One Guru to guide them all ...

We have mentioned elsewhere the authoritarian, top-down style of control that governs the Wonderful World of Kenowek Kemyn. Here's one small example of it in action, that was found on Ray Edwards' Kernewek Dre Lyther site. Here we have a man of mature years, who has been running the KDL system for a long time, in Unified Cornish at first before he turned his loyalties towards Kemyn. He says,

'Ken is ... envisaging the possibility of introducing z where there is a tendency to voice the s sound.'

Thus, nothing may be done until the Arch-Guru of Kemyn pronounces on His Envisagements. Still, to put his weltanschauung into perspective, on the same page he also mentions:

"... people liked and trusted Ken and appreciated the enormous amount of work he had put into trying to sort the matter out ..."
"... the sincerity of Ken George and other members of the Language Board ..."

Disingenuous, or merely ingenuous? Sure enough, it's a revisionist view of history that's not shared by most of the Cornish speakers that we know, none of whom would trust 'Likeable & Trustworthy' Ken or the 'Sincere' Kesva an inch! Given their dubious actions within the Cornish Language Revival over the last couple of decades or so, that's hardly surprising.

So, a fragment of evidence of the top-down authoritarianism of the KK world. Contrast this with the rest of the Cornish speakers, who --while they manage to cohere-- do so in a much more democratic, disputatious, even anarchic sort of way. Which is just how it should be, and is just how it's done in, say, the English-speaking world, where there is a long history of either ignoring the pronouncements of crackpot skylgerydhyon, linguistic charlatans and orthographical mountebanks, or at most exposing them to ridicule, satire and oblivion. Why, even the respected lexicographers of the likes of the Oxford University Dictionary are not taken as the final, undisputed word on the language.

We call to mind from the 1920s the almost forgotten Shavian Phonetic English of that other 'great' George, GB Shaw, as well as the 19th-century minor poet William Barnes and his Pure English (with its ludicrous 'welkinfire' and 'wortlore' for 'meteor' and 'botany'). How long will it be, we wonder, before Ken George's Kenowek Kemyn joins them and assumes its rightful place --as a small footnote in the history of the Cornish Language Revival (and as a cautionary tale of the dangers of ignorant meddling with languages)?