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.
I really enjoyed this article. I grew up with a small amount of a similarly uncommon (outside of religious groups) Germanic language, one that I’ve learned more of as an adult, and many of the experiences (around struggling to get people to speak it, even when they know it) ring true.
> I grew up using this term, but upon encountering Louden’s work, I learned that “dialect” often functions more as an insult than a linguistically useful designation.
“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.
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/or academic crevices and most people don't know about them. Rose has great info on her site here https://penndutchdialects.org/pennsylvania-dutch-isnt-a-writ...
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.
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.
Hi! I'm Eythana, the author. We do also use "English" very often to describe non-Amish people. They're used interchangeably. I wanted to include it but my editors preferred to stick with one term to keep things simpler.
The etymological sense of the Pennsylvania Dutch phrase is in fact, as far as I can tell, 'high people' or 'fancy people'. This is not the literal meaning or connotation of the phrase in Pennsylvania Dutch today. I did not think (and the LLM did not claim) that the phrase is used in Pennsylvania Dutch with this meaning, or that it was borrowed from standard German at any time. Essentially, the LLM helped me find recognizable cognates to understand how the phrase originated.
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.
I'm the author of the article :) while you're right that Libby is uniquely positioned, I see this attitude often in places like Geauga County, Ohio, for example, where I have many relatives. Just 2 weeks ago an Amish girl there, who's traditional, surrounded by other Amish, tole me she hardly speaks it at all anymore, even with her family at home! That area also doesn't represent the majority, but in areas besides Libby, it's increasingly common to use it more, among young people / with friends especially, but obviously it extends even further for her. She didn't really have an explanation but said she just doesn't even think about it and essentially prefers English. There isn't always overt negativity, but dismissal or apathy are very common.
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.
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 historian, who I quote extensively. They both reviewed the piece. I could believe that a century or two ago, it was in usage, perhaps, but it isn’t anymore. To say we have no “distinct” word isn’t an exaggeration. We have to borrow directly from German or English as no one uses the loanword version. I’m open to seeing evidence to the contrary. I should say it’s possible that non-sectarian (non-Amish or otherwise historically religious) speakers of PD, of which there aren’t many anymore, may use that? If so, I could have clarified with a caveat, but since the Amish are the primary speakers of PD today, and where my experience comes, it wasn’t something I broached. And also, there was an editorial decision about not discussing non-sectarians in general for the same reasons.
> 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?
I know only palatinate concept of "lieben" (that i would pronounce it "liewe") and the only distinction i can think off is the same problem chinese learners have with 爱 and 喜欢[https://mandarinbean.com/ai-xihuan/].
It is hard to describe, but I share the same feelings of the author when it comes to expressing love, affection or sadness. It's strange and hard to describe, even though we also use the SHG "lieben", but it still doesn't feel right if we are trying to speak in "Pfälzisch" about it.
Not only that, but it's odd, and it looks like they took and maintained the same sentiments we had 150 years ago and still use and share today.
Oh, that's interesting. The same thing happens in Spanish, where "amar" is used exclusively for romantic relationships, while "querer" is used for everything else (e.g. the love between family members, between an owner and his pet, etc.), and "encantar" is used for intense liking of things and activities ("me encantan los mariscos" -> "I love shellfish").
I wonder if there's an equivalent for 喜欢 in Japanese.
The general sense of “liking” something is usually 好き (suki) in Japanese, AFAIK. Depending on the context (romantic, etc.), “love” could be 愛, 恋愛, 大好き, and probably others.
I've often read on church in Flander "onze lieve vrouw", but I had read that there is no word in Dutch for love. Instead, one would say "ik hou van jouw" which I translate as "I'm attached to you". Could it be in Pennsylvania Dutch a similar situation, due to some lineage between the languages?
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.
