Schaffition
Thursday, 18 February 2010 11:01![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pneThis morning, I was reading the Romansh newspaper and came across the "Word for Sunday", talking about how "water is life".
One word which caught my eye was scaffiziun, which seemed to mean "creation". (meinPledari glosses rm-sr "scaffir" as "schaffen, schöpfen, erschaffen", which makes this seem likely. I can't reach Pledari Grond online right now to check "scaffiziun" in particular.)
It seems likely to me that scaffir (rm-rg "stgaffir") is borrowed from Germanic, so the combination of such a root with a Latin suffix looks funny to me :) Like "Schaffition" would in German, or perhaps "makeition" (from "make") in English.
Of course, that sort of word (stem from one language, derivational affix from another) is probably not unusual in English or German, only you tend not to notice them as much if they're words you're used to.
In mostly-unrelated news, it seems that Surmiran does "article + possessive + noun" like Italian does (à la "the your book"); I don't think I've seen that in other Romansh idioms.