Despite a somewhat slow start (the only real negative thing I can say about the book), "Hotel Paradiso" is a rather unique reading experience. David, our main narrative voice, has come to Pigeon Cay to get away from the rotten relationship and rat race that Montreal represents. In Pigeon Cay, he is running the only bank on the island in a world where drug running, back-room dealings, and white-collar crime walk hand in hand with racism, beatings, murders and voodoo.

The book, however, reads nearly lyrically. The passages where David describes the slow pace of the world around him are nearly meditative, and when the action begins, it garners your attention all the more for the sharp change of pacing. The myriad plots and deals and secrets of Pigeon Cay are a marvel to unravel, and definately a worthwhile reading endeavour.

Despite the slow beginning, I'd definately reccommend this one. And, as always, it's a pleasure to read strong writing from a Canadian author.

'Nathan

This is an introduction to the least known of the official Romance languages, spoken by about 50,000 people in one canton of Switzerland (about 0.8% of the population of the country); more precisely, an introduction to the largest of its five dialects, with about 20,000 speakers.

I recall that in elementary school in New York, we were told that some valleys of Switzerland still spoke "a kind of Latin". Such vague statements are still made: the New Book of Knowledge (Grolier, 1985, p.S495) says that Romontsch is "a very old language which may come from Latin".

It is, of course, "a kind of Latin", or better, "comes from Latin", in the same way Spanish, French, Rumanian, etc. all do. As one usually finds when one looks at an unfamiliar member of a language family, it has features of the parent language that the other members have lost, which can lead one to see it as a "living fossil"; but it has also lost features that others have kept, which should cure one of that idea. So Romontsch, alone among the Romance languages, has kept the Latin nominative singular ending -s in a grammatical function (to mark masculine predicate adjectives: While "the strong man", is "igl um ferm", "the man is strong" is "igl um ei ferms"); it usually preserves Latin "au" ("the weather" is "l'aura"), and it keeps some Latin words lost elsewhere ("the book" is "il cudisch", from "codex"). On the other hand, Latin long "u", which French has umlauted, Romontsch umlauted and then unrounded to i, so the words for "one" and "thou" are "in/ina" and "ti"; it has lost the distinction between the four verb conjugations in most present-tense forms, so that "dumandar, temer, vender, udir" ("to ask, fear, sell, hear") have present indicative forms "el damonda, el tema, el venda, el auda" (and subjunctive forms with the final -a replaced by -i). It has a first person singular ending -el of disputed origin, e.g., "I ask, ... , I hear" are "jeu damondel, ... , jeu audel"; and negation follows the verb: "I don't sell" is "jeu vendel buca". An endearing trait is the dropping of initial unstressed syllables in many common words, so that "nus vulein" ("we want") can be shortened to "nus lein", "jeu havevel" ("I had") to "jeu vevel", etc.. These are a few of the language's many interesting features.

The book contains 83 pages on the history and folklore of the Romontsch-speaking people, 115 on grammar, and a 171-page anthology of literature, with translations.

The author's style is more lively than in most books of the sort. Under history, he observes that "if only" certain things had gone differently, the language might now be spoken in a much larger area. Under folklore, describing similarities with the folklore of northern Italy, he says "The hen is still there ... with full supporting cast of snake, ladybird, cuckoo and black cat". In sketching the grammar he tells the student familiar with other Romance languages that "it will be a shock to see the infix -esch ... occurring not only in verbs of the original 4th conjugation ... but also in the 1st conjugation".

The book (at least the version I have out of the library) is a photocopy of typewritten notes. The reproduction is very readable, and there are very few typos. However, there are some notable errors. For instance, the diphthongs "ai" and "ei" are described as "like the i in fire" and "like ey in eye", which hardly shows what the difference between them is. The author says there is no special pronoun for politeness, although the last item in the anthology is a letter, apparently to him, where he is addressed as "Vus", not "ti". And the conjugations shown for "dar" and "star" are missing the ending "-t" in the third person singular, unique to those two verbs.

The author notes that the spelling "sch", borrowed from German, is used not only for the "sh" sound, but also for its voiced counterpart (as in English "vision"). It is a pity he does not mention that one can generally tell which way "sch" is pronounced if one knows the French cognate. Thus, corresponding to French "nous laissons" with unvoiced -ss-, Romontsch has "nus laschein" and a shortened form "nus schein", both with unvoiced "sch", while to French "nous disons" ("we say") with voiced -s- corresponds "nus schein", spelled like the preceding but pronounced with a voiced "sch". (A full form "*nus dischein" has presumably disappeared.)

Though the author's decision to write a grammar of just one of the five dialects of Romontsch rather than attempting to cover them all together is surely a good one, he might have given us a page or so on differences among the dialects, especially between Sursilvan and the other main group, the two Engadine dialects; for instance that Engadine has ü (e.g., ün/üna, tü) where Sursilvan and the other dialects have unrounded this to i, and that only Sursilvan has the first person singular ending -el. Brief samples of the five dialects, and of the official compromise language, Romontsch Grischun, can be found on the website of the Lia Rumantscha.

But these are isolated faults.

Gregor's book is not a textbook -- it has no exercises or vocabulary lists. Nevertheless, it is a well-organized cornucopia of information about the language; I would enjoy owning a copy.

Some other sources of information about Romontsch: Sep Modest Nay's "Bien di, bien onn! Lehrbuch der Rätoromanischen Sprache" (Buchdruckerei Condrau & Co., Disentis) is a textbook aimed at Swiss German schoolchildren. John Haiman and Paula Benincà's "The Rhaetoromance Languages" is a linguistic treatise on the relationship among 15 dialects -- the five of Romontsch and ten in northern Italy -- which have traditionally been considered to form a group, though the authors' thesis is that they do not; it contains much interesting information. Once you can read some Romontsch, I recommend the magazine "Punts" ("Bridges") which can be found online.