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Our Amish Language

thedial.world

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Re: Our Amish Language

#11

Post by carschno »

schoen wrote: post #2

I asked an LLM to help me find the standard German equivalent for "hooche Leit", and it said "hohe Leute" 'high people' (here in the sense of 'fancy people'), which of course doesn't have the same connotation, but that's the etymological sense.

Apologies for being nit-picky, but there is no etymological sense. The output of your LLM has the same etymological root, but a different meaning. In terms of translation, it is therefore plain wrong.

Honestly, I was triggered to correct this comment mostly because it illustrates how we tend to explain away mistakes made by an LLM. It's not about subtle 'connotation', but the meaning is just incorrect. No offense meant to the poster, this is a trap the world has been falling into at scale for the past few years.

Re: Our Amish Language

#13

Post by pqtyw »

jibal wrote: post #4

[flagged]

Unfortunately we don't really have any premodern (i.e. operating under the same constraints) atheistic societies to compare against.

Maybe its just human nature to try and rationalize the world around them? (using whatever framework they have a available)

Re: Our Amish Language

#16

Post by panative »

carschno wrote: post #11
schoen wrote: post #2

I asked an LLM to help me find the standard German equivalent for "hooche Leit", and it said "hohe Leute" 'high people' (here in the sense of 'fancy people'), which of course doesn't have the same connotation, but that's the etymological sense.

Apologies for being nit-picky, but there is no etymological sense. The output of your LLM has the same etymological root, but a different meaning. In terms of translation, it is therefore plain wrong. Honestly, I was triggered to correct this comment mostly because it illustrates how we tend to explain away mistakes made by an LLM. It's not about subtle 'connotation', but the meaning is just incorrect. No offense mea…

I don’t know what you are nitpicking and we don’t have the prompt or output, but from first-hand knowledge that was basically correct.

“hooche Leit” is PA dialect for standard German “hohe Leute,” literally “high people” in the sense of “fancy” people as opposed to plain people, as there used to be “plain Dutch” and “fancy Dutch” to refer to plain (Anabaptist) Pennsylvania Germans as opposed to other (now basically assimilated) German people in Pennsylvania. Commonly what her community and many other Deitsch-speaking communities call “hooche Leit” in Deitsch, they will often simply call “English” in English. From her description that’s probably fallen mostly out of use in her Libby community given their religious abandonment of the Ordnung.

Re: Our Amish Language

#18

Post by simonask »

michalpleban wrote: post #15

> Difficult to communicate affection, impossible to say the word love. We have no distinct word for it. I wonder what it says about a community that its language has no word for "love".

It certainly doesn't say that there is any less love among members of that community.

It would be more correct to say that there is no direct translation for the English word "love". Lots of languages fall in that category. Languages are complicated.

Re: Our Amish Language

#19

Post by panative »

michalpleban wrote: post #15

> Difficult to communicate affection, impossible to say the word love. We have no distinct word for it. I wonder what it says about a community that its language has no word for "love".

That stuck out to me because it’s absolutely untrue. Deitsch/Pennsylvania Dutch has “liiwe/liwe/liewe” (there is no standard written orthography for the language) which is precisely “lieben” in standard German. The author absolutely knows this despite her implicit claim that it’s a loanword rather than part of the vocabulary (which it absolutely is, even if her community is sparing in how they use it in Deitsch).

It’s certainly true that Amish much less the small and peculiar Libby community (which isn’t representative of wider Amish culture although part of it) have different ways of expressing feelings just as Germans are different from Americans and have very different ways of relating.

Bear in mind that she went from a remote group of emergent Amish to UC Berkeley, she is a fairly young writer and obviously still processing her background.

Re: Our Amish Language

#20

Post by panative »

simonask wrote: post #18
michalpleban wrote: post #15

> Difficult to communicate affection, impossible to say the word love. We have no distinct word for it. I wonder what it says about a community that its language has no word for "love".

It certainly doesn't say that there is any less love among members of that community. It would be more correct to say that there is no direct translation for the English word "love". Lots of languages fall in that category. Languages are complicated.

It’s not correct though, because “liiwe/liewe” is a direct translation for it.
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