When is a book not a book? When it's part of a two-book package.

So... in preparation for my trip to Switzerland, I thought I'd get a book on the Bernina Express and a book on travelling around Grisons with bus and train.

The books arrived today... and I saw that the "Glacier and Bernina Express" book was a vinyl cover holding two books: a 50-page one on the Glacier Express and a 150-page book that was the "around Grisons by bus and train" book I had bought separately.

So I thought I'd send back the single book since I didn't need two copies of the same book. But after thumbing through the first book (labelled "Glacier Express, Bernina Express, and the Rhaetian Railways"), I found that it covered only the Glacier Express; presumably the Bernina express was covered in the general "getting around the canton" book, though a quick flip through the table of contents didn't see it discussed specifically. (Though the route it takes seems to be in there, along with the other train routes in Grisons.)

So now my plan is to send back the two-book package, since (a) I don't need the "around Grisons by bus and train" book twice and I have no interest in the Glacier Express. (At the moment, that is.)

Unfortunately, you have to cover the costs of postage yourself if you send back an order worth less than €40 (but then, you don't pay for postage when you buy books). And they say that you're supposed to keep the receipt you get when you send the thing off, but the only products where the post office stamps something and gives it to you is parcels, I think—rather than, say, plain letter or book rate, which would be cheaper.

I think I'll go the latter rate, anyway, to keep costs down. Will have to ask at the post office tomorrow whether it meets the criteria for book rate or for a commercial sample, otherwise I'll just suck up the €2.20 for latter rate. Better than €3.90 for a parcel, though.

And I wish the web site had been more up-front about the make-up of the "book".

Langenscheidt Wörterbuch Rätoromanisch

Speaking of books, I also bought a Rumantsch dictionary (rm–de/de–rm; specifically, Rumantsch Grischun).

It's got a little mini-grammar at the end, which may come in handy.

What I'm disappointed about, though, is that the words do not have any pronunciation hints with them.

While the orthography is phonemic enough in general, there is at least one point, possibly two, where letters are ambiguous: e and o can be either open or closed (at least according to some sources; the Wikipedia article and the dictionary pronunciation guide disagree); and sch can be either voiced or voiceless.

While the French Wikipedia article on RG helpfully says that you can usually guess which it will be if the word has a cognate in French (depending on the sound in the appropriate position of the French cognate), I would have hoped that, if not all, at least the words with sch in them would have a pronunciation guide so that one can know that, say, sche (fr si) starts with /S/ but schanugl (fr genou) with /Z/.

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On a slightly-related not, I seem to recall reading somewhere that Rumantsch has, coincidentally, roughly the same phoneme inventory as Croatian.

It's certainly got the distinction between č and ć (e.g. la tschatta chatta "the paw finds", pronounced "la čatta ćatta") and it's also got đ (but not dž), lj and nj, as well as š and ž (represented by the same letter, unfortunately—either sch or, before certain consonants, s).

For details, compare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumantsch_Grischun#Phonology and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_language#Sounds.

Hm, they do look extremely similar, especially the consonats; the main difference I can see is that RG has a schwa and an eng, while Croatian has /x/ and /dZ/, and that Croatian's /v/ is said to be an approximant while RG's is said to be a fricative (like both languages' /f/).

Funny!

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Hm... that means I should be able to write RG in Croatian orthography, or Serbian cyrillic :) Fun!

(Schwa can be "e/е" and eng can be "ng/нг", as in the regular RG orthography.)

So the example text used in the German Wikipedia article to compare the five literary idioms and RG would go like this in Serbo-Rumantsch:

Ла вулп ера пушпѐ ина ђада фоментада. Ква а елла вис син ин пињ ин корв ке тењева ин ток ћажијел ен сес пикел. Квај ма густасс, а елла пенса̀, ед а клама̀ ал корв: "Ће бел ке ти ес! Ше тес ћант ѐ ушѐ бел шко тиа парита, лура ес ти ил пли бел учѐ да тутс."