As you both no doubt know, part of my job as an editor at Your Favourite Weekly Etcetera is to travel round the place doing my stand up routine talk about how we editors handle papers, demystifying the editorial life to any scientists present, whether they want me to or not. The idea is to show that editors are actually human beings (I was the best Your Favourite Etcetera could come up with at short notice.)
Notwithstanding inasmuch as which I am on the way home from the 8th Annual Retreat for PhD Students in Molecular Life Sciences at ETH and the University of Zurich, in Switzerland – and I’d like to thank the fine group of young men and women from the Retreat for organizing the event so beautifully and for welcoming me. I wish I could have stayed longer.
The retreat was held some three hours and three train rides east of Zurich, in the canton of Graubunden (Home of Heidi, it says here) in the mountain resort of Bergün. The train from Chur, like Norwich City, just goes up, up, up into the mountains. The scenery is quite impossibly spectacular. It’s no surprise that the Rhaetic Railway (for it is she) is one of only three railways in the world to be awarded UNESCO World Heritage status.
Bergün is just totally choclate-box. No locale more archetypically Swiss can possibly be imagined. This is the view from the back door of the lecture room, this morning:
My hotel was traditionally and architecturally Swiss, in Swiss surroundings. When I left it the first time to walk the 800m of wiggly-windy-cobbly street to the conference hotel, there was an ensemble of alpen-horn players tootling their stuff outside (I swear I’m not making this up.) And, being Switzerland, the hotel, for all its olde-worlde appurtenances, had FREE WIFI. Oh joy! This meant that I could read manuscripts as the sun set over the alps.
One of the things you discover when you go to out-of-the-way corners of the world, especially mountainous ones, is that the modern world hasn’t entirely managed to extinguish traces of an older world, especially linguistically. As every schoolboy knows, Switzerland has four official languages – German, French, Italian and something called ‘Romansch’. The latter is only spoken in Graubunden, and even then only in particular places in Graubunden, which is the only officially trilingual of the Swiss Cantons (German, Italian and Romansch.) You know something is odd when you see signs like this -
‘Scoula’ is not German, or even Italian, but Romansch, a member of the Rhaetian subgroup of the Romance languages, a relic of the language like what she was spoke round here in the Middle Ages, when modern national languages existed only in embryo, most people speaking the dialect of their home village and the fields adjacent.
Being a journalist at heart and naturally nosy I like to look at village noticeboards wherever I go, to get a flavor of the locality. I was mildly amused to see this advert for a property to let.
Not sure, mesself, whether I’d like to live in Segl Crap street. But what’s the ‘Chesa’ – Italian? Or Romansch, which is sort of a bit like Italian, maybe, though not really?
Imagine my surprise, therefore, to learn that Romansch isn’t the only linguistic relic spoken in these parts. There is another Rhaetian language, which is even more possibly sort of like Italian but not quite, and that’s called Lombard. Unlike Romansch, Lombard has no official status, so you won’t see it in signage… except that I am sure it appears here, on a small diagram showing the routes of the Rhaetic railway.
Sorry if this is a bit blurred. We we going across a rather vertiginous viaduct at the time.
Let’s take it from the top. You’ll see, in order, German, Italian and Romansch (being the official languages of Graubunden), and then French, and English … but what’s that one at the bottom? It can’t be Italian, or Romansch, but Lombardic, the last remnant of a language spoken by a mighty nation in the Middle Ages, but of whose continued existence I had been completely unaware until yesterday.
Let us treasure these lost remnants, these living fossils of language, lest they become extinct, and a wealth of expression, life and literature disappears with them, leaving the world all the poorer.
Now, must go, they’re about to call the flight to Norwich, or, as we say in Norfolk Dialect, Narch. Toodle, and, moreover, pip.
Location:Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam
Isn’t that what Inspector Klemp spoke?
That is fascinating. It’s easy to imagine that there are only major national languages in Europe, and it is a a shock to cone across something like Lombardic. I remember the surprise of discovering that some people in the south of France speak Occitan, and seeing road signs in Occitan.
But when is a language a language and not a dialect? I think there are parallels with speciation, but I haven’t read up on tis.
