Friday, August 20 The day began with a major conference "minority culture and place names, with Hannibal, which introduced the Salsa 'topic and moderate the activities of many representatives of minority cultures that have accepted the invitation of the rocks and the sky.
The theme of the conference was without doubt one of the main political hot summer thirty, after allegations of heavy Minister Raffaele Lease who had ordered the removal of road signs in one German in South Tyrol, requiring a translation into Italian. The opening speech of Hannibal Salsa was therefore enlightening and extremely valuable for understanding what should be the correct approach to the problem of local place names.
First, the former chairman of CAI and the Alpine Convention has in fact a clear separation between the point of interest (for which you need to make the position to be tracked as many people as possible, translating signs not only in Italian, but also in English if necessary) and place of local interest (such as the name of the top of a mountain known only in the area, rather than the name of a hut, etc..) of which almost always there is a translation into other languages \u200b\u200bor if there is a pure craftsman often made during the Fascist era.
Later he led as an example of perfect harmony between different cultures experience the secular state of Switzerland. In Switzerland, in fact, there is no language and therefore a toponymy "official", but there are only names "experiences" that is written in the language spoken by the sedentary population in the region. In fact there is an official language alongside some minority languages, but all the languages \u200b\u200brecognized by the Swiss Confederation have equal right to citizenship and become the official language in the area they are actually spoken. The names are not translated accordingly unless you have an extra-national and national significance that necessitates the identification (the points of interest, in fact or recommendations to public places like town halls). Just coming out of a logic of the majority culture and minority languages \u200b\u200band starting to think of as something tied to the land and the people that speaks and lives you can get out of the power-play culture that sees the "dominant" to try to cancel as much as possible all traces of different local identities.
After this necessary and valuable introduction, began operations representatives of several minority cultures, which submitted their direct experience of management of local place names and have shown how place names can be valuable clues to the history of a linguistic area. Starting from the etymological root of a place-name was unable to locate the root in a given language can indeed reconstruct such populations have inhabited a particular place and which have left traces of itself. The name is something related to the place and language of origin, and its translation, if not already present, it is always forcing an unnecessary and harmful.
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