Newly discussed Cornish vocabulary and etymologies, published on the 26/06/2026

Written and published by Linden Alexander Pentecost, published on the 26th of June 2026 and only on this UK website, published from the UK and I the author am also from the UK and live in the UK. No AI was used in this nor in any of my written works. I also took the photo included in this article. This article is unrelated to and separate from any and all of my other publications, including others in which I discuss other aspects of Cornish. Note that this article begins with me re-introducing a concept I have discussed elsewhere, but with new information and in a different way, before I go on to discuss previously undiscussed etymologies, even if a couple of the words I have discussed elsewhere in completely different contexts. Note that yesterday I published an unrelated article on this website concerning the Ringing Stone on Tiree and have published a lot of other things recently, in many forms and in many places, many different things about Tiree and other topics. This article contains a total of 1645 words. I may publish other articles about Cornish in the near future.

I have commented on this to some degree elsewhere, that it is in many respects surprising how much of the vocabulary and grammar of the attested Cornish language has been excluded, by and large, from the present forms of revived Cornish taught to adults in Cornwall. 

A lot of this has to do with Celticism and the idea of an “original” Cornish language which is closer to the other Brythonic languages, and particularly to their archaic and literary forms. This idea - as I have mentioned elsewhere though, has resulted in the language revival becoming overly focused on the “idea” of a perfect, archaic truly “Cornish” and truly “Celtic” language, whilst the actual versions of the language spoken a few hundred years ago and well recorded have tended to become discounted as being somehow more “corrupt” and somehow less “Celtic”. 

This idea that the Cornish recorded just before the 1800s was more corrupt than the language of Tudor plays, is just an idea or concept. These two versions of the language can I think be better thought of in terms of being registers, the “Tudor Cornish language” being a register of Cornish, likely connected to how the language was once spoken in more eastern parts of Cornwall by the original Cornish aristocracy - this language is a language of tradition, of a certain poetic meter and cultural-linguistic context that is more closely aligned to Welsh and Breton literary tradition at its core.

The so-called “modern” or “late” Cornish language is not corrupt or “later”, in my opinion it is simply the general form of Cornish that people actually spoke in Western Cornwall, with a cultural and linguistic structure pertaining to the continuity of ancient culture and language in western Cornwall. 

Photo below: part of the north Cornish coastline, taken by me on an analogue camera back in 2011, when I visited Cornwall with my dad, grandad and his friend. Note how the coastal landscapes of Cornwall in November - as seen below, have a bright beauty even though they are dangerous and unforgiving. As can be seen in the photo - this landscape is unique. 

In other words, so-called “Modern Cornish” is not I think “modern” at all, it rather encompasses a more diverse, ancient and uniquely Cornish world, whereas the Tudor Cornish language encompasses more the Brythonic connection between Cornwall and the wider Brythonic traditions. 

The vocabulary of “Modern Cornish” may differ significantly from that of Tudor Cornish. Part of the reason is that yes there are more commonalities with English and French, but these are themselves not necessarily in any way recent or modern. For example Late Cornish journa - “day”, but Tudor Cornish dydh - “day”, with journa being borrowed from or connected to French jour - “day”. Or Late Cornish welcubma “to welcome”, compare revived Tudor Cornish dynnerghi - “to welcome”. 

The French and English connections can simply be thought of in terms of how Cornwall has been connected to both England and France culturally for thousands of years, it's only natural that there would be a lot of crossover, and some of these so-called English loanwords in English may not be English at all, but may simply have been inherited into both Cornish and English from prehistoric languages. 

Furthermore much of the vocabulary of so-called Modern Cornish is in my opinion and from my own research - non-Indo-European, with relationships to the Afro-Asiatic languages being observable. This is not surprising really, given that we know that Cornwall has shared maritime connections to the Mediterranean for thousands of years. Sadly these possibilities tend to be ignored because they do not fit the simple “Cornwall is Celtic”, “Cornish is Celtic” and “everything has to come from Proto-Indo-European” explanations, which more often than not result in an unconscious shifting and reorganisation of the evidence to support these Celtic and Indo-European ideologies, neither of which even existed in Cornwall until relatively recently.

Cornwall is not Celtic. “Celtic” is a linguistic way of describing a central part of Cornwall's linguistic history, but neither the terms “Brythonic” nor “Celtic” entirely encompass that linguistic history. 

An interesting thing I want to bring up here is how Cornish incorporates the cardinal directions. So, in Late Cornish, “north", "east", "south" and "west" are simply noor, east, sooth, west. This may partially result from the way in which directions are perceived, in our modern sense of directions, Cornish uses “Germanic” terms for these three cardinal directions. Cornish does have other words referring to cardinal directions and yet these seem to have been used in a slightly different way and with different implications, structured around a different understanding of reality. 

For example, “Late” Cornish also has the word thuryan for “east” but also meaning “sunrise”, so perhaps there is a distinction here between Cornish east - the east as a direction from the speaker, and thuryan as in the “place” in the east or direction from which the sun rises. One might also imagine how both words may have had unique esoteric and symbolic meanings also attached to them.

Another interesting word in “Late” Cornish is skydnia - to descend or to “happen”. This is clearly connected to the English word “descend”, with the -scend part connected to Latin scando - “to climb”, but I also wonder if the “happen” meaning of Cornish skydnia could be in some way connected to the Swedish word ske - “happen”, connected to Low German schen, these forms themselves perhaps connected to a root meaning of to “move quickly” or “emerge”. Without there being some kind of further connection, I find it unlikely that skydnia would come to mean “happen” if this word was entirely derived from the verb to “descend”. 

The “Late” Cornish word for “metal”, olcan, or in revived Cornish: alkan, is also pretty interesting. The root can be connected to English “alkane” in terms of gasses and “alkaline” also in terms of chemistry, and there is also a connection with the Arabic word “alchemy”, from Arabic اَلْكِيمِيَاء al-kīmiyāʔ, connected to Greek khumeíā - “the process of altering metals/creating metal alloys”. Given that the semantics of Cornish olcan are closer to the Greek semantics and “metal” implication, could this Cornish word be another example of a Cornish word that could be connected to pre-history, and to the period when metal trade, mining and processing connections existed between Cornwall and the Mediterranean? I think this is indeed highly probable. Note that even though the Arabic term is said to be derived from the Greek, that this is not necessarily the case, compare for example Ancient Egyptian kmt - “Egypt”, a word said to mean “black”, as in “black soil” or “black earth”, although I am more inclined to believe that the implication here is of sacred, unworked matter, in the same way that the mud of the primordial mound can be thought of as the esoteric “basis” of physical reality, and the transmutation of this “mud” and the formulation of the different physical levels of reality is of course akin to the alchemical process. This is furthermore connected to the idea of the “seven layers of physical matter” as formed from the cosmic mound or egg; the seven chakras in the human body, and the formation or realisation of kundalini energy in 7 stages, and the legends and mythology regarding a serpent wrapped around a hill 7 times. The number 7 is also highly significant in alchemical traditions. 

Another interesting word in “Late” Cornish is the word adgy meaning a “gap” or “break”, which is equivalent to the modern revived forms of aswa and ajwa of the same meaning. Whilst the form with j is assumed to be later, I wonder if any possible connection exists here with the Arabic root ف-ج-و , F-J-W which is a triconsonantal root referring to a “gap” or “opening”, whence comes Arabic فجوة - fajwa - “a gap”. Could there be some kind of connection here to the Cornish word adgy? Note I do not see the word adgy as having any negative connotations.