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Dolly Pentreath |
Dolly Pentreath (died December 1777) is often considered to have been the last monoglot speaker of the Cornish language (that is, the last person who spoke only Cornish and not English) - a legend which arose as a result of an account written by Daines Barrington of an interview he had conducted with Dolly. She has passed into legend for cursing at people in a long stream of fierce Cornish whenever she became angry.1 Her death essentially marked the death of Cornish as a community language. According to legend, her last words were "Me ne vidn cewsel Sawznek!" ("I don't want to speak English!")
Pentreath lived in the parish of Paul, next to Mousehole, where she was also buried; a monument in her honour was established in the churchyard wall in 1860 by Louis Lucien Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoleon. There are many tales about her. She was said often to curse people, including calling them "kronnekyn hager du", an "ugly black toad", and was even said to have been a witch. Numerous other stories have been attached to her, their accuracy unknown.
A year following the death of Dolly Pentreath, Barrington received a letter, written in Cornish and accompanied by an English translation, from a fisherman in Mousehole named William Bodinar stating that he knew of five people who could speak Cornish in that village alone. Barrington also speaks of a John Nancarrow from Marazion who was a native speaker and survived into the 1790s2.
As with many other "last native speakers", there is controversy over Dolly Pentreath’s status. William Bodinar (died 1794) learned Cornish as a child and, in 1776, could remember it well enough to write a letter in it. Some claim that John Davey, who died in 1890, should be considered the last "traditional" speaker; he was said to have kept the language alive by speaking to his cat. However there is some confusion as to the extent of his abilities, notably that some may be attributed to him rather than his father. Mebyon Kernow erected a plaque bearing his name as the last person to have significant knowledge of the Cornish language. Subsequently the Cornish language continued to have some usage, by a few isolated learners, and words of Cornish origin persisted in the local dialect of English. Currently some children and young adults speak various forms of revived Cornish as native speakers. For example the dancer Gwenno Saunders has been a native speaker of Cornish and Welsh since a child.
John Mann was one of a group of Zennor children who spoke Cornish among themselves in the mid 1800s. In 1914, this native Cornish speaker from Boswednack was living in Chapel Street, St Just in Penwith at the age of 80, ten years after Henry Jenner's Handbook of the Cornish Language sparked the revival. 3
Pêr-Jakez Helias, the Breton writer, has dedicated a poem to Dolly Pentreath.
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