I’m Eythana, the article’s author. I’ve made no claims about this group being uneducated or unable to express themselves in general. There are certain limitations in the scope of the language’s vocabulary, which you would know if you spoke it. No one who’s familiar will deny this. This doesn’t mean they are unable to talk about certain topics, but when using Pennsylvania Dutch, it is simply the case that one must use more English words, choose from a much smaller pool of descriptors, or perhaps skim over it or avoid the subject altogether. All of these happen frequently.
I have no contempt for the culture or language as you stated, but I do find it unfortunate when I see vocabulary being disregarded as speakers continued to use more English in the midst of Pennsylvania Dutch, which I described. This is a very well documented phenomenon and my bringing it up is completely neutral. If anything, I champion the use of PD as much as possible while many Amish people I know and encounter are less interested in that.
If you have any actual evidence to contradict my these points besides your impression from a few conversations (assumably in English), I’d be happy to see it.
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.
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.
> 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 mit an armey un flot."
I wonder whether locals in the German Palatinate region can still understand Pennsylvania Dutch, given that it supposedly originates from their dialect.
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 to some samples i still can, and it sounds just like older people from my village, which younger people often can't understand, especially as these older people tend to mumble and speak faster a lot. Pennsylvanian Dutch sound just like this.
Keep in mind though: The region Amish people came from, the Palatinate, was historically a highly fractured region with lots of mini-kingdoms and small administrative clusters. While mostly Protestant, there are villages solely catholic, which were often trying to not mingle with the next villagers. (even it there was a mix of Catholics, Protestant and Jews)
This is mirrored in highly fractured words that are often different from village to village, even if they are just 5 kilometers away. (e.g. the word for soap or apple is pronounced totally different in the next village). This lead to some secludedness and distance which is mirrored in the article and why i think Amish were trying to maintain their distance from the local english population (if you discount the religious component of that population)
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
It's baffling to you that people are comfortable in their niche and use their own jargon? Are you a baby that needs to be spoonfed every little bit of information?
>This HN thing of casually using acronyms without defining them is baffling to me
You have a whole internet at your fingertips with which to look up terms you don't understand without diluting the thread, but if you need at all to do that you should consider that you might not have anything relevant to add to the conversation to begin with. Hacker News is supposed to be a forum of educated professionals and domain experts, we shouldn't have to dumb things down here.
One must be really deep in some fertility obsessed subculture to think that TFR acronym should be instantly recognized when placed in tech forum discussion about minority language.
Otherwise said, using full expression is not "diluting the thread".
Asking pointless questions that can be answered with a simple Google search and complaining about other people's use of language do dilute the thread.
It's explicitly in the guidelines that we don't complain about voting because it "makes for boring reading." Complaining about acronyms has the same effect.
Having to google obscure acronyms and having to guess which interpretation author meant makes for super boring reading.
It is way better when you see a question and answer just below. And bonus point, question and answer teaches others to not use all acronyms they learned in all the random subcultures.
>Having to google obscure acronyms and having to guess which interpretation author meant makes for super boring reading.
It doesn't, because we don't have to read that.
Also the interpretation can be gleaned from context, as @williamdclt did above. It's unlikely that, reading the thread, the "TFR" being discussed is "temporary flight restriction."
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.
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.
I really enjoyed this article. I grew up with a small amount of a similarly uncommon (outside of religious groups) Germanic language, one that I’ve learned more of as an adult, and many of the experiences (around struggling to get people to speak it, even when they know it) ring true.
> I grew up using this term, but upon encountering Louden’s work, I learned that “dialect” often functions more as an insult than a linguistically useful designation.
A shprakh iz a dyalekt mit armey un flot!
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.
> (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/or academic crevices and most people don't know about them. Rose has great info on her site here https://penndutchdialects.org/pennsylvania-dutch-isnt-a-writ...
"squiz"?
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.
That would be "Höhergestellte" nowadays.
"höhergestellte" are "superiors". "hohe leute" is more like "upper class people"
Traditionally, it also has the meaning of "Personen von höherem Stand", meaning upper class people.
Or "high lede" in English
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.
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.
