Talk:Romansh language

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"Romansh"

When did people start spelling the name of the language in this fundamentally un-English way? As far as I can discover there are no native English words at all that end in "nsh" (the Yiddish "mensh" surely doesn't count, being a transliteration from Hebrew letters - and anyway even that's often spelled "mensch"). I've always known the language as "Romanche". Of course that's its French name, and perhaps someone wanted to get away from that - but then why not "Romanch" without the French "e"? English has plenty of common words ending in "nch", such as "French", "ranch", "inch" and "lunch" - there may be a hint of a "t" sound in there too, but that's a more faithful echo of the name in the language itself, which ends in "tsch" whichever variant you use (and the "t" is audible there). Whenever I see "Romansh", I think "Oops, typo!"

I hope no-one's going to say "this is how the Lia Rumantscha/the Swiss government/whoever wants it to be spelled in English", for non-English-language bodies are simply not entitled to make up words in a language that is not their own. This is a problem I frequently encounter as an English translator in Holland - Dutch organisations repeatedly make up ungrammatical or misspelled English names for themselves, and unfortunately Wikipedia repeatedly copies them as they stand, on the "grounds" that "this is what the Dutch want us to call it". I'm sorry, but Dutch people's English really isn't all it's cracked up to be, and they should have it checked first. There's already far too much unidiomatic (i.e. mangled) English on Wikipedia and the web generally, and we shouldn't be adding to it!213.127.210.95 (talk) 15:19, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

I don't know the history of the name of this language in English either, but I put all the imaginable spellings I could think of into Google Ngram, and the spellings that occurred at all in English books between 1850 and 2008 were: Romansh, Rumansh, Rumantsch, Romantsch, Romanche, Romanch, Romontsch, and Rumonsh. This is the link: [1]. Of course we can't actually be sure that all of those refer to this language; could also be the name of something else in some English text. From the Ngram, it appears that "Romansh" has been around since the mid-19th century (so long before the internet or Wikipedia was around to spread mangled English). The other common spelling is "Romanche", while all the others barely occur at all. Since that is the exact French spelling, I suspect that the name entered English through French (which makes sense, since lots of Swiss-related terms entered English in their French form in the 19th century), and maybe the "nsh" was supposed to reflect the French pronunciation more closely? Or to avoid confusion with other words? Analogy with language names in English that end with "-ish"? But those are just my guesses. According to this diagram, "Romansh" and "Romanche" were about equally common until around 1955, when "Romansh" started being used a lot more frequently. --Terfili (talk) 21:08, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Garbled sentence

§ Rumantsch Grischun contains the following sentence:

The decision not to publish any new teaching materials in the regional varieties was not overturned, however, raising the question of what would happen with those municipalities refused to introduce Rumantsch Grischun at all as the language of schooling is decided by the municipalities themselves in Grisons.

Whatever this is, it isn't grammatical English. What is the meaning of

what would happen with those municipalities refused to introduce Rumantsch Grischun at all as the language of schooling is decided by the municipalities themselves in Grisons.

?

I have tried to figure out the likeliest intended meaning, and accordingly have changed the sentence to

The decision not to publish any new teaching materials in the regional varieties was not overturned, however, raising the question of what would happen in those municipalities that refused to introduce Rumantsch Grischun at all, since the language of schooling is decided by the municipalities themselves in Grisons.

"[W]hat would happen with those municipalities..." is not nearly so specific as "... in those municipalities..." and could imply that some higher authority would do something to them. "In" is exact and accurate.

Without "that",

those municipalities refused to introduce Rumantsch Grischun

is most easily read as a clause, able to stand on its own as a sentence, with "those municipalities" as subject:

What did those municipalities do? They refused to introduce Rumantsch Grischun at all as the language of schooling.

But that clause can't be integrated into the rest of the sentence.

Without the comma I have added, "as" seems to go with "introduce", so

refused to introduce Rumantsch Grischun at all as the language of schooling

would mean "completely refused to make R.G. be the language of schooling". But that reading, like the one described just above, can't be integrated with the rest of the sentence. This problem is largely due to the ambiguity of "as", which I believe here means "since, because"; so I have changed that word as well as introducing a comma to separate this reason-clause from the clause with "introduce".

--Thnidu (talk) 23:07, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the copyedits. Originally that sentence actually read:

The decision not to publish any new teaching materials in the regional varieties was not overturned however, raising the question of what would happen with those municipalities which would not want to introduce Rumantsch Grischun at all, as the language of schooling is decided by the municipalities themselves in Grisons.

which I think is pretty clear, but it seems over the years somebody edited around in it to make it unclear. Your version seems fine to me too though. --Terfili (talk) 21:21, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

pro-drop

Is Romansh a pro-drop language? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.138.32.154 (talk) 11:45, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

Generally not, the pronoun must be included. However, in some cases they can be dropped, for example in certain types of questions (Sas aunc? ‘Do you still know?’), but don't have to be (Sas ti aunc? is also grammatical). I will try to find some sources that describe this. Most overviews of pro-drop in Romance languages seem to just say that Romansh isn't, and ignore the option to drop them in certain constructions. --Terfili (talk) 08:19, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

Latin Stock item

Is there evidence that cudesch, 'book', is derived from Latin codex? If so, shouldn't that be stated in the Latin stock section? GeorgeTSLC (talk) 08:30, 22 June 2019 (UTC)

Merger proposal

Since the article Romansh people is by large only discussing the language issue despite existing since 2008, it makes no sense to keep updated two articles about the same subject. Therefore, I propose to merge it into this article, about the Romansh language. –– ZH8000 (talk) 18:19, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

I agree with this proposal. There isn't really a common Romansh identity anyway, just like the primary identification of other people in Switzerland is with their home canton or region, rather than with an ethnic group. The question for me though would be whether to redirect to here or to Swiss people, like Italian Swiss and French Swiss do. --Terfili (talk) 05:46, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

• Support per @ZH8000 and Terfili: Romansh nationalism does not exist at all.  — Mr. Guye (talk) (contribs)  02:53, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

Fluency in other languages

In the introduction of the article one can read: "About 28% of the Romansh-speaking people in the Romansh-speaking areas also speak one other language fluently, e.g. German or Italian, which are the other official languages of Grisons.[11]"

Reading this I thought that it meant there are plenty of monolingual Romansh speakers out there, but further down the article it's written that nowadays only pre-school children are monolingual Romansh speakers.

Can someone clarify this please? --Spafky (talk) 11:36, 17 October 2020 (UTC)

It seems to me that whoever added that sentence calculated the percentage of people living in the Romansh-speaking area (as defined by the Swiss statistical office - whose definition of "language area" is problematic anyway when it comes to Romansh) who declared that they have more than one "main language". However, stating that you have more than one "main language" is not the same as "being fluent" in a language. People might well be fluent in several languages but still have one language they consider to be the language they speak best and are most at home in. Furthermore, this 28% is of all the people living in the Romansh-speaking area, not of Romansh speakers. It likely includes people who speak no Romansh at all but declared, for example, German and English as their "main languages". It is in fact correct that virtually every single Romansh speaker can speak at a minimum Swiss German + Standard German fluently, and very many also speak additional languages fluently (usually at least either English or French, sometimes Italian as well). I am going to delete this sentence. Thanks for catching it, Spafky. --Terfili (talk) 21:33, 17 October 2020 (UTC)

@ 2607:FB91:880D:541C:F8DD:E8A4:C78E:6FB9 (talk) 04:14, 23 August 2023 (UTC)