Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/199

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GRAMMAR

understood but not expressed,^[1] but with these few exceptions the number of syllables to a line is strictly accurate, and in the Ordinalia is never varied by the unaccented and uncounted syllables that often occur in English verse. The rhymes are quite strict to the eye, but that is no doubt because in the days when one could spell as one pleased, the writer might arrange his spelling to suit, but there appear to be cases where the dh and th, both written th, as final consonants are made to rhyme together, and the three sounds of u (oo and the French u and eu) are sometimes confused. Though the rhymes are always "masculine" (i.e. of one syllable), there are occasionally cases where, unless one counts the rhymes as "feminine" (i.e. of two syllables), they would not be rhymes at all, and yet feminine rhymes would throw out the rhythm.^[2]

The metres of late Cornish were usually rather more assimilated to English, but apparently some memory of Celtic prosody lingered on. Lhuyd quotes a proverb, of which he gives two versions, in the old three-lined metre known in Welsh as the Triban Milwr, or Warrior's Triplets, which is found as early as Llywarch Hen's Laments for Geraint ap Erbyn and for the Death of Cynddylan, in the sixth century. Lhuyd himself wrote a Cornish Lament for William of Orange in what he claimed as the same metre, a singularly inappropriate subject for the language of a nation of loyal Jacobites, as the Cornish certainly were as late as 1715. Boson (Gwavas MS., f. 7) wrote a short elegy on James Jenkins

↑ Probably the apparent eight syllables in line 6 of the Poem of the Passion may be accounted for in this way, and one should read levarow as larow; cf. in the Breton of Treguier, laret for lavarout, and the late Cornish lawle for lavarel.
↑ It may be that the Cornish ear for rhymes was like the French, and that the explanation is to be sought in a theory like that of the rimes riches and the consonne d'appui of modern French. In French chercher—rocher is a better rhyme than aimer—rocher (in each case with the accent on the last syllable). In English the first would be no rhyme.

[1] Probably the apparent eight syllables in line 6 of the Poem of the Passion may be accounted for in this way, and one should read levarow as larow; cf. in the Breton of Treguier, laret for lavarout, and the late Cornish lawle for lavarel.

[2] It may be that the Cornish ear for rhymes was like the French, and that the explanation is to be sought in a theory like that of the rimes riches and the consonne d'appui of modern French. In French chercher—rocher is a better rhyme than aimer—rocher (in each case with the accent on the last syllable). In English the first would be no rhyme.

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