waggawerewolf27 wrote:Cornish hasn't evolved quite as much as Welsh, maybe. Welsh & especially Irish, are in everyday use, whereas Cornish not so much, though the nearest I ever got to Cornwall was the ancient City of Bath.
Bath is wonderful, isn't it?
It's the most beautiful city I've ever seen anywhere. I've been there many times (though I live over the other side of England, just outside the Greater London border in western Kent) and I especially loved the Christmas market, which I've been to a couple of times.
Cornish, unfortunately, still doesn't have any settled communities where it's in day-to-day use — there are several hundred fluent speakers and hundreds more with at least some knowledge, but not enough living in close proximity where they can interact in the language all the time. (Other than in some families where parents have brought their children up to speak it at home — which I'd definitely love to do if I happened to find a Cornish-speaking husband, but no such thing has ever come my way and I'm not holding my breath!
) So it mainly gets spoken at deliberate gatherings — there are regular informal pub conversation groups and language events throughout the year.
However, there are now bilingual street signs in many towns in Cornwall (just the street names, but it's a start) and the amount of public exposure and awareness that the language gets has increased even over the past 6 or so years that I've been visiting Cornwall fairly regularly, so that's something. (I have Cornish ancestry on my father's side, which is how I got interested after I first visited Cornwall some years ago and fell head over heels in love with the place.) And as I was saying, there's a small but growing industry in Cornish-language books and we always need more children's literature, so...
(And there's definitely a Cornish-speaking Christian community — we have a lovely C of E minister who runs Cornish language services in Anglican and Methodist churches all over Cornwall, with one being held nearly every Sunday, and they get a substantial audience, as I know from having been to several. So that tells me there have got to be some Cornish language enthusiasts who would definitely love to have the Chronicles of Narnia in Cornish.)
waggawerewolf27 wrote:I'm wondering if you'd do better to find an equivalent to trek, hike, journey, or just step or walker, maybe?
Yes, that's a thought. "Treader" is a bit of a funny name to attach to a ship anyway, but hey, I'm not the one who chose it!
But I do want to be as faithful as possible to what Lewis actually wrote or intended, needless to say.
If there's a thread somewhere on NarniaWeb about translations or languages in general, by the way, I'll be happy to go there so as not to keep cluttering up the welcome thread...