Williams, Nicholas J. A., “The preterite in Cornish”, in: Philip Payton (ed.), Cornish studies 18, 18, Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2010. 179–202.
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Like the other Celtic languages, Cornish distinguishes an imperfect, or past habitual, tense from a simple past or preterite tense. This distinction in the Celtic languages is sometimes a cause of difficulty for English-speaking learners, because English has only one past tense. Learners sometimes use the less correct tense. The problem is compounded in the case of Cornish by the absence of native speakers and also by the relatively limited amount of traditional Cornish that survives. It is possible nonetheless by reading the extant corpus of Cornish literature to establish the preferred usage in the language of the two tenses, imperfect and preterite; and thus to decide when and where either of the two tenses is to be used in the revived language. By far the commonest person in all verbs in all texts in Cornish is the third person singular. In the texts the third person singular of the imperfect in most verbs ends in -e/-a or -y. The preterite, on the other hand, in most cases ends in either -as or -ys/-is.
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