Nadelik - Nadelak - Nadelek - Nedelek?

[Albert Bock]

As a follow-up to the discussion on Talat Chaudhri's facebook wall, I'd like to sum up where we are standing on the issue.

We have KK <Nadelik>, UC/R <Nadelek>, RLC <Nadelak/Nadelik> and the following attestations collected by Gendall (1992 & 2008):

Nadelack (Borlase)
Nadelik (Gwavas)
Nedelik (Lhuyd)
Nedelack (Pryce)

TC, DP, and myself agree that **Nadelik looks like a Lhyudian Cymricism and that the native LC form more likely ended in -ak (which stood for [-ək] or [-ak], according to theory).
But what about the first syllable? Is it feasible that i-affection had spread, and that the underlying MC form would have been /ne'delek/ (c.f. Breton Nedeleg)? Or is /na'delek/ more likely?

[Tony Snell]

In Borlase, 'The Antiquities of Cornwall' published 1769, in the Cornish-English vocabulary at the end of the book, I find:

Nadelik (with a circumflex accent over the 'a', indicating a long vowel) "The Nativity, viz. Christmas".

Did he simply get this from Gwavas (who is one of his listed sources), I wonder?

What should be the length of the first vowel? Hitherto I have always pronounced the word with a short 'a'. Right or wrong?

Tony

[Albert Bock]

Borlase's long <â> implies stress on the first syllable, which is unexpected here. I am therefore somewhat inclined to distrust this form.
One way of interpreting the variation between <a> and <e> (1st syllable) and <e> and <i> (3rd syllable) in attested spellings would be to explain it as the result of vowel neutralisation in unstressed syllables, i.e. that all spellings imperfectly represent a LC realisation [nə'dɛlək]. Which still leaves us with the question what it was that native speakers had stored in their mental lexicon. /nədelək/? /nedelek/? /nadelɪk/?

[Karesk]

Is it considered most likely that Gwavas wrote his verse about the parson of Paul himself, or that he got it from local tradition? Are there other occurences of the word outside vocabularies?

[Karesk]

There is also
Gwave an have terebah Goluan
Ha Have an Gwave terebah Nedelack.

That comes from a manuscript by Usticke that Borlase copied from but I don't know whether it's in any of Gwavas, Tonkin, or Lhuyd's papers. Is the Cornish from these sources easily accessible anywhere?

[Evertype]

We're writing Nadelyk pl Nadelygow.