Oh yes

I think things are changing fast. Charles Thomas, the historian, lives further along the uplands on my present horizon, having spent much of his life inadvertently delineating the otherness of Cornwall / Kernow, remarked that within a hundred years that sense of not being English might be gone. That is relevant, I think, because it's part of increasing mobility. While the public transport gets worse, roads _improve_. TV Radio etc

Philip Peyton, who succeeded Thomas as Director of Inst of Cornish Studies, once estimated that in two centuries (which btw Thomas elsewhere suggests is the limit of family memory where it becomes folkloric), 90% of the population left - quite how such a quantification is calculated I don't recall - especially in the last years before the Industrial Rev, which cld be said to have started here - and then again when the tin prices dropped and the pilchards and mackerel began avoiding the coast (wouldn't you?)... and then he reckons 90% inmigration - it's a big retirement home now

It's a cultural thing, then, not ethnic, being Cornish. Peyton also wrote an article, maybe this same one! just before the Jugoslav civil war arguing it really wasnt worth fighting or even arguing about ethnicity - this in the face of people saying you say tomato and I say tomato so you're a Serb not a Croat etc... and suggested that a more peacable and sensible approach would be that if you *really think you are Cornish or Lapp or whatever (other, I imagine, than mental delusion), then you are. [I'd like to see an immigration officer process that.] Maybe ? ? like all the Italians in the Dodecanese after WWII who were comfortable where they were and just hellenised their names, making sure they spoke Greek when the clipboarders came by

the Cornish language survived, just, but not genetic difference, I'm told. I quite like that, I can claim a kind of uniqueness and be a mongrel; and if my pedigree - some of which I take on trust - proved wrong; well, what the hell. We're probably all Jewish anyway, with all that multi-century begetting; must have given them a start; or African

And this area has always been ethnically mixed. Xtianity came here from Ireland and Wales; Kernow related to Brittany before London - Spanish, Portuguese - still a now whispered put down on mainland scilly for the inhabitants of the off island Agnes even if they are all called Hicks

I like your story

I have a good friend who comes from East Anglia where also it survives - and you get the same effect of whichever direction you go in you still go the same place - and we find a lot in common - the same *awareness / awe of the sea even - relatives and friends at sea who can't and won't swim - territory no bigger than a tabby cat and suspicion of outsiders

and there was a very droll radio play a few years ago in which one of H G Wells Martians had survived in Norfolk, and raised a family. He and his children were yellow with a single eye but no one seemed to notice he was different

L
 
  -----Original Message-----
  From: Joanna Boulter <[log in to unmask]>
  To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
  Date: Saturday, March 11, 2006 2:46 PM
  Subject: Re: help--translation query


  Are people allowed to marry furriners, then, or is the whole area totally 
  inbred?

  Used to happen in Wiltshire too, though not so much nowadays. I heard of a 
  village that had the education authority really worried about intelligence 
  levels in the local school -- until a US Air Force base was built nearby. 
  Sounds an apocryphal story I know, but it isn't; I had it from someone who'd 
  worked in the relevant LEA office at the time.

  joanna

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: "Lawrence Upton" <[log in to unmask]>
  To: <[log in to unmask]>
  Sent: Saturday, March 11, 2006 11:32 AM
  Subject: Re: help--translation query


  ah furriners can be the next village though increasingly it is jokey - e.g. 
  tonight's speaker has come all the way from Falmouth, but we won't hold that 
  against him

  but I have been chided for saying someone was local to Landewednack when she 
  came from 3 miles away

  L

    -----Original Message-----
    From: Roger Day <[log in to unmask]>
    To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
    Date: Saturday, March 11, 2006 10:57 AM
    Subject: Re: help--translation query


    That's true. In my part of North Devon, "grockel" was rarely used and
    still seems strange to my ears, still seems imported. Furriners as in
    "them blaidie furriners wish they'd fuck off home" was more the idiom.

    In East Anglia, they have "incomers" as in ...

    Roger

    On 3/10/06, Lawrence Upton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
    > furriners
    >
    > *
    >
    > someone may have said this, I hadnt been paying full attention till i 
  read my own name, but grockel however spelt also means monster as in 
  fabulous monster, dragon, faery thing
    >
    > L
    >   -----Original Message-----
    >   From: Cindy Lee <[log in to unmask]>
    >   To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
    >   Date: Friday, March 10, 2006 6:28 PM
    >   Subject: Re: help--translation query
    >
    >
    >   Just to be an anorak: I grew up in Lyme Regis in Dorset, where 
  'grockel' was
    >   definitely the word for tourist (mind you, we were still being called 
  that
    >   after 20 years...)
    >
    >   Cindy Lee