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Our Amish Language

thedial.world

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Re: Our Amish Language

#31

Post by avyeed_desa »

panative wrote: post #20
simonask wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As one of the commentators above mentioned: This might be the literal translation, but the dialect and especially the people from the region this came from don't really use it this way. The "Pfälzische Wörterbuch" (Which also includes some Pennsylvanian Dutch words) has an entry for "lieben" [https://woerterbuchnetz.de/?sigle=PfWB&lemid=L01838], but also notes in the first sentence that it is not used generally.

The love concept for people from the Pfalz is expressed differently for this dialect specially. We would say "ich hann dich gern" or "ich hann dich lieb", but never "ich lieb dich". There is even an informal joke from my area, that we are incapable of expressing this feeling properly. Given that most Amish are from here, i can understand what she is referring to, but it seems misplaced for the article specially.

Re: Our Amish Language

#32

Post by kzrdude »

I didn't know that Amish thought so lowly of their own language, I think that's just sad. It's their own language and there's no reason to measure it against others.

Re: Our Amish Language

#33

Post by dnpls »

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".

Even Dothraki has a word for love!

Re: Our Amish Language

#35

Post by fuckyah »

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.

[dead]

Re: Our Amish Language

#37

Post by lproven »

panative wrote: post #16
carschno wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> the Ordnung

What does that mean?

(This entire thread is very hard for this Brit to follow. So many unknown words and whole concepts.)

Re: Our Amish Language

#38

Post by lproven »

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)

"squiz"?

Re: Our Amish Language

#39

Post by williamdclt »

lproven wrote: post #36

"TFR"?

According to gemini, "Total Fertility Rate" ("average number of children a woman would have over her lifetime if she experienced the current age-specific fertility rates of her society").

This HN thing of casually using acronyms without defining them is baffling to me

Re: Our Amish Language

#40

Post by swongel »

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’…

From the article;

> The contours of Pennsylvania Dutch words are harder and sharper than English ones. It’s hard to ask for a soft favor. Difficult to communicate affection, impossible to say the word love. We have no distinct word for it. One must use the standard German liebe, obtuse and antiquated in our mouths, or succumb to English, a concession. It is a tongue of commands and directives, probing questions about family relations, occupation in the most literal sense, and of following rules.

It might then have been more correct to specify that in the author's regional dialect this is the case but not in Deitsch generally.

To me as a native dutch speaker and a non-native Platt (Dutch Low German) and Frisian speaker it leaves me with a couple of questions:

If liiwe/liwe/liewe is used in at least some variants of Deitsch; does it's meaning (originally) als mean to convey interpersonal affection? Is liwwe/liwe/liewe still used in the infinitive or even as a noun? As you pointed out it is not common to express feelings so explicitly in the culture/language; so does liiwe/liwe/liewe still have the meaning of showing affection if there was no use for it or did it (re)gain the meaning of the word later on? If some dialects of Deitsch lose some of the gramatical forms of the word liwwe/liwe/liewe or completely stop using is, would it not make sense to use the SHG or English words in it's stead to signify a non-native meaning?

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