7 ms·

Our Amish Language

106 points by NaOH 3mo ago

schoen 3mo ago
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.
- unkeen 3mo ago
  That would be "Höhergestellte" nowadays.
  - em-bee 3mo ago
    "höhergestellte" are "superiors". "hohe leute" is more like "upper class people"
    - unkeen 3mo ago
      Traditionally, it also has the meaning of "Personen von höherem Stand", meaning upper class people.
    - panative 3mo ago
      That isn’t the sense it’s used in Pennsylvania at all. A side hill dirt farmer with one striped shirt he wears six days a week and goes to a Methodist church every Sunday and a mustache with his beard is “hoch” and a man who wears solid black and white with buttons and suspenders and no belt or mustache, drives a buggy to church at a district members house every other week and owns a mill that employs 500 people is a “Kirche/Plain” person.
      - em-bee 3mo ago
        can you elaborate please? the way i read this it directly contradicts what you say here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903436 “hooche Leit” is PA dialect for standard German “hohe Leute,” literally “high people” in the sense of “fancy” people but that supports what i said, because upper class people are also fancy.
        wildfireday2 3mo ago
        “Fancy” is has a very specific meaning as as opposed to “plain” here and “upper class people are also fancy” is not generally true. “Plain” refers very specifically to lifestyle rules and modes of dress and sometimes speech adopted by conservative Anabaptists, most notably Amish, and historically, Quakers (very few of whom are meaningfully plain anymore although “simplicity” is still taught as a Quaker value). It has nothing to do with social class, there are many examples of plain peoples who were better off as a whole than their “fancy” neighbors. Fancy, in the context of plain people in America, is just anyone who lives according to the dominant culture or otherwise isn’t bound by the rules of plain people. Those being things like what kind of fasteners or colors you can have on your clothes, what kinds of hats men wear, head coverings and dress standards for women, etc., and for the Amish extending to bans on mains electricity, automobiles or self propelled vehicles, etc.
        ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
        Closely related, and not limited to the sects which you mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holiness_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holiness_movement
        wildfireday2 3mo ago
        They may have some theological distinctions but they aren’t related to the plain/fancy distinctions at all. Holiness/methodists are culturally extremely mainstream and Methodists have always been at the forefront of uniting church with “popular” worldly culture, as opposed to the separatism (in particular of culture down to dress and technology) of plain people. Holiness/Wesleyan people are “fancy.” So are almost all contemporary Quakers and many or most mainline Mennonites.
- usrnm 3mo ago
  Or "high lede" in English
- carschno 3mo ago
  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.
  - panative 3mo ago
    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.
    - lproven 3mo ago
      > the Ordnung What does that mean? (This entire thread is very hard for this Brit to follow. So many unknown words and whole concepts.)
      - pantalaimon 3mo ago
        the Order, as in community sharing/following a set of rules
        panative 3mo ago
        As in understand it, the Ordnung are the rules themselves, but the rules are what create the community. They aren’t written down but they are collectively decided and determined and known within an individual district. Districts normally split due to growth rather than disagreements about the Ordnung but both can happen, and the Ordnung can develop differently from one district to another. An individual or family openly rejecting some aspect of the Ordnung can result in shunning/excommunication (though the intent is supposed to be for them to come back fully to the community, doesn’t have to be permanent, and it doesn’t always mean they are completely estranged).
- fuckyah 3mo ago
  [dead]
jibal 3mo ago
[flagged]
- drdaeman 3mo ago
  This is about language, though. Religious oddities are merely the background.
- sooperserieous 3mo ago
  s/religion/text editors/ s/religion/sponsors/ s/religion/politics/ s/religion/nationalism/ s/religion/insecurity/ s/religion/intolerance/ ...
- dagss 3mo ago
  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 know I have always respected Amish for daring to be different, and for living sustainable and not contributing to climate change. If you trade their belief in God with increased CO2 emissions -- why would that be a rational change to their culture? So who are really misdirected humans? I would say those who sacrifice the planet on the altar of numbers stored in computer systems in banks... Reading tip for you is "Sapiens" of Harari. Don't worry, he's an atheist, but he may contribute a more nuanced view on the role of religion in human culture (and he names capitalism as a religion too).
  - saithound 3mo ago