Re ‘when is a dialect a language’, one common answer is ‘when it is a written language with a written grammar’.
Thus the oberbayerisch dialect my in-laws speak (& which I find utterly incomprehensible) is not a language, according to my better half, since it is strictly a spoken dialect/language with no literature or ‘agreed’ separate grammar.
I love this kind of stuff. I remember my family’s surprise in traveling through Brittany, and finding many aspects of Bretagne to be uncannily like Welsh. Both are celtic languages, of course, although I didn’t know that at the time.
These beautiful landscapes remind me of the beautiful southern Chile.
Something a little related.
I remember when I lived in Catalonia, near for the Pyrenees, the Catalan language near the French people had some distinct tone. The tone of the words in these fonetics was really beautiful (mixture French-Catalan very fluid and beautiful intonation).
Beautiful remembrance.
Alejandro – if I recall correctly, Catalan is a language with no known “ancestry”. Unless I’m mistaken, it’s still a mystery where it came from, and to which other languages it’s related.
Really the origin of Catalan is uncertain, as spoken in the eastern Pyrenees of France, on the island of Sardinia in Italy and of course Catalonia and Spain.
I don’t dare assure the source, but I would venture that originated in the Oriental Pyrenees between France and Spain.
I can’t add much to the discussion of the origin of Catalan (I must ask Mrs F when I go home), but I’ll add that Catalan is an official language across the Balearic islands and Valencia.
The islanders seem perfectly happy to accept that their language is Catalan, yet refer to it as Mallorquí in day to day usage (which may reflect the difference between spoken and written languages DrAust mentioned), while the Valencians appear to refuse to accept their language is Catalan, even though it has few (if any) distinct written differences.
Following recent elections, there are, unfortunately, moves afoot to remove Catalan as the lingua franca from schools in Mallorca. This, in spite of the evidence that shows that growing up bilingual improves scholastic ability across a range of subjects. citation needed.
In any case I’m sure that was not the language spoken (aranés) in the Áran Valley (Val D’Aran) the catalàn of this area was something more pure. It is strange, since that Catalan in particular that I’ve listened in teh Pyrinees orient but to the north side of “Seu de Urgell” between “Andorra La Vella” toward “Pas de La Casa- Grau Roig” in course of Ax-Les -Thermes (in occitan) in the north is very fluid, more than the Catalan of the center of Barcelona, that the catalàn is very harsh .
Ricardipus – you are thinking of Basque, spoken in the western Pyrenees, which is a true linguistic isolate. Catalan is a ‘Romance’ language, like Spanish, French, Italian, Romanch, Lombardic and indeed Occitan.
Prof Denis Noble, the well known physiologist, author, philosopher and general sage, is known for singing medieval ballads in Occitan (sic) at some of his lectures, though perhaps ‘multimedia performances’ is a better term. He is a must-listen if you ever get the chance, if only for the asides about his having been Richard Dawkins’ (or, given our location, perhaps I should say ‘he who must not be named’s') PhD Examiner.
Over the years I’ve seen Denis Noble deliver speeches at conferences in Korean, Japanese and even Maori (!), so I imagine he likely speaks a good few European languages in addition to Occitan.
I remember one summer in the year 1991, during the weekend I was helping a friend who lived in Andorra, helped him to his doctoral thesis on the grouse (Urogallo: Bonesia bonesia) in the Pyrenees, since I had some experience with birds of undergrowth in Chile and sometimes talking in Catalan, I really had a very special phonetic, told me that he always spoke in Catalan Perpignan and had much tolerance for that language, I think it’s great, because in some parts of France if you do not speak the French language, you is an enemy. ¿Why?
Oh! sorry is : Tetrao urogallus aquitanicus
In any case my excursions in solitary in the Pyrenees and the Cantabrian Mountains in general, I found that different subspecies of Urogallo Cantabrico and the Urogallo of the Pyrenees, have a little different songs. You does not tell anyone. It’s a secret of Order of the Unicycling Girrafe.
“ferrocarril retico” looks like perfectly ordinary Spanish to me
Maybe that’s what it is …
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