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Our Amish Language

thedial.world

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Re: Our Amish Language

#81

Post by tptacek »

eythana wrote: post #69
cactacea wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (I assume Amish has a large corpus) Pennsylvania Dutch does not, it is primarily oral and the Amish generally don't allow themselves to be photographed or recorded.

Hi, I'm Eythana, author of the article. A corpus is currently being built! Lots of Amish are actually okay with audio recordings, and there are tons of formerly Amish who contribute too. Rose Fisher at Michigan State is creating it. We're both interested and slowly working on familiarizing speakers with the orthographies that do actually exist (BBB is our preferred one). They've just been floating around in niche and…

Neat! Thanks for taking the time to add to this thread!

Re: Our Amish Language

#82

Post by dredmorbius »

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #62
williamdclt wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"HN"?

Happy Now? ;-)

Re: Our Amish Language

#83

Post by zkmon »

> But it became harder and harder for some members to keep refusing modern conveniences

I read about Amish people and I have very high respect for their traditions. Sometime I believe that's exactly how the society should be guided. It's not about getting harder and harder to keep refusing the modern practices. It is about slowing the adoption of such practices to ensure that the community still stays above the individual. I hope they can slow it down as much as possible.

"Individualism is frowned upon" - that's a great way to keep the community stronger. I experienced this in my community from South India. People are hardly known by their own names. Everyone was called by their family name only or something like "grandson of XYZ".

"Too much education causes separation" - another true observation, affects Indian families a lot. Each generation is alienated from its previous generation, only because of education, jobs and foreign living.

Re: Our Amish Language

#84

Post by avyeed_desa »

eythana wrote: post #72
panative wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’…

I’m Eythana, the author. That German loanword isn’t used at all, I could say virtually to be safe, but it’s really not used anywhere among the Amish. No one in my community ever did, and the same goes for communities in Ohio where I have many relatives. But besides my anecdotes, Rose Fisher, a linguist at Michigan State who works on the language, has validated this claim, and so has Mark Louden, the foremost PD histo…

Don't you use the word in expressions like "ihr liewe Leit" (we usually use it as an expression of astonishment, seldomly to address a group of people) or "es lieb Mädsche" (the /nice/lovley girl)?

Re: Our Amish Language

#85

Post by avyeed_desa »

eythana wrote: post #74
avyeed_desa wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can understand them! Especially if you are ready and used being hit with interjected English words. It is hard to get used to it the first few minutes (i speak two other languages, language switching is always hard for me), but once you know what to look out for we could be talking interchangeably. My teacher in high school went there over 40 years ago, and he said, he never had any trouble. Listening on youtube t…

Hi, I’m the author. I’ve never met someone from the region so I haven’t been able to test this but I’d love to at some point. Thanks for sharing.

If you ever plan to visit this region for research, try to get to Kaiserslautern, less than an hour southwest of Frankfurt.

I don't know where exactly (which village) your ancestors started from here, but this will be the town where you will have no trouble getting started as everyone here is able to speak English and a lot of US citizens living here (due to the Ramstein AFB 5 minutes away).

And if you want to practice standard german, this will be the perfect middle ground to get to know dialect speakers who also are able to communicate in standard high german and are comfortable with english.

Re: Our Amish Language

#86

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

quickthrowman wrote: post #76
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #49

> Louden points out, for example, that Swedish and Norwegian are highly mutually intelligible, but neither is considered a dialect of the other, or of a parent language, primarily because each is associated with a separate nation-state. This reminds me of the famous saying, "A language is a dialect with an army and navy." It was also originally uttered in a German-adjacent language, Yiddish: " a shprakh iz a dyalekt…

Wow, aside from ‘shprakh’ that is easily understood as an English speaker. ‘Is a dialect with (an) army and flotilla/navy’

This is when you realize that English is a Germanic language.

"Shprakh" is from the same root as "speak," so the literal, word-for-word translation is, "A speak is a dialect with an army and flotilla."

Re: Our Amish Language

#87

Post by vintermann »

zkmon wrote: post #83

> But it became harder and harder for some members to keep refusing modern conveniences I read about Amish people and I have very high respect for their traditions. Sometime I believe that's exactly how the society should be guided. It's not about getting harder and harder to keep refusing the modern practices. It is about slowing the adoption of such practices to ensure that the community still stays above the indiv…

One of my perennial essay ideas, something I've tried to express well (and mostly failed) for decades, is this... Here goes again, I guess.

Immigrants coming to a new culture face hard choices about which customs to keep, and which to let go. If the culture is different enough, they often straight up refuse, and try to hold on to everything they can. This doesn't work. If they try this, from what I've seen their children will probably adopt the worst aspects of both the old culture and the new. What is needed is a conscious choice, about what's important and why, and even more crucially, what's not important.