    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.
woodruffw 3mo ago
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!
thomasfromcdnjs 3mo ago
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 https://huggingface.co/facebook/nllb-200-distilled-600M I'd recommend giving it a squiz. (I assume Amish has a large corpus)
- trollbridge 3mo ago
  “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.
- lproven 3mo ago
  "squiz"?
- cactacea 3mo ago
  > (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.
  - eythana 3mo ago
    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-written-language/ https://penndutchdialects.org/pennsylvania-dutch-isnt-a-writ...
abstractspoon 3mo ago
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
- inglor_cz 3mo ago
  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.
- holgerschurig 3mo ago
  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 ...
exoque 3mo ago
> Ich hab honestly really struggled Funny. That's how (swiss) german gen z sounds to me.
michalpleban 3mo ago
> 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".
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- simonask 3mo ago
  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.
  - panative 3mo ago
    It’s not correct though, because “liiwe/liewe” is a direct translation for it.
    - avyeed_desa 3mo ago
      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 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.
- panative 3mo ago
  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.
skissane 3mo ago
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.
- panative 3mo ago
  Hasidim go to school in Yiddish for up to 12 hours a day through 12 grade and their secular and English education ends in 8th grade and is afterward taught exclusively in Yiddish with a side of Hebrew. After 12th grade many men continue to study Torah and Talmud all day for many years with rabbis doing so all their lives. The Talmud is in Aramaic and Hebrew but instruction, conversation and writing about it is conducted in Yiddish rather than English. Yiddish has orthographies in both the standard Hebrew script where it has a vast literature and is intelligibly romanized in Latin script with good concordance. By contrast Pennsylvania German has never even had a standard orthography much less a literature. In the past fancy Dutch would read and write in Hochdeutsch (the standard literary German, for their times). Old order Amish education is exclusively in English and they are taught to read and write only in English except for reading the German Luther bible for church (as well as they can; typically most do better with the English side in the King James) and singing the Ausbund in German. Education ends altogether in 8th grade. Days are consumed with farmwork or trade work, chores, family life. Other than the Bible and the Ausbund (which is just a songbook) their religious texts are in English. There are some well-regarded old order Amish authors and journalist's who write books and periodicals in English. Many publications used by the Amish aren’t written by old order Amish but other Amish, Mennonites, and others. In short there is no opening whatsoever for Pennsylvania German to become a written living literary language. There is a translation of the Bible into Deitsch done by outsiders that pretty much no one asked for and no one uses.
anthk 3mo ago
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.
kzrdude 3mo ago
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.
- moomoo11 3mo ago
  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.
  - eythana 3mo ago
    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.
fuckyah 3mo ago
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lproven 3mo ago
"TFR"?
- williamdclt 3mo ago
  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
  - krapp 3mo ago
    >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.
    - watwut 3mo ago
      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".
      - krapp 3mo ago
        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.
        LoganDark 3mo ago
DiogenesKynikos 3mo ago
> 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.
- avyeed_desa 3mo ago
  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_Kreise_Deutschland_Ausl%C3%A4nder_nach_Herkunft.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Karte_Kr...]
  - 3mo ago
hexnuts 3mo ago
The thing I always think about when I think about societies like this is, They are on a timer. Eventually, they will have no choice to but accept mechanization. Because humans will not able to farm in 90% humidity due to wetbulb physics. Animal husbandry will most likely be a WORSE horror show than what we have now, due to the fact that most live stock will similarly be unable to deal with the heat. And lets be honest, most of the farms we have now are unsustainable. So famine is definitely a thing we'll have to consider.
zkmon 3mo ago
> 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.
- vintermann 3mo ago
  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).
  - avyeed_desa 3mo ago
    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.

