WALSERSPRACHE - The four main objectives of the Alpine Space ...

Sergio Maria Gilardino
= ergremmung, erbeisung
Il va sans dire qu’il s’agit d’une série de comparaisons et de recherches
qui demandent le dévouement et l’appui des jeunes chercheurs.
C’est bien pour cela que nous profitons de la présence de plusieurs dictionnaristes
et savants de la langue des Walsers, comme Peter Zürrer, Max
Waibel, Kurt Wanner, Volmar Schmid et Elisabetta Fazzini, en cette assemblée,
pour les conjurer de bien vouloir continuer à nous fournir autant le
savoir-faire scientifique qui s’impose en de telles prises de Bastille, que
les disciples et les étudiants en phase de rédaction de thèse qui pourraient
suivre par segments ce dessein ambitieux, et néanmoins très faisable,
de donner enfin aux Walsers une langue unifiée.
There is no such thing as a Walser language. It never reached the status of a state language
nor did it ever serve as a literary tool of great prestige. The Walsers simply spoke
their respective dialects, virtually unaware of one another’s whereabouts and ultimate
lot. The need for a concerted action was felt, but still nowadays we fall short of even a
sketchy outline of a Walser language. Isolation is probably the main cause of this much
felt shortcoming. Yet it should not be too difficult to devise a common grammar and dictionary.
After all, they drew the grammatical and word outline of ancient German,
Angle-Saxon and even Indo-European, so it should not be too hard to do the same for the
language of the Walsers. En route toward such an ambitious goal, let us not confuse
ancestral and state languages. All dialects were at some time past a language. They were
demoted because a state language took over. Should this be taken to mean dialects can
no longer express all embracing human feelings? Absolutely not. People at large believe
languages are only those so consacrated by constitutions and state laws, and literary critics
often take their task to be that of deciding what a language and what a dialect is. Such
a task falls to the linguist. All the literary critic has to do is to determine whether the linguistic
medium used in a literary composition was apt to convey the poetical meaning it
was meant to. If critics confined themselves to that task, they would find out more often
than not primitive languages and dialects accomplish that far better than official languages.
If that is true for poets and poetry, it is even more so for peoples and civilisations.
Languages are not such because constitutions hallow them, but because peoples cling to
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