Just watched today's Telesguard daily news program in Romansh, and also the Minisguard weekly news program for children. (The latter apparently gets put up even before the show is over! It started at 17:40, and I started watching at 17:44.)

One interesting thing was hearing two Romansh speakers speaking to each other in different dialects: the ( Read more... )

I was reading a recent issue of La Quotidiana this morning in the train, and on one page, in the Engiadina section, there were two news items:

One was about the school in La Punt-Chamues-ch which is scheduled to change from a so-called "Romansh school" (not sure what it was like there specifically, but apparently a typical case is 100% Romansh in ( Read more... )

The other day, I tried to listen to RTR (Romansh radio and television), and it worked-last time, I couldn't get it to play in my browser.

My first impression was that it sounded Portuguese: lots of "sch" in it and a fair bit of "au" probably contributed to that impression.

And for a couple of words I learned that I had guessed the wrong vowel ( Read more... )

I came across a Romansh-language clip on "youth and beauty" (about what youth think about standards of beauty and brands etc.) on YouTube (part 1, part 2, part 3) and was a bit disappointed to find that I understood next to nothing-I could hardly even pick out a word or two!

Reading it is one thing but picking out continuous speech is obviously a ( Read more... )

I saw that it's possible to download older issues (more than 14 days ago) of the weekly newspapers published by the Südostschweiz group free of charge, so I had a look to see what they publish: mostly regional newspapers for Graubünden and Glarus, partly with official notices from the various communes.

The reason I had looked in the first place ( Read more... )

At the beginning of December, there was a post to the "Posta Rumantscha" mailing list advertising "Il Chalender da Litterature Rumantscha" (the Calendar of Romansh Literature) to all those who were still "looking for a pretty Christmas present": "53 Romansh authors accompany you through the year 2009 with some poetry or some prose text and a pretty ( Read more... )

One of my favourite books in my high school library was Kenneth Katzner's The Languages of the World, which briefly describes many of the world's languages, which a short sample text plus translation in each article. A few years ago, I bought the book so that I could have it on my shelf.

A while ago, I remember re-reading the article on Maltese ( Read more... )

The other day, I dreamed that I studied linguistics of some kind or another and worked on a Romansh spell-checker as part of my work (perhaps an input file for myspell/hunspell or something like that).

I thought I'd ask to see whether something like that-or even simply a decently-sized list of correctly-spelled words-exists, so I asked the Lia ( Read more... )

According to an article I read today (in Romansh; possibly, specifically Vallader), Christ's ascension into heaven was referred to differently in the Roman and the Gallic (France, Spain, Portugal) traditions: as ASCENSA in the Roman (until C6) and as ASCENSIO (acc. ASCENSIONEM) in the Gallic (C4-C9).

However, by C10, the Roman liturgy had also ( Read more... )

I found an interesting article on the development of the standardised so-called "idioms" of Romansh in Graubünden (in German) today.

It's only a short introduction, but it reminded me of the fact that the existence of five idioms doesn't mean that there are also five dialects-in the context of Romansh, it appears to be traditional to use idiom to ( Read more... )