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Our Amish Language

thedial.world

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Re: Our Amish Language

#21

Post by saithound »

dagss wrote: post #8
jibal wrote: post #4

[flagged]

Do you feel current western capitalistic culture is perfect and the peak of what humanity can accomplish? There should be more, not less, experiments in alternative ways of life. I wish there was a lot more examples because we desperately need to change some things and some people need to be first. As a non-American I don't know much about amish and there could be atrocities I am unaware of, but from what little I kn…

Going from "current mainstream culture is not perfect" to "there should be more experiments in alternative ways of life" requires the assumption namely, that the average experiment is more likely to improve matters than to make them worse. When these experiments go awry, they hurt not only the participants of the experiment (who are themselves often children or others who have no other choice), but also everyone standing nearby.

I don't think the current nuclear doctrines are anywhere close to perfect or best possible. There is surely room for improvement. But I vehemently oppose more countries innovating on nuclear doctrine, because the average outcome of innovation is likely to be worse than the current equilibrium, for bystanders and innovators alike.

Medieval Europeans knew that the fallow-field system was imperfect, but many simultaneous experiments on alternatives would have led to famine, not viable alternatives. Careful experimentation in some monastery gardens is a good thing, but wagering everyone's supper on untested ideas isn't.

The same applies to our own civilization. Western capitalist culture has flaws aplenty. But this does not mean we should throw open the gates to every, or even any, alternative group that comes along.

Re: Our Amish Language

#22

Post by pantalaimon »

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 used my old fashioned bio neural net trained on standard German and also understood it that way. What else is it supposed to mean?

Re: Our Amish Language

#23

Post by michalpleban »

panative wrote: post #19
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’…

Thank you, that makes much more sense now.

Re: Our Amish Language

#24

Post by skissane »

I had not heard of the Libby (Montana) community before.

But from the description in the article, it is clear they are at the liberalising end of the Amish.

And one thing that almost certainly follows from their liberalisation, is their TFR (Total Fertility Rate) is going to gradually converge with mainstream society – not necessarily with the very low levels associated with the completely secular, but at least with the levels associated with mainstream conservative evangelicalism – modestly above the secular average, a lot lower than the Old Order Amish average.

By contrast, groups at the most conservative end of the Amish–e.g. the Swartzentruber–have a very high TFR, and it seems unlikely it is moderating to any significant degree; and also I'm sure their Pennsylvania Dutch is much healthier as a language.

Comparing Pennsylvania Dutch to Yiddish, I think the fact that Yiddish-speaking Hasidic communities (e.g. Kiryas Joel) use it as a written language, e.g. for their newspapers and community notices, and also a language of instruction in schools, puts Yiddish on a much more secure footing. I wonder why the Amish have never made much effort to write their distinctive language down? As far as I know, there isn't any theological objection, just a cultural habit they've stuck with. (They could keep standard German for their liturgy, just as the Hasidim use Hebrew not Yiddish for theirs.) I wonder if at some point, any of them will realise that investing in their distinctive language would be conducive to their long-term prospects of surviving the forces of assimilation.

Re: Our Amish Language

#25

Post by dagss »

saithound wrote: post #21
dagss wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel current western capitalistic culture is perfect and the peak of what humanity can accomplish? There should be more, not less, experiments in alternative ways of life. I wish there was a lot more examples because we desperately need to change some things and some people need to be first. As a non-American I don't know much about amish and there could be atrocities I am unaware of, but from what little I kn…

Going from "current mainstream culture is not perfect" to "there should be more experiments in alternative ways of life" requires the assumption namely, that the average experiment is more likely to improve matters than to make them worse. When these experiments go awry, they hurt not only the participants of the experiment (who are themselves often children or others who have no other choice), but also everyone stan…

Comparing changes in nuclear doctrines with people choosing a different way of life (granted, also for their children) than the majority seems totalitarian, to me.

Minorities are, well, in miniority. Noone is at any point waging "everyone's supper" by trying out alternative ways of farming within their small miniority. (Meanwhile the majority IS risking everyone's supper in some decades).

Nuclear is different from your other examples because the choices of a small minority can drastically affect the vast majority.

Re: Our Amish Language

#26

Post by inglor_cz »

abstractspoon wrote: post #12

The German critique of Pennsylvania Dutch reminded me of how the Nazis critiqued Yiddish back in the day for not being High German and thus its speakers must themselves be of lower class/value

Setting Nazis aside, Germans are used to having a single source of correct grammar and vocabulary.

The first Duden was published in 1880 and helped standardize German language a lot, even though local accents and dialects still persist. But speaking in dialect is considered somewhat low-brow in German language space, unless you are Swiss; even there, people will code-switch all the time.

(E.g. during class, both the professor and the students would speak High German, but during recess, they would switch to Swiss dialect.)

A rural language of peasants who do not use even old tech such as newspapers and radio and reside on a huge territory will necessarily diverge into a barely mutually intelligible family of local dialects, at least in the spoken form. Basically the Medieval or Early Modern standard situation.

Re: Our Amish Language

#27

Post by anthk »

That's reminds me on Sefardi/Jewish-Spanish dialect of Spanish. I've read some of it I can understand a 97% módulo some Jewish related words.

Re: Our Amish Language

#28

Post by anthk »

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".

Spanish has distinct words for love: querer and amar.

Re: Our Amish Language

#29

Post by trollbridge »

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".

This is flatly untrue; the language has a word for love, or people just use the High German or English term for it, along with colloquial expressions (like calling someone sweet).

A statement like this makes the author lose all credibility:

  Neither our language nor our culture invites dwelling in the complexities of grief and loss.
The language certainly can express grief and loss, and people from that culture seem to have no trouble at all in conversations I’ve had with them about such topics. When someone is ill, they conduct fundraisers (I participated in one once, which meant going door to door selling frozen pizzas and then talking to each person with tidbits about the situation), meals are arranged / delivered… if there’s a funeral it goes on for days, many people show up.

This is a common attitude I’ve seen, though, of people who leave the culture / language - a certain type of sneering contempt for how uneducated and culturally poor the group they left is: “Their language is so poor they can’t say the word love or express grief or loss.” It is interesting she claims to want to try to “preserve the language” whilst having a very poor understanding of it.

Re: Our Amish Language

#30

Post by trollbridge »

thomasfromcdnjs wrote: post #10

I've had a bit of fun working with low resource languages (aboriginal australian), and enjoying the result from Facebook's No Language Left Behind project -> https://huggingface.co/facebook/nllb-200-distilled-600M I'd recommend giving it a squiz. (I assume Amish has a large corpus)

“Amish” isn’t a language but Pennsylvania Dutch has plenty of written material, although most speakers of it prefer to write in English with the occasional person who prefers German.

I live adjacent to a few thousand speakers of it and I doubt there is a single person over the age of 8 who can’t speak English fluently.

Due to the lack of a standard orthography don’t expect LLMs to do anything remotely usable other than generate a few laughs.

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