Hi! I'm Eythana, the author. We do also use "English" very often to describe non-Amish people. They're used interchangeably. I wanted to include it but my editors preferred to stick with one term to keep things simpler.
> the Ordnung
What does that mean?
(This entire thread is very hard for this Brit to follow. So many unknown words and whole concepts.)
the Order, as in community sharing/following a set of rules
I don't think I understand your criticism.
The etymological sense of the Pennsylvania Dutch phrase is in fact, as far as I can tell, 'high people' or 'fancy people'. This is not the literal meaning or connotation of the phrase in Pennsylvania Dutch today. I did not think (and the LLM did not claim) that the phrase is used in Pennsylvania Dutch with this meaning, or that it was borrowed from standard German at any time. Essentially, the LLM helped me find recognizable cognates to understand how the phrase originated.
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?
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.
these are amish in a state with low amish presence and super liberal.
in the ohio/penn area there are tons of amish who are thriving.
i think its cool that in america people can do their own thing and make it work.
I'm the author of the article :) while you're right that Libby is uniquely positioned, I see this attitude often in places like Geauga County, Ohio, for example, where I have many relatives. Just 2 weeks ago an Amish girl there, who's traditional, surrounded by other Amish, tole me she hardly speaks it at all anymore, even with her family at home! That area also doesn't represent the majority, but in areas besides Libby, it's increasingly common to use it more, among young people / with friends especially, but obviously it extends even further for her. She didn't really have an explanation but said she just doesn't even think about it and essentially prefers English. There isn't always overt negativity, but dismissal or apathy are very common.
> 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.
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 historian, who I quote extensively. They both reviewed the piece. I could believe that a century or two ago, it was in usage, perhaps, but it isn’t anymore. To say we have no “distinct” word isn’t an exaggeration. We have to borrow directly from German or English as no one uses the loanword version. I’m open to seeing evidence to the contrary. I should say it’s possible that non-sectarian (non-Amish or otherwise historically religious) speakers of PD, of which there aren’t many anymore, may use that? If so, I could have clarified with a caveat, but since the Amish are the primary speakers of PD today, and where my experience comes, it wasn’t something I broached. And also, there was an editorial decision about not discussing non-sectarians in general for the same reasons.
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?
I know only palatinate concept of "lieben" (that i would pronounce it "liewe") and the only distinction i can think off is the same problem chinese learners have with 爱 and 喜欢[https://mandarinbean.com/ai-xihuan/].
It is hard to describe, but I share the same feelings of the author when it comes to expressing love, affection or sadness. It's strange and hard to describe, even though we also use the SHG "lieben", but it still doesn't feel right if we are trying to speak in "Pfälzisch" about it.
Not only that, but it's odd, and it looks like they took and maintained the same sentiments we had 150 years ago and still use and share today.
>the same problem chinese learners have with 爱 and 喜欢[https://mandarinbean.com/ai-xihuan/].
Oh, that's interesting. The same thing happens in Spanish, where "amar" is used exclusively for romantic relationships, while "querer" is used for everything else (e.g. the love between family members, between an owner and his pet, etc.), and "encantar" is used for intense liking of things and activities ("me encantan los mariscos" -> "I love shellfish").
I wonder if there's an equivalent for 喜欢 in Japanese.
The general sense of “liking” something is usually 好き (suki) in Japanese, AFAIK. Depending on the context (romantic, etc.), “love” could be 愛, 恋愛, 大好き, and probably others.
I've often read on church in Flander "onze lieve vrouw", but I had read that there is no word in Dutch for love. Instead, one would say "ik hou van jouw" which I translate as "I'm attached to you". Could it be in Pennsylvania Dutch a similar situation, due to some lineage between the languages?
Thank you, that makes much more sense now.
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:
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.
