In an old Celtic revival, spelling is a test of wills

No one knows for sure who the last native speaker of Cornish was, although some point to Dolly Pentreath, a resident of the village of Mousehole who died in 1777, apocryphally uttering the Cornish phrase for "I don't want to speak English."

Whatever the truth, sometime by the 19th century, the language fizzled out completely.

Since then, historians and linguists have tried to revive Cornish, one of a group of old Celtic languages whose cousins include Gaelic, Welsh and Breton. But the campaign is not going so well.

For one thing, only about 200 people currently speak it well enough to hold a conversation.