228 
JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
THE CORNISH LANGUAGE. 
BY THE REV. W. S. LACH-SZYRMA, M. A. 
(Read December 11th, 1879.) 
This subject is of some interest and importance. 
1. Because language, especially the Aryan family of languages, 
is a consistent whole, and the problems of philology and ethnology 
have to be solved only by a comprehensive view of the whole 
subject, and not merely of its parts. Their not realizing this was 
the error of the etymologists of the last century, who looked to the 
three learned languages — Latin, Greek, and Hebrew — as alone 
deserving scientific study. The discovery of Sanscrit has changed 
all that. To it, rather than to Latin or Greek, and most certainly 
rather than to the Semitic Hebrew, we look for solution of linguistic 
questions ; but every language, even such as our ancestors regarded 
as barbarous, assumes an importance, at least as a mesh in the 
linguistic net. The loss of one mesh mars a net, so the loss of one 
language makes the solution of a question obscure and uncertain. 
The loss of Cornish may be the loss of a link in a great chain. 
Some of the most barbarous and despised of European tongues are 
of the greatest importance. None exceed in interest the Basque or 
the Magyar, islands of Turanian in the midst of the ocean of 
Aryan speech. 
Of the Aryan tongues few are more interesting than the Manx 
and the Icelandic, and even the Frisian dialects and the vulgarisms 
of many an English county become of scientific interest. The last 
dead of the Aryan tongues — i.e. last dead after the Old Prussian — 
becomes therefore of great importance, more especially to some of 
us, whose ancestors a few centuries ago may have greeted the 
English traveller who asked them the way, with the Cornu-British 
sentence, Me a navidraa cowza Sawzneck = " I have not learned 
to talk in Saxon." 
I ask you, then, to give me a little patience while 
(1) I define what the Cornish language really was ; 
