Category: wikipedia

  • Swiss weather in Swiss German

    Stopped by at the Swiss TV blog for the very first time, and do you know what:

    “es hudlet”, “es chuutet”, “es strääzt” oder “es chunnd ganz schöön cho schütte”

    Looks like I’ll need to learn more Swiss German dialect to find out what kind of weather’s being forecast for tomorrow.

    Just wondering if there’s another European country that has a similar language constellation. I mean, if we consider the German speaking part, there’s:

    • Standard High German – variant required to speak with Germans;
    • Swiss High German – often mistaken as being Mundart by German visitors. (Typical duh comment: Swiss German isn’t as difficult to understand as I thought it would be);
    • And then there’s the various regional dialects such as Basel-Deutsch, Bärn-Deutsch, Zuri-Deutsch. Basically every valley has its own language.

    Swiss German has a lot of French loan words. New discovery of the week: couronne as in couronne de Paris. Never heard of the expression before, but Wikipedia had this description.

    Agglo and quartier are regular expressions heard often in Basel.

    (I know, I know. A very boring blog entry. Nothing new. But I did say “I’m blogging this” at the time 😉 )

    A couple of interesting links:

    My only hope is that the Swiss German weather will be sunnier than in High German…

  • new at chiperoni.ch: learning italian

    3 years after my last italian classes in Lugano, i’ve enrolled for yet another italian language course for advanced learners. Today was the first lesson. And it looks like it’s going to be fast-moving and challenging. I’m introducing a new category at chiperoni.ch, learning Italian, in which I’ll post notes and useful links from time to time.

    The course is based on the following books:

    Grammar book: Corso Italia 2

    Reading book: Lo scialle andaluso by Elsa Morante

    If you have a copy of Corso Italia 2 or Lo scialle andaluso sitting in your shelf and gathering dust, please let me know.

  • Wikipedia on Malawi

    The Malawi entry in Wikipedia has grown considerably over the past year.

    For example, there’s an entry on Malawian music:
    Music of Malawi

    and Malawian English.

    If you’re from Malawi or doing research on a topic related to Malawi… check the pages to see if you can contribute any useful facts and references.

  • On Microfinancing

    zapped into this TV report on microfinancing:

    Mikro-Kredite

    Basically, microfinance provides loans and insurance to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans.

    An alternative and maybe more effective way to fight poverty…

    These two institutions were mentioned in the report:

    OikoCredit

    Procredit Holding

    [update] Another similar institution is:

    Opportunity International Bank of Malawi
    see also Mike’s blog entry