Richard Carew. The Ordinary, The Ordinalia, and the Ordinary Actor ...

Carew's Ordinary 10
adiectiue after the substantiue.” He then tells us the Cornish names for numbers from one to
10,000. The language he thinks has only two or three oaths, but “this want is releeued with a
flood of most bitter curses, and spitefull nick-names.” He concludes his survey with a short list
of useful nouns–“a sister, they call whoore; a whoore, whorra: a priest, coggaz”–conventional
expressions–Relauta (“by my troth”); Durdatha why (“Good morrow to you”); Ternestatha
(“Good night”); Fatlugan a why? (“How do you?”); Da durdalathawhy (“Wel I thanke you”);
Betha why lawanneck (“Be you mery”); Benetugana (“Farewell”)–and curses: Molla tuenda
laaz (“ten thousand mischiefs in thy guts”); Mille vengeance warnathy (“a thousand vengeances
take thee”) (55v-56r). Even if his intention here is to give only a brief snapshot of the language,
this is by any measure a disappointing and inadequate one.
All together, the evidence that Carew himself offers us suggests at best a very elementary
grasp of Cornish. One can overlook his suggestion that “the Cornish tongue was deriued from, or
at least had some acquayntance with the Greeks”–it is very much an educated man’s
speculation–and he does rightly connect Cornish with Welsh as “deduced” from a common
source and differing only in dialect. But he makes no mention of Armoric, which also is
“deduced” from the same source and is even arguably more closely related to Cornish, and he
should know that; he often mentions Cornwall’s close relationships with Brittany (e.g., 96r-7v).
Moreover, he is often incorrect in his translations of Cornish words and phrases, sometimes
dramatically so. He tells us that there is no Cornish word for “to tye,” but there is: kilmy is quite
a common word, both in Carew’s time and earlier.29 Sometimes his translations miss the mark
quite dramatically: Pol is a pool or pit, not “a top;” Godolghan does not mean white eagle” but
“a little tump or mound;” Bokelly does not mean “goat” but “a grove dwelling;” meea navidna
[sic for My ny-vynnaf] does not mean “I cannot” but “I will not,” a crucial difference.30
Even in a snapshot, it seems odd that the only grammatical feature of Cornish that he
chooses to mention is that adjectives follow nouns. This syntactical feature, of course, Cornish
has in common with other modern European languages which he did know, such as Spanish,
Italian, and French. Would it not have been more informative to tell us, for instance, about some
of the more remarkable features of the Cornish language, for instance that in Cornish, unlike all
these other languages, every verb may be conjugated in three different modes and that there are
five tenses?31 Even among his illustrative Cornish expressions, we find vengeance, an
anglicized Cornish word, instead of the more common Cornish word, dial. If he really does mean
the plural, vengeances, then this anglicized word further lacks a Cornish plural ending. This
superficiality is all very odd for a writer who elsewhere writes so eloquently about languages in
The Excellency of the English Tongue.32
But let us not be too hasty in our judgment. As Philip Butterworth rightly points out,
“Carew understood languages other than English,” and that he was proud enough of his linguistic
accomplishments to have recorded on his tombstone the boast that he was fluent in Greek,
Italian, German, French, and Spanish.33 Indeed, Carew taught himself these languages, and he
published translations of Italian and French works.34 He was also an Oxford scholar, and
necessarily knew Latin. One cannot push this point too far, however. Because he taught himself
all these languages, it does not necessarily follow that he also knew Cornish. As John
Chynoweth points out, “it was from books that he had learned the five foreign languages he had
taught himself, and there were no such books in Cornish.”35 He could certainly read and