Rebuilding the Rhaeto-Cisalpine written language: Guidelines and criteria. Part I: ORS-Orthography

This paper is the first one of a series aimed at reconstructing a unitary Rhaeto-Cisalpine written language, including ISO 639-3 Piedmontese, Ligurian, Lombard, Emilian-Romagnol, Venetan, Ladin, Romansh and Friulian. We shall assume that, on the one hand, written language is (relatively) independent from its spoken counterpart; on the other hand, we will fully treat the Rhaeto-Cisalpine (or Padanese) system as a unitary one, belonging to the western branch of Romance languages. After showing that none of the current orthographies now in place can be extended to cope with the whole language, we propose to retrieve a medieval-like orthography (close to that of Subalpine sermons), in the same spirit of Alibert's for Occitan, Stich's for Francoprovençal and Hull's unified Padanian orthography. We yield a few examples of transcriptions of excerpts from literary texts.

Keywords: Rhaeto-Cisalpine, Padanese, written language, speech, orthography, western-Romance languages, ISO 639-3, Piedmontese, Ligurian, Lombard, Emilian-Romagnol, Venetan, Istriot, Ladin, Romansh, Friulian.