My Finished Sampler

I suppose I should have added Albanian, Arabic, Aramaic, Armenian, Azeri-Arabic, Azeri-Cyrillic, Azeri-Turkish, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Byelorussian, Coptic, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Farsi, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Greek-Classical, Greek-Modern, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, International-Phonetic, Inuktitut, Italian, Kannada, Khmer, Ladino, Lao, Latin, Latvian, Lihyanite, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malayalam, Malay-Jawi, Marathi, Moabite, Mongolian, Nabataean, Nepali, Norwegian, Oromo, Oriya, Pashto, Phoenician, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Rumanian, Russian, Safitic, Sami, Sanskrit,Serbian, Sinhalese, Slovak, Slovenian, South Arabian, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss, Syriac-Eastern, Syriac-Estrangelo, Syriac-West, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Thamudic, Tibetan, Tigrania, Tigre, Transliteration, Turkish, UK-English, Ukrainian, Ugaritic, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh and Wendish Bruce

I thought for an awful moment you were going to forget the Welsh and start a new celtic war lol You shouldn't overlook American-English, which is very different from UK-English !

I really, really, didn`t want to answer that `very learned list of languagages `,,, but than i saw that you know about a language i never heard about? would you kindly tell me where People speak SWISS ???? mirjam

You also mentioned many Forgoten langugaes which aren`t spoken any more , quite some which have no written culture, and i must admit i that i am facinated by another language

Which i have done many a time in the University Library when i was still an active Librarian ... mirjam

Probably somewhere not too far away from the place where people speak Transliteration Bruce

Bruce probably meant Rhaeto-Romansh which is a distinctly Swiss dialect.

You took the words right out of my mouth, MargW

SchwietzerDietsch is so different from High German as to be incomprehensible. Thus, IMHO, Swiss is a separate language.

mirjam

I ain't saying nary a word lol

Yes Sure this Rhaeto-Romansh `almost like transliteration ...... The page Karin gave shows there is NO language called Swiss !!!!! mirjam

Actually, Swiss refers to the form of German spoken in Switzerland.

Elizabeth

Nope, Romansh is Romansh. Swiss is German.

Elizabeth

Swiss bears about as much relationship to German as Extreme Texan does to The Queen's English; maybe less. When my friend and her mom lapsed into it, I had to struggle to pick up enough to have the barest clue of what the subject was, and I'm fluent in German. Not only is the pronunciation quite different, but everything is made diminutive, with a

-li on the end. (As in "my wife-li went to the store-li and bought a dress-li." Or to do the complete comparison with Texan/Queen's English, "mah waffly wint ta da stawly un bod a dracely." Say wot, old chap?! Subtitles, please!)

It has Germanic roots, true, but this is one case where the apple not only fell far from the tree but then rolled downhill another couple miles.

The official Languages of of Switerland, are French, German and Italian,,, Although people speak several Dialects of all three languages. mirjam

Don't forget Romansch. According to the Swiss 2000 census the languages are German (official) 63.7%, French (official) 20.4%, Italian (official) 6.5%, Serbo-Croatian 1.5%, Albanian 1.3%, Portuguese 1.2%, Spanish 1.1%, English 1%, Romansch (official) 0.5% other 2.8%. (note: German, French, Italian, and Romansch are all national and official languages) Source: CIA World Factbook Bruce

I thank you Bruce for taking all this care and trouble to find all kinds of extremely intersting facts ,,,, But NOTHING shows that there is a language called Swiss , which you noted down for my other `lesson `,,,,, mirjam

Mirjam!

You read the original manuscripts? I would love to read the Masura (I am not sure of the spelling) and the footnotes.... I also am trying to learn more of the origins in Aramaeic....

Your erudition amazes me and inspires me to continue trying to learn more.

Hugs, Dee

I was away for awhile and missed the end of this, but I've got to say that MOST dialects of German are so different from High German as to be incomprehensible; they are still dialects of German rather than separate languages. That notwithstanding, people still refer to Swiss German as "Swiss." So if the question is "where is Swiss spoken," the answer is "in the German-speaking regions of Switzerland."

Elizabeth (who has only to open her mouth in German to be pegged by German speakers as having learned it in Vienna)