Cadi, and the word's etymology

[pne]

The Surselva in Graubünden has two big sub-districts (de: Kreise, rm: circuls) in the Rhine valley itself: Disentis and Ilanz.

The German names of those sub-districts are fairly self-explanatory; they are the names of each district's capital town.

In Romansh, however, the names are rather different: "Kreis Disentis" is called "Circul da la Cadi" and "Kreis Ilanz" is called "Circul da la Foppa".

Since the Foppa region is occasionally referred to in German as "Gruob" (presumably corresponding to High German "Grube"), I figured that would be a regular word, and indeed, my dictionary translates "foppa" as "Mulde, Delle, Senke" ("basin, dell, hollow, dent, depression, dip").

But the meaning of "Cadi" was elusive to me. The fact that the kinds of contexts where Kreis Ilanz is referred to as "Gruob" in German refer to Kreis Disentis as "Cadi" in German, too, didn't help, either.

But then I read about the Three Leagues (which later themselves joined together to form Graubünden), one of which, the League of God's Hause (Gotteshausbund) has its own article in the English Wikipedia—and there I read that the Italian name is "Lega Caddea" and the Romansh is "Lia da la Chadé".

And then something clicked. (It also helped that the article used the Rumantsch Grischun version of the league's name rather than the Sursilvan one, since I'm more familiar with RG morphemes).

So, presuming that S "Cadi" = RG "Chadé", I presume that they're both short for "God's house" ("chasa da Dieu" in RG, and word-initial cha- in RG regularly corresponds to ca- in Sursilvan).

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

No, sorry -- I don't know a whole lot about the traditional written idioms.

I thought that the palatalisation of word-initial *CA was a Ladin thing, so tgau, tgaun (presumably Surselvan for "head" and "dog", respectively? *checks meinpledari.ch* Ah, yes) surprise me.

Apparently, things aren't as simple as that.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I always thought it one of the features that supposedly unified this granfalloon called "Rhaeto-Romansh". Friulian, for instance, has čhâv, čhan.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Huh.

I read that the reson why RG spells that sound with ch word-initially before a and o was because Sursilvan tends to retain c there, whereas Ladin tends to have ch.

(Word-medially, and word-initially before other vowels, RG uses the spelling tg, which is the western [Sursilvan, Sutsilvan, Surmiran] spelling for the sound that Ladin spells ch.)

Otherwise they might as well have gone ahead and consistently spelled that sound tg in RG.

On the other hand, you have Mr. "dialect continuum" - Surmiran, for example, and even Sutsilvan, have tg in house (tgesa, tgea(sa)) and horse (tgaval, tgavagl~cavagl). (They all have "cantar" for "sing", though -- there, "ch" is purely Ladin.) So perhaps some bits of spoken (as opposed to standard written) Sursilvan also have palatalisation?

In which case it's hard to draw the line, and weird to exclude, say, three-fifths of the Surselva from speaking Rhaeto-Romance merely because they mostly don't palatalise words A, B, and C while including the rest of Surselva and all points east.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Which is merely one of many problems I have with the Rhaeto-Romansh hypothesis. It really makes much more sense to consider all these peripheral varieties of Gallo-Romance rather than see them as a distinct West Romance branch.