Talk:Romansh language

Romansh scholarship

Not added this yet as I don't have all the names and references:

Research into Romansh, which can mostly be traced to as late as the nineteenth century, was often highly erroneous and politicised. The most accurate work was not produced until the late nineteenth century, when studies went beyond noting vague relations between the 'dialects'.

In 1832, Haller tried to link Romansh, Ladin and Friulian as an exclusive group of Gallo-Romance, as they are seen today. His method was the well-used process of comparing written texts of various dialects, including Surselvan and Vallader, and noting the presence of related features. Also, Schneller in 1870 used grammatical criteria in a ground-breaking study to show Rhaeto-Romance as a sub-family rather than a single language with three main dialects:

"We have a separate and independent branch of the Romance languages, granting even that its speakers have no common written language or even any consciousness of its inner unity." (Schneller)

Schneller’s evidence comprised one particular fundamental feature - the palatalisation of velar stops ([k], [g]) before /a/, e.g. [k] becomes [c]. In 1873, Graziadio Isaia Ascoli went even further, noting more important shared features of ‘Ladin’ (Rhaeto-Romance), but never had the chance to prove this evidenced more than a "linguistic family" rather than a new set of languages. Problematically, many of these shared features, and others subsequently discovered, do not apply to every language and dialect of Rhaeto-Romance,.

Carlo Battisti’s twentieth-century surveys suggested that the Rhaeto-Romance family was really a branch of the northern Italian dialects. Battisti’s view suggests fascist interests, in line with Italian claims on several Swiss regions at the time. However, it seems that this was always Battisti’s belief; he was very much favouring this view whilst still an Austrian citizen twenty years earlier.