I came across this Romanian Wikipedia article on Cetatea Albă street in Chișinău (while looking for the diacriticful spelling of a Postcrosser’s address), and what struck my eye was this bit:

Strada Cetatea Albă (până în 1991 str. Krasnodonskaia) se află în sectorul Botanica, cartierul Muncești. (emphasis mine)

That reminded me of Sursilvan ( Read more... )

I was reading a web page somewhere (probably an article on Nunatsiaq News Online) when an advertisement in syllabics caught my eye.

I had a closer look and saw that it was a quadrilingual (English-French-Inuktitut-Inuinnaqtun) advertisement asking for comments on the Proposed Uqausivut Comprehensive Plan.

I had a bit of a look through the materials ( Read more... )

Software Rumantscha blog announced that a Romansh spellchecker for Office 2007 has now been released (using the same dictionary as the one for Office 2003).

("Romansh" in this context meaning the standardised variant "Rumantsch Grischun", i.e. rm-rumgr, rather than one or more of the five traditional written standards.)

I was reading through a grammar of Romansh when I came across this delightful example sentence (exemplifying gruppas conjuncziunalas):

Sco mintga di è il tren era oz puspè stà punctual.

Or roughly,

Wie jeden Tag ist der Zug auch heute wieder pünktlich gewesen.
Like every day, the train was on time again today.

Only in Switzerland would they use ( Read more... )

German “heißen” is translated in Romansh as “avair num”, literally, “to have name”.

The basic meaning of “heißen” is “to be called”, so the Romansh equivalent makes sense: “Co avais Vus num? Jau hai num Chatrina.” (How have You name? I have name Chatrina = What are you called? I’m called Catherine.)

However, I’ve also seen “avair num” used in at ( Read more... )

It’s amusing sometimes to read some people’s written Rumantsch Grischun, where they make mistakes based on their “native” written idiom.

(Most recent example: an invitation, where the Sursilvan shone through in the masculine plural participle ending -ì (sr: sg -i pl -i, rg: sg -ì pl -ids), including an instance of the masc/fem form “bainvegnì(das ( Read more... )

In La Quotidiana, they have a regular feature right now where they publish installments of Notiztgas dalla Sizilia by Linard Candreia (in Surmiran). (Is that the right word? Where they take a text and publish it a bit at a time, day by day?)

The other day, I was reading part 31, and came across this bit:

Chegl tgi fò smarvagler ad en Rumantsch an ( Read more... )

I’ve come across a construction a couple of times while reading news in Romansh that seems to be used to refer to people from a specific place: “ils da X”, literally “the [ones] from X”.

I was reminded of that just now when seeing an article with the subtitle “Ils dal Vnuost vulessan eir alch «Bio e sfera»” (The ones from Vinschgau Valley would ( Read more... )

I was reading La Quotidiana the other day (issue of Tuesday 2010-02-16) when I came across two articles on the same page that each had two identically-spelled words next to each other. (I’m not sure whether they are also pronounced identically, which would make them homophones and homonyms as well as homographs, according to the the Venn diagram on ( Read more... )

This morning, I was reading the Romansh newspaper and came across the "Word for Sunday", talking about how "water is life".

One word which caught my eye was scaffiziun, which seemed to mean "creation". (meinPledari glosses rm-sr "scaffir" as "schaffen, schöpfen, erschaffen", which makes this seem likely. I can't reach Pledari Grond online right ( Read more... )