Switzerland Today
Greetings from Zurich!
Lightning doesn’t strike twice in Switzerland – it strikes 95,000 times overnight. This sets a bizarre mini-record because this is the number of lightning bolts that would normally hit Swiss soil during the whole month of July.
If you don’t find that electrifying enough, then read on to find out why traditional words in Swiss-German dialect are going extinct and how to train robot dogs for the Moon.
In the news: wartime exports, a solar project derailed and flight delays.
Swiss women are far more independent than men. A third of women have flown their parents’ nest by the time they are 20 compared to 23% of men.
As the war in Ukraine rumbles on, the federal audit office concludes that export controls on ‘dual use’ equipment, which could be used for military purposes, are perfectly adequate to stop them getting into Russian hands and to defend Swiss neutrality.
A month after voters endorsed Switzerland’s new climate goals, an ambitious plan to carpet railway tracks with solar panels has been rebuffed by the transport ministry.
Swiss International Air Lines has gone on a hiring spree in an effort to improve punctuality of flights.
Farewell Anke, hello Butter
You can kiss goodbye to the quaint Swiss-German word Trüütli when you next pucker up. Once commonly sighed in Appenzell, hardly anyone uses this old-fashioned word anymore. The same could be said for a host of traditional dialect words, reportsExternal link the Tages Anzeiger.
“Butter” is now more commonly heard at the breakfast table than “Anke”, according to researchers at the University of Bern who have studied the changing face of Swiss-German dialect.
Like all languages and dialects, Swiss-German changes over time. This has been given a helping hand by brand marketing, the increasing dominance of cities over rural areas and enhanced transport links that make it harder for small villages to use the buttress of isolation to stave off linguistic dilution.
Virtually every dialect speaker will call a butterfly a “Schmätterling” rather than “Summervogel” or “Pfifolter” by 2060. “Löwenzahn” (Dandelion) will cease to be referred to as “Söiblueme” or “Schiimeie”.
But there is better news for traditionalists. The researchers say it is unlikely that Swiss-German dialect will be pushed out by the invasive linguistic species called English. It’s more a case of Swiss-German losing some of its regional variety and becoming more homogeneous.
Cantons Graubünden and Valais are holding out against this phenomenon. A degree of isolation from the rest of German-speaking Switzerland has played a role in the dialect of these areas retaining a unique brand. And it also appears that the good folk of these parts take great pride and pleasure in speaking their own distinctive types of dialect.
Four-legged lunar teams
It takes teamwork to win a World Cup or to run a company – and also to robotically mine minerals on the Moon.
Robots have long been employed as lunar workers and the four-legged variety are also nothing new (legs often cope better than wheels with rough terrain). But teams of four-legged robots are a less common sight on the surface of the Moon.
The federal technology institute ETH ZurichExternal link wants to change all that by training several robots to coordinate their actions to achieve tasks such as exploration and mineral extraction.
The principle is that teams can perform tasks better than solo robots. In addition, if one robot breaks down the others can be programmed to compensate for the loss.
The research, which also saw contributions from the universities of Bern, Basel and Zurich, recently won the European Space Resources Challenge in Luxembourg.
The Swiss team has now set its sights on producing flying robots for future Moon exploration.
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
