Dateline France, 5 March 1990 Report 13 Easy Question: What are the three official languages of Switzerland? Answer: German, French and Italian. Hard Question: What is the fourth official language of Switzerland? Hint: It's not English. In January I took a trip to Zurich, at the invitation of Klaus Dittrich and Hans Schek. Both are fairly recently arrived in Switzerland (within the past year) from Germany. Klaus is at the University of Zurich (canton- sponsored) and Hans is at ETH (state-sponsored technical university, the one with N. Wirth). Both brought some people with them. Schek's group includes Marc Scholl, Gerhard Weikum and Arnie Rosenthal, who is visiting from Xerox AIS this year. The excuse for my visit was to give the inaugural lecture for the "Zuercher Forschungskolloquium Datenbanksysteme," a joint lecture series organized by UZ and ETH. They got a good turnout--the hall held 150 and it was over 3/4 full. I spent some time at both schools talking to faculty and students, and also to some people from a research group recently started by one of the Swiss banks. The schools seemed well funded to me. ETH's department is in a new building, and Klaus showed me the construction site of their new building. I got some tutoring on both campuses on organization of the German and Swiss university systems (similar, but with some important difference in hiring procedure). An interesting question is whether anything will happen to make university governance more uniform after 1992, when it should be possible for a professor to apply for a position at any ECC university. One thing that is easy in Switzerland is changing money. I think that any 12-year-old on a street corner probably could handle the major European currencies. The exchange bureaus actually take foreign coins (when have you ever seen that in the US), and there are exchange machines in the airport that take French, Italian and German bills. Getting from the airport to UZ was easy as well--the train and trolley service is frequent and punctual. I did notice a few differences between Swiss German and German German (although my major problem was mixing in words of French when I was trying to talk German). English was understood almost everywhere, many of the ticket agents and shopkeepers being at least trilingual (German, French, English). I don't see how the US is going to compete well on foreign markets if the majority of us stay monolingual. Admittedly, in Europe, the choice of a second language is often clearer than in the US (except maybe the Southwestern US), and it is easier to get practice with native speakers. I had several wonderful meals in Zurich (and no bad ones). One custom I had not seen before was getting served your meal twice. If you order a "dish" rather than a "plate," they bring out the frying pan or sauce pan to show you what you are getting, then take it back and transfer it to a plate. Just when you think you've finished, the waiter takes your plate away and brings you a second plate filled with the other half of what they didn't serve you the first time. This took me by surprise at my first meal, with the effect that I was very full after lunch the first day. In order to keep the second half hot while the dish is on a side table, the waiter puts it on a special solid-metal trivet, which has been heated up in a special trivet- warming rack that holds 12-15 of them. Specialities of Zurich include a dish with pieces of veal in a cream sauce, and a very rich kind of hash brown potato, both of which I tried. One of the finishing PhD students at UZ, Duri Schmidt, took me out with some other students one night to a trendy restaurant frequented by young professionals, and after that to a neighborhood tavern. The food was great at the restaurant, but the beer was better at the tavern. Duri also showed me around parts of Zurich during a few hours I had the last afternoon before my train left. Many old buildings in very good shape, thanks to Swiss neutrality in recent times. Some things I noticed walking around town. In every main square there is a fountain with drinking water, although you need a cup to catch the water easily. I saw several buildings (one of them a bank) where it seemed someone had lobbed a rock through each street-level window. No one I was with seemed to know who or why. There was no snow to speak of in the mountains, a source of much consternation to the resort operators. (The snow did not show up until several weeks later, when 10 feet fell in some areas within a couple days. Then people couldn't get to the resorts because of avalanches. More recently it has warmed a little. Now people can't get to the resorts because of rock- and mudslides.) I thought that the harpist I had seen in the Paris metro was one of a kind, but there was a harpist in the Zurich main train station, too. He had a full-size harp that had been fitted with legs so he could play standing up. I noticed a row of trees along one street with 6-foot cyclone fences around each. I thought that there must be rather tall dogs in the neighborhood, until someone explained that the trees were part of a study of urban pollution, and needed to be kept unmolested. Short takes: -Knitting is prohibitted on Zurich trolleys. -The scheduled time for my plane to leave Zurich was 7:30. The posted "actual time" was 7:25. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Answer: The fourth language is Romansh, spoken in some of the valleys of the Italian cantons (also in parts of Italy and Austria). It is also called Ladin, and is similar to the colloquial Latin spoken by Roman soldiers, with Rhaetian idioms thrown in. (It took me about twenty minutes with a dictionary to find all this out.) Bonus question: Why is CH the abbreviation for Switzerland?