I’m Eythana, the article’s author. I’ve made no claims about this group being uneducated or unable to express themselves in general. There are certain limitations in the scope of the language’s vocabulary, which you would know if you spoke it. No one who’s familiar will deny this. This doesn’t mean they are unable to talk about certain topics, but when using Pennsylvania Dutch, it is simply the case that one must use more English words, choose from a much smaller pool of descriptors, or perhaps skim over it or avoid the subject altogether. All of these happen frequently. I have no contempt for the culture or language as you stated, but I do find it unfortunate when I see vocabulary being disregarded as speakers continued to use more English in the midst of Pennsylvania Dutch, which I described. This is a very well documented phenomenon and my bringing it up is completely neutral. If anything, I champion the use of PD as much as possible while many Amish people I know and encounter are less interested in that. If you have any actual evidence to contradict my these points besides your impression from a few conversations (assumably in English), I’d be happy to see it.
It's completely plausible the author's experience is a valid projection of the people they were surrounded by and also valid.
"anecdote" is the word you are looking for - which means based only on personal stories and not systematic research.
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.
Even Dothraki has a word for love!
Spanish has distinct words for love: querer and amar.
> Ich hab honestly really struggled
Funny. That's how (swiss) german gen z sounds to me.
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.
> 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 mit an armey un flot."
I wonder whether locals in the German Palatinate region can still understand Pennsylvania Dutch, given that it supposedly originates from their dialect.
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 to some samples i still can, and it sounds just like older people from my village, which younger people often can't understand, especially as these older people tend to mumble and speak faster a lot. Pennsylvanian Dutch sound just like this.
Keep in mind though: The region Amish people came from, the Palatinate, was historically a highly fractured region with lots of mini-kingdoms and small administrative clusters. While mostly Protestant, there are villages solely catholic, which were often trying to not mingle with the next villagers. (even it there was a mix of Catholics, Protestant and Jews)
This is mirrored in highly fractured words that are often different from village to village, even if they are just 5 kilometers away. (e.g. the word for soap or apple is pronounced totally different in the next village). This lead to some secludedness and distance which is mirrored in the article and why i think Amish were trying to maintain their distance from the local english population (if you discount the religious component of that population)
Funny sidenote: The highest rate of foreign migrants into the palatinate region --- where the amish came from --- is now from US citizens [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Karte_Kr...]
"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
> This HN thing of casually using acronyms without defining them is baffling to me
It's called, I forgot. Next time I will try to remember.
I've taken the liberty of adding a macroexpansion to your post above, and detaching this off topic subthread. I hpoe that's ok!
Thank you
It's baffling to you that people are comfortable in their niche and use their own jargon? Are you a baby that needs to be spoonfed every little bit of information?
"HN"?
>This HN thing of casually using acronyms without defining them is baffling to me
You have a whole internet at your fingertips with which to look up terms you don't understand without diluting the thread, but if you need at all to do that you should consider that you might not have anything relevant to add to the conversation to begin with. Hacker News is supposed to be a forum of educated professionals and domain experts, we shouldn't have to dumb things down here.
The problem with looking up acronyms is it's usually from a domain you're unfamiliar with, so you don't know which definition to pick from.
One must be really deep in some fertility obsessed subculture to think that TFR acronym should be instantly recognized when placed in tech forum discussion about minority language.
Otherwise said, using full expression is not "diluting the thread".
Asking pointless questions that can be answered with a simple Google search and complaining about other people's use of language do dilute the thread.
It's explicitly in the guidelines that we don't complain about voting because it "makes for boring reading." Complaining about acronyms has the same effect.
Having to google obscure acronyms and having to guess which interpretation author meant makes for super boring reading.
It is way better when you see a question and answer just below. And bonus point, question and answer teaches others to not use all acronyms they learned in all the random subcultures.
>Having to google obscure acronyms and having to guess which interpretation author meant makes for super boring reading.
It doesn't, because we don't have to read that.
Also the interpretation can be gleaned from context, as @williamdclt did above. It's unlikely that, reading the thread, the "TFR" being discussed is "temporary flight restriction."
seeing the definition for TFR in the thread is not boring reading because, as you say, it's something I would be expected to look up anyway.
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903808. TFR is explained there now.)
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.