Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

fig.1 Surely Merv Davey, Pyber an Orseth, can't be an Piper Discrissick?
Or has his likeness been libellously taken in vain?

Quite a lot of pop groups have so-called 'tribute' bands, who play second-rate plagiarised versions of their hits, supposedly in 'tribute' to the Great Ones (although you can bet that not much 'danegeld' changes hands).

Even the humble bloggist is not immune to this species of sycophantic groupy. A 'tribute' web-site was announced recently on CornishOrthography (#3140) under the lexicographically challenged pseudo-pseudonym of 'an Piper Diskrissick' (Oh! –our aching ribs!), with the subject tag, 'An Gweeas Internet noweth an Piper Discrissick'. Alas, after having had an intoxicating burst of mispelling one of our names, his muse seems to have gone AWOL, as the site is almost bare of content!

This purports to come from a pseudonymous 'new' member of the group, one 'sarazin2007', who joined just the day before posting his/her/its first message.

By the by, we notice that 'torontosteve' aka 'brocher2001' has kept his promise (as mentioned in a previous article) and departed from the group, in that not one single trace of him remains in the list of members. But we have a suspicion that he has emerged from his lair under a new persona. Now, we appreciate that it's a dodgy job trying to guess who's behind the masks of online 'avatars' (has not one of us been oh-so-confidently identified as at least 3 separate people (all males, at that!) at various times?). But let's note the following points of circumstantial interest:

• the two noms de guerre are rather similar: brocher2001 and sarazin2007, which shows the lack of imagination we would expect from El Disparecido,
• one disappears from the members' list just as t'other appears –poof!– like the villain in a mediaeval melodrama,
• the pseudo-site is hosted at www.geocities.com/brocher2001/, which suggests that, if not one and the same person, the two 'dear boys' are abnormally intimate with each other,
•it's also hosted at the rather grandiosely addressed www.cornish-language.com, and the choice of this URL shows the same self-important egotism we came to associate with the 'dear departed' brocher2001.
• 'sarazin2007' doesn't like using lots of words; apart from URLs, his first 3 messages are 5, 3 and 10 words long. Brocher2001 was also sparing with words, perhaps because of his linguistic/intellectual difficulties described below. As we've seen in the past, brocher2001 shows impatience when faced with challenging linguistical phe-nom-en-a like:
– long words,
– lots of words (even short ones), as in sentences (or posts) longer than a few words,
– words used to form a logical, coherent argument,
– words used to denote abstract concepts,
– words used in humour, mockery or satire,
– words used to disagree with him,
– words used to criticise Kernewek Kemyn.
– words in foreign languages (such as Cornish and English)
• the brocher2001/sarazin2007 site is very sparing with its content to boot; in a similar way, many of brocher2001's posts were content free.

Just as 'torontosteve/brocher2001' had problems with language, so too does 'sarazin2007' seem to be similarly challenged:

(1) Vocabulary:
• 'gweeas' for website, when the word actually means 'web' (if we've correctly interpreted his dyslexic orthography, that is); 'website' would normally have the '-va' suffix denoting a place; thus, in his idiolectal spelling, he should have said 'gweeasva'.
• similarly for 'Internet': LCR uses 'An Gwiaz' for 'The Internet', so presumably the other versions of the language might use that word as well. It does seem a tad feeble just to use the English word au naturel, and make no attempt to Kernify it. A quick look at the Nance '52 gives us:
• between = 'yntra' before vowels, 'ynter' before consonants
• net = 'ros'
• so even the ad hoc calque *yntraros or *ynter-ros should be preferable to just using the English. Gosh, even An *Ynternet would be a slight improvement!
Surely even George's ghastly dictionaries should be equal to the task of providing pseudo-Cornish equivalents to this pair of basic lemmas.

(2) Syntax:
• reduplicated definite article à l'Anglaise in his genitive construction (oh, naughty boy!):
'an gweeas ... an piper ...'
for 'the web[site] ... of the piper', when every learner will have been told it should take the form:
'gweeas ... an piper'
with only a single article and, of course, proper spelling, e.g. 'gwyas An Pyber'.
Still, perhaps we should be grateful for small mercies: at least he didn't inflict on us the triple whammy of '*an gweeas an Internet an Piper ...' !

(3) Spelling:
• the UC spelling is 'gwyas', the LCR is 'gwiaz', and KK is 'gwias'. 'Gweeas' seems to be a home-brewed rendition. By contrast, he uses UC 'noweth', where LCR has 'nowedh' and KK 'nowydh'. While one can imagine there may be humourous intent in mispelling 'An Pyber Dyscryjyk' as he has ("an Piper Discrissick", with inconsistent capitalisation), it's difficult to see the fun in getting these two more mundane words messed up. We suspect he shares the dyslexia manifested on occasions by 'brocher2001'.

One final point that needs clarifying: we note with interest that the photograph of 'sarazin2007/Piper Discrissick' (shown on his profile page, and above in fig.1) appears to depict him as Pyber an Orseth, the official piper of Gorseth Kernow. In fact, it is recognisable as a photo of Merv Davey himself. Does this mean that the true identity of this plagiaristic piper has been revealed, or is sarazin2007 taking Mr. Davey's name in vain? Merv has always struck me as being an intelligent and articulate sort of person, quite unlike the linguistically challenged wee pissant that brocher2001/sarazin2007 has shown himself to be. One can only hope that a case for libel is not brought against our namesake!