I tell the story with immigrants because it's easier for people to see it in others. But really, all of us face the same choice, because culture is always changing. We all have to decide what really matters in our culture, what's worth passing on - and what to let go. If we never go against the stream, we end up at the same common low point. But if we always try to go against the stream, we fail.

I think Amish have mostly succeeded in keeping their culture because consciousness about the "why" of their rules is usually (not always!) at front. And they don't reject everything modern, and they're not static in response to a changing world (as this article is a good example of).

Re: Our Amish Language

#88

Post by sReinwald »

avyeed_desa wrote: post #51
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #49

> Louden points out, for example, that Swedish and Norwegian are highly mutually intelligible, but neither is considered a dialect of the other, or of a parent language, primarily because each is associated with a separate nation-state. This reminds me of the famous saying, "A language is a dialect with an army and navy." It was also originally uttered in a German-adjacent language, Yiddish: " a shprakh iz a dyalekt…

We can understand them! Especially if you are ready and used being hit with interjected English words. It is hard to get used to it the first few minutes (i speak two other languages, language switching is always hard for me), but once you know what to look out for we could be talking interchangeably. My teacher in high school went there over 40 years ago, and he said, he never had any trouble. Listening on youtube t…

I'm from a region bordering the palatinate region and I'll absolutely back you up on being able to understand them pretty well. There's an amish guy who sometimes pops up on my TikTok feed, and it's always fascinating to me how the language, while it has obviously drifted away over hundreds of years, is still fairly intelligible for me. The comparison to older people from your local village is pretty apt.

> Funny sidenote: The highest rate of foreign migrants into the palatinate region --- where the amish came from --- is now from US citizens

For anyone wondering whether this reflects some strange Amish return migration: almost certainly not. It’s overwhelmingly the result of the enormous US military presence around Ramstein, Landstuhl, and Kaiserslautern. It's also not exactly a recent development.

Re: Our Amish Language

#89

Post by holgerschurig »

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

The thing is: today (!) there is no such thing as a "german critique on Pennsylvania Dutch". Most germans aren't even aware that such a thing exists.

Also, this one citation is just anecdotal. You cannot conclude of any mainstream thinking about Pennsylvania Dutch. In the end, journalists often use items in their stories that create the highest emotions, not necessarily what reflects reality the most. So the writer of that citation might not have outright lied, but he might not reported about the general mindset about this.

Keep in mind that in 1780 germany itself was a mishmash, hundreds of counties, fiefdoms, kingdoms, self-governed city and what not. And even the language was much more a mishmash than today. Sure, Luther's work already started a bit a common way of writing. But we still didn't have some "high german" definition, e.g. no Duden. The Grimm Brothers, not only collectors of oral stories, were just 5 and 6 years old!

I guess during that time someone from Emden (very north-west) looked down at someone from Passau (very south-east) --- and the other way. Each one claiming that the other is uttering an unintelligible gibberish.

Oh, and EVEN today people from the center of Germany thing that speaking a strong german dialect (e.g. Bavarian, Swabian, Saxonian) correlates generally with low education / lower class. Because in THEIR region it is actually so. However, in Swabian it doesn't correlate. There was even the pun that in order to climb the carrier ranks at Mercedes or Porsche, one had to speak Swabian ...

Re: Our Amish Language

#90

Post by avyeed_desa »

vintermann wrote: post #87
zkmon wrote: post #83

> But it became harder and harder for some members to keep refusing modern conveniences I read about Amish people and I have very high respect for their traditions. Sometime I believe that's exactly how the society should be guided. It's not about getting harder and harder to keep refusing the modern practices. It is about slowing the adoption of such practices to ensure that the community still stays above the indiv…

One of my perennial essay ideas, something I've tried to express well (and mostly failed) for decades, is this... Here goes again, I guess. Immigrants coming to a new culture face hard choices about which customs to keep, and which to let go. If the culture is different enough, they often straight up refuse, and try to hold on to everything they can. This doesn't work. If they try this, from what I've seen their chil…

The idea of keeping their culture, especially focusing on Amish, is not as rigid as many think. Many forget that the Amish, as a split off group from the Mennonites already had an immigration phase before going to the US. They came from Switzerland and north-eastern France and were forced to settle into southern Germany because of repressions.

Oddly enough they chose to assimilate with the local populace or at least transplant the ideals of anabaptism, thus adopting the local rhine-frankish dialect, instead of keeping the romansh or french dialects. They specifically chose to not repeat that when coming to America, for whatever other reasons they had.

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