106 points by NaOH 3mo ago

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.

unkeen 3mo ago
That would be "Höhergestellte" nowadays.
- em-bee 3mo ago
  "höhergestellte" are "superiors". "hohe leute" is more like "upper class people"
  - unkeen 3mo ago
    Traditionally, it also has the meaning of "Personen von höherem Stand", meaning upper class people.
  - panative 3mo ago
    That isn’t the sense it’s used in Pennsylvania at all. A side hill dirt farmer with one striped shirt he wears six days a week and goes to a Methodist church every Sunday and a mustache with his beard is “hoch” and a man who wears solid black and white with buttons and suspenders and no belt or mustache, drives a buggy to church at a district members house every other week and owns a mill that employs 500 people is a “Kirche/Plain” person.
    - em-bee 3mo ago
      can you elaborate please? the way i read this it directly contradicts what you say here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903436 “hooche Leit” is PA dialect for standard German “hohe Leute,” literally “high people” in the sense of “fancy” people but that supports what i said, because upper class people are also fancy.
      - wildfireday2 3mo ago
        “Fancy” is has a very specific meaning as as opposed to “plain” here and “upper class people are also fancy” is not generally true. “Plain” refers very specifically to lifestyle rules and modes of dress and sometimes speech adopted by conservative Anabaptists, most notably Amish, and historically, Quakers (very few of whom are meaningfully plain anymore although “simplicity” is still taught as a Quaker value). It has nothing to do with social class, there are many examples of plain peoples who were better off as a whole than their “fancy” neighbors. Fancy, in the context of plain people in America, is just anyone who lives according to the dominant culture or otherwise isn’t bound by the rules of plain people. Those being things like what kind of fasteners or colors you can have on your clothes, what kinds of hats men wear, head coverings and dress standards for women, etc., and for the Amish extending to bans on mains electricity, automobiles or self propelled vehicles, etc.
        ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
        Closely related, and not limited to the sects which you mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holiness_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holiness_movement
        wildfireday2 3mo ago
        They may have some theological distinctions but they aren’t related to the plain/fancy distinctions at all. Holiness/methodists are culturally extremely mainstream and Methodists have always been at the forefront of uniting church with “popular” worldly culture, as opposed to the separatism (in particular of culture down to dress and technology) of plain people. Holiness/Wesleyan people are “fancy.” So are almost all contemporary Quakers and many or most mainline Mennonites.
usrnm 3mo ago
Or "high lede" in English
carschno 3mo ago
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.
- panative 3mo ago
  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.
  - lproven 3mo ago
    > the Ordnung What does that mean? (This entire thread is very hard for this Brit to follow. So many unknown words and whole concepts.)
    - pantalaimon 3mo ago
      the Order, as in community sharing/following a set of rules
      - panative 3mo ago
        As in understand it, the Ordnung are the rules themselves, but the rules are what create the community. They aren’t written down but they are collectively decided and determined and known within an individual district. Districts normally split due to growth rather than disagreements about the Ordnung but both can happen, and the Ordnung can develop differently from one district to another. An individual or family openly rejecting some aspect of the Ordnung can result in shunning/excommunication (though the intent is supposed to be for them to come back fully to the community, doesn’t have to be permanent, and it doesn’t always mean they are completely estranged).
fuckyah 3mo ago
[dead]

jibal 3mo ago

[flagged]

drdaeman 3mo ago
This is about language, though. Religious oddities are merely the background.
sooperserieous 3mo ago
s/religion/text editors/ s/religion/sponsors/ s/religion/politics/ s/religion/nationalism/ s/religion/insecurity/ s/religion/intolerance/ ...
dagss 3mo ago
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 know I have always respected Amish for daring to be different, and for living sustainable and not contributing to climate change. If you trade their belief in God with increased CO2 emissions -- why would that be a rational change to their culture? So who are really misdirected humans? I would say those who sacrifice the planet on the altar of numbers stored in computer systems in banks... Reading tip for you is "Sapiens" of Harari. Don't worry, he's an atheist, but he may contribute a more nuanced view on the role of religion in human culture (and he names capitalism as a religion too).
- saithound 3mo ago
  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.

