by Dr Ken George
In the year 2000, I had the honour to give a lecture at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts. The subject was, I fear, rather dry: Changes in the verbal stem in the subjunctive mood in Cornish . The material presented did, however, clarify how to spell parts of verbal paradigms.
In his English-Cornish dictionary, Nicholas Williams made the extraordinary statement about the numeral two, that "The Middle Cornish texts do not distinguish between a feminine form dyw and a masculine form dew." This is just not true .
A formal description of the structure of Cornish verbs is presented here .
The word heb 'without' causes occasional mutations .
The question of gender-neutral agent-suffixes in Cornish has recently received attention. Two different proposals for non-binary pronouns have been put forward: the first based on what Celtic neuter forms might have taken had they survived, and the second based on the third person plural verbal ending -ns .
The verbs 'to beg' and 'to believe' are of interest because they have four different verbal nouns.