View Message

Uhm, quite frankly - I don't know. Well, as a matter of fact I don't know many people from that part of Switzerland (just two families). All I know is that Romansh is spoken in only a few valleys of Switzerland and that it is derived form vernacular Late Latin, so over the years/decades/centuries they have preserved and come up with some names typical for their region (Reto and Urs, for example) and they are somewhat influenced by their neighbours from the Italian, German and French-speaking part of Switzerland. It's kinda all a big mix and match. It's not uncommon to combine a Romansh name with a German/Itlian/French one (or the other way round, for that matter). Well, that's what I've been told. ;-)

---

Edited to say: From what I understand it's a quite recent thing to (re-)use genuine Romansh names. Until about twenty years ago there were only very few ones that were used constantly (Reto and Ruedi being some examples that come to my mind) and now there are also some other ones. (The children of one of the families I know are now in their late teens, they are called Leta - which is the Romansh form of Laetitia - and Dumeni - the Romansh form of Dominic).

---

I must admit I'm a little obsessing over Romansh names at the moment because I like a lot of them...

---

Not all the names on this list are genuine Romansh names, though.

This message was edited 8/17/2009, 1:37 PM