A (brief, initial) look at the new online Cornish dictionary

4 July 2019

4 a vis Gorefen 2019

As someone who’s previously been openly critical about “official” representations of Cornish, I was delighted to notice today that the new version of the online Cornish dictionary has been launched. Here are my thoughts after an extremely quick look at the new dictionary.

Good things

• The new interface is nice. I assume the old one was from 2009, as that’s when the SWF was (eventually) agreed on—it was obviously due an update. The new site is much nicer looking, and more logically designed: there are no longer three separate unnecessary search boxes. The one-column design looks well optimised for use on tablets and phones, but somehow it looks good on desktop as well.
• The pronunciation guides are gone; apparently the plan is to upload actual sound files from speakers. I have my doubts about how quickly/thoroughly/fairly this will take place, but getting rid of the old pronunciation guides was definitely a good thing: a lot of them were inaccurate and they weren’t that great at meeting IPA standards.
• The really good thing: Middle and Late variants are now dealt with sensibly. As someone who continually goes on about being a Late Cornish user, I really feel like this is the most important feature of the new dictionary. The old version typically marginalised Late variants while presenting Middle variants as a de facto standard (see my now-partly-deprecated conference paper); the new version handles this more sensibly. This was actually something I was slightly dreading about the new dictionary: many official sources of Cornish leave out Late variants entirely these days, and I feared this would do the same. So I’m really pleased with this outcome.

Things that are less good

• Despite Late forms being well-treated in the body of the entries, they are absent from the interface—the metalanguage of the site is firmly SWF-Middle (unless you choose to navigate it in English!!!). I must point out that this is acknowledged as a deficit in tomorrow’s presentation of the dictionary at the Celtic Knot conference by new maintainer David Trethewey, who asks, “could M/L, and/or the ‘traditional’ forms be offered as a user selection at the front-end?”, so I hope this is something that has the potential to change in the future.
• On the subject of traditional forms, they’re absent from the body of the dictionary, and only acknowledged as much as they were in the previous version, with a brief explanation on what’s now the “help” page. It would obviously be harder to include them in the dictionary itself, but there could maybe be an option to display them alongside the “main” forms.
• Similarly, there’s still no real explanation of mutations. I know this isn’t meant to be a grammar of Cornish, but paper dictionaries would typically have at least a brief mutation table. Also using numbers to mark the mutations in the entries seems unnecessarily opaque when there’s no need for the limitations of a paper dictionary: spelling out “second state mutation/lenition” might make things clearer than just using a superscript 2.
• Not all parts of the dictionary entries are always in Cornish when the language is set to Cornish. I realise though that I’m the person whose blogs are all in English when my website’s interface can be viewed in Cornish, so I don’t really have grounds for criticising that.
• I haven’t tested this thoroughly, but it looks like some Late forms of inflected prepositions are missing if the lemma itself doesn’t have separate Middle and Late forms: see heb.
• The search function is fairly unforgiving, and could maybe do with a predictive ability as on the old site. Apostrophe-initial words such as ’nia are a bit of a problem: you won’t get to it if the search doesn’t start with an apostrophe, and while a curly apostrophe is technically more correct than a straight one, that doesn’t work either.
• Some of the metatext probably needs updating to match the SWF: again, I haven’t looked into this thoroughly, but a few instances of nowyth jumped out at me on the about page: it’s nowydh/nowedh in the dictionary itself …
• A slightly different sort of point, but the original credits to the various parties who worked on the SWF and the first dictionary have gone: now the only information in this vein is about the Akademi. I’m a bit sad about this, maybe because of the removal of a few Big Names in Late Cornish, but I still think it’s important to acknowledge that the SWF and the dictionary now have 12/13 years of development behind them.

Also

David Trethewey’s Celtic Knot presentation is called “Developing the Cornish Dictionary using open-source tools and data”. As far as I’m aware, though, the dictionary files themselves aren’t open-source, and to put it simply, I really think they should be. The dictionary (rightly) isn’t the result of some commercial for-profit activity, so I see no disadvantage in this. On the contrary, it would benefit those of use who use standard-but-less-standard orthographies so we could adapt materials and produce our own dictionaries; it would also encourage the Cornish language community to get more involved and speed up the production of these official materials. Numerous examples show that the open-source model is mutually beneficial.

The verdict

In numerical terms, I seem to have come up with more criticisms than commendations, but overall, I’m really pleased that this dictionary has taken the shape it has. The interface is pleasant and intuitive, and—my big plus point—the handling of the variants is immeasurably better than in the previous iteration. I’m looking forward to exploring the dictionary more and finding increasingly esoteric things to complain about, but my first impression is that this looks like a great resource; I hope the small potential improvements mentioned here and in the Celtic Knot presentation will be followed up on.