing a KDL lesson every week or so and practising vocabulary daily.I finished the 50 KDL lessons available from the Kesva website a bit more than a year later, in December 2014.However, by that time, my spark was flickering and it was beginning to show that I had no intrinsic motivation for the language; my Maltese wanted to get ‘learned’ again and my Slovak improved, so I ended up not continuing with KDL past lesson 50.I did attend the Cornish Language Weekend in April 2015, taking the oral part of the Grade 3 exam there, and continuing with the written part in June 2015. (The KDL lessons up to 50 prepared for Grade 3, the old Grade 2 before another intermediate exam level was added in between old Grades 1 and 2; since I had finished the KDL course, I decided to skip Grade 2.)Further KDL lessons, preparing for the Grade 4 exam, would be rather different then the previous ones, with a greater focus not only on the language but also Cornish culture, literature, and history. I had lined up a teacher but put off starting lessons with him and eventually never did end up doing so.I spent a few intense months with Turkish and now Slovak would like to come next… but the pile of Cornish books I bought at the two Weekends I attended also beckons….One thing that frustrated me a little during my more intense involvement with the language was what variety of the language to use. Since it was a revived variety, and the texts the revival was based on spanned quite a range both in geography and time, not to mention not completely consistent spelling back then, the ‘correct’ form of a word or even its meaning was not always clear, and there were often several opinions available. Sometimes I even had my own opinion which disagrees with all the major ones (for example, I think the first person singular of the present-future of don is likely to have been dogav with an o and not degav, degaf; this particular verb form is apparently not attested, at least not in the foundation texts that the KS spelling uses, so we can’t check the old texts).I had a slightly similar problem with Romansh and Inuktitut: nobody speaks Rumantsch Grischun, and there wasn’t even a standard Inuktitut to begin with. ‘Normal’ people who learn those languages because of some connection to the area could pick the variety appropriate to the village they are most connected to, but foreigners who just want to learn ‘Romansh’ or ‘Inuktitut’ will have to pick some other way of settling on a dialect.And similarly here; if I had a more specific reason to learn Cornish, perhaps an ancestor who comes from a specific part of Cornwall, I could try to tailor things with multiple options to one appropriate for that part. Or I could use the spelling my local teacher uses if I went to a local class.At first, I was sympathetic to spellings which were closer to traditional manuscript spelling; hence my initial choice of SWF-T (with Traditional graphs) rather than SWF-M (with Main form graphs): a compromise between traditional spelling and a published standard, itself a compromise between several main groups. Nobody really likes it, apparently, but at least everyone agrees that it exists.That said, later on, I got the impression that the areas where Cornish was ‘happening’ overwhelmingly used less traditional spellings: either KK or SWF-M. Quite a few more books seemed to be published in those two orthographies than new books in UC or UCR, and essentially nothing in SWF-T. (There are a fair number of books in KS by now, but that spelling is impossible to learn since there is no published dictionary that I am aware of, so I doubt that many people use it.) Also, the speakers I became aware of seem to use newer spellings predominantly.So after a while, I switched from SWF-T to SWF-M (I think I did this shortly after my Grade 1 written exam; I didn’t want to confuse myself by switching before I wrote it).Now that I’m less involved with Cornish, I toy with the idea of switching back again to SWF-T… for no particular reason. I imagine that my fingers have got so used to typing SWF-M now, though, that it would be hard to make the switch.So, that was a rather long and rambling answer. Perhaps the short version is better :)Any questions, feel free to ask.