Romansh

[pne]

So I decided to fill out a table of correlatives like the one they have in Esperanto, since I figure I should the "little" words first since they tend to trip me up the most.

I found two on Wikipedia (one for Esperanto, one for English) and made a grid, then tried finding the right words to put in it. That didn't work out perfectly since I had a couple of categories with no words and several words which didn't fit that well into any of my categories but were still related (e.g. "most" and "some" in between "none" and "all").

Incidentally, the Romansh word that trips me up the most is sin. I keep reading it as Spanish sin or Latin sine, "without"—but it's actually "on, on top of"!

I also had a go at some minor changes to Wikipedia articles.

Comments

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

"sin"

Do you happen to know anything about the word's etymology?

[pne.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid not.

It's probably significant, though, that the Rumantsch Ladin form is "sün", indicating that the original form may have had a "u" in it.

Compare, for example, the indefinite article, which is "in" in RG and in the Sursilva but "ün" in the Engadin, or "silent", which is "mit" in RG and (though I can't confirm this) presumably "müt" in the Engadin, which looks more like English "mute" than the RG form does.