Thursday, February 03, 2022

Another dialect

 


The waiter at my hotel in St. Moritz speaks five languages: German, Portuguese, Italian, English, French. I speak only 2.1 (English, French, ein wenig Deutsch).

I live in a country with four official languages: German, French, Italian and Romanish. The later is spoken by about 13,000 and is a descendant languages of the Roman Empire's spoken Latin when it replaced Celtic and Raetic about the 5th Century. It only became an official language in 1938.

Among the Romanish there seem to be three varieties or dialects Sursilvan, Vallader, and Surmiran Puter. 

Wikipedia either helps stop or adds to the confusion with this:

"Puter and Vallader are sometimes referred to as one specific variety known as Ladin, as they have retained this word to mean Romansh. However, the term Ladin is primarily associated with the closely related language in Italy's Dolomite mountains also known as Ladin. Puter and Vallader are distinguished from the other Romansh dialects among other things by the retention of the rounded front vowels /y/ and /ø/ (written ü and ö), which have been derounded to /i/ and /e/ in the other dialects. Compare Putèr audio speaker iconmür (help·info) to Sursilvan audio speaker iconmir (help·info) ‘wall’ and Putèr audio speaker iconchaschöl (help·info) to Sursilvan audio speaker iconcaschiel (help·info) 'cheese'."

This means that side-by-side villages may have a different dialect. In the German part the Swiss-German of one Canton and be incomprehensible to the Swiss German of another canton. 

It's enough to make a linguist weep or jump for joy, thinking he will have a career for decades.

 



 

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