woodruffw 3mo ago

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!

thomasfromcdnjs 3mo ago

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 https://huggingface.co/facebook/nllb-200-distilled-600M I'd recommend giving it a squiz. (I assume Amish has a large corpus)

trollbridge 3mo ago
“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.
lproven 3mo ago
"squiz"?
cactacea 3mo ago
> (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.
- eythana 3mo ago
  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-written-language/ https://penndutchdialects.org/pennsylvania-dutch-isnt-a-writ...

abstractspoon 3mo ago

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

inglor_cz 3mo ago
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.
holgerschurig 3mo ago
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 ...

exoque 3mo ago

> Ich hab honestly really struggled Funny. That's how (swiss) german gen z sounds to me.

michalpleban 3mo ago

> 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".

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
simonask 3mo ago
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.
- panative 3mo ago
  It’s not correct though, because “liiwe/liewe” is a direct translation for it.
  - avyeed_desa 3mo ago
    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 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.
panative 3mo ago
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.

skissane 3mo ago

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.

panative 3mo ago
Hasidim go to school in Yiddish for up to 12 hours a day through 12 grade and their secular and English education ends in 8th grade and is afterward taught exclusively in Yiddish with a side of Hebrew. After 12th grade many men continue to study Torah and Talmud all day for many years with rabbis doing so all their lives. The Talmud is in Aramaic and Hebrew but instruction, conversation and writing about it is conducted in Yiddish rather than English. Yiddish has orthographies in both the standard Hebrew script where it has a vast literature and is intelligibly romanized in Latin script with good concordance. By contrast Pennsylvania German has never even had a standard orthography much less a literature. In the past fancy Dutch would read and write in Hochdeutsch (the standard literary German, for their times). Old order Amish education is exclusively in English and they are taught to read and write only in English except for reading the German Luther bible for church (as well as they can; typically most do better with the English side in the King James) and singing the Ausbund in German. Education ends altogether in 8th grade. Days are consumed with farmwork or trade work, chores, family life. Other than the Bible and the Ausbund (which is just a songbook) their religious texts are in English. There are some well-regarded old order Amish authors and journalist's who write books and periodicals in English. Many publications used by the Amish aren’t written by old order Amish but other Amish, Mennonites, and others. In short there is no opening whatsoever for Pennsylvania German to become a written living literary language. There is a translation of the Bible into Deitsch done by outsiders that pretty much no one asked for and no one uses.

anthk 3mo ago

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.

kzrdude 3mo ago

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.

moomoo11 3mo ago
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.
- eythana 3mo ago
  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.

fuckyah 3mo ago

[dead]

lproven 3mo ago

"TFR"?

williamdclt 3mo ago
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
- krapp 3mo ago
  >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.
  - watwut 3mo ago
    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".
    - krapp 3mo ago
      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.
      - LoganDark 3mo ago

DiogenesKynikos 3mo ago

> 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.

avyeed_desa 3mo ago
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_Kreise_Deutschland_Ausl%C3%A4nder_nach_Herkunft.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Karte_Kr...]
- 3mo ago

hexnuts 3mo ago

The thing I always think about when I think about societies like this is, They are on a timer. Eventually, they will have no choice to but accept mechanization. Because humans will not able to farm in 90% humidity due to wetbulb physics. Animal husbandry will most likely be a WORSE horror show than what we have now, due to the fact that most live stock will similarly be unable to deal with the heat. And lets be honest, most of the farms we have now are unsustainable. So famine is definitely a thing we'll have to consider.

zkmon 3mo ago

> 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.

vintermann 3mo ago
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).
- avyeed_desa 3mo ago
  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.