In the show Deadwood on HBO they have some Cornish characters. They are minor characters, who play miners who are treated poorly by the mine owners for stealing gold and organizing unions. That was aired about 20 years ago and the show took place in the late 1880s. But there’s several scenes of them speaking Cornish - the townsfolk and the Sheriff have a hard time understanding them and need an interpreter.
“In the show Deadwood on HBO they have some Cornish characters.”
They called them Cornish miners but they were speaking Irish Gaelic (I could understand what they were saying).
All the same, it’s great to hear there’s interest in Cornish. I’d love to see Duolingo create a Breton/Cornish course.
I think it is closely related to Welsh (and more distantly to Breton) but don't know how easily a Welsh-speaker could understand a Cornish-speaker.
Only Celtic language I have ever heard spoken is Gaelic, when I was in Killarney, Ireland.
Mid-1870s. The 'real' Deadwood was founded in 1876. The show opens weeks after Custer's last stand, which took place on 25 June, 1876. And the murder of J.B. Hickok, which took place on 2 August, 1876, is in (IIRC) the third episode. So it's safe to say the show opens between those two dates.
Both the Cornish and the Welsh were legendary miners because both tin and copper were abundant in Cornwall and Wales. That made them one-stop-shopping back in the Bronze Age (ca. 3300 - 1200 BC) because bronze is an alloy of copper and tin.
They Cornish have been using steam engines to "dewater" mines since at least 1714. Wales and Cornwall both are coastal regions and they had hand-dug mining tunnels that went down as much as 1000 feet and then ran horizontally as much as a mile offshore and beneath the sea. All dug with pick-axes, shovels, and sweat. And it took serious horsepower to pump water up from those depths, well more than what humans or draught animals could produce.
The Cornish pasty meat pie was made like it was so the miners could hold it by the braided crust as they ate it so as not to get the powdered tin covering their hands on what they were about to eat. Then they'd lose nothing but a bit of bread when they threw out the contaminated crust.
That's why they would have imported miners from the other side of the Atlantic. Because they long since were experts in digging and managing the mines. Even figured out how to eat down there without cleaning up before or killing themselves after.