avyeed_desa
Joined 7 years ago
Joined 7 years ago
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.
I don't know where exactly (which village) your ancestors started from here, but this will be the town where you will have no trouble getting started as everyone here is able to speak English and a lot of US citizens living here (due to the Ramstein AFB 5 minutes away).
And if you want to practice standard german, this will be the perfect middle ground to get to know dialect speakers who also are able to communicate in standard high german and are comfortable with english.
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.
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...]
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.
The ones around my place all use EDH, which also has a map feature, but not as intuitive as this! Reminds me of vici.org
They do consult IDF and Israeli government, but the narrative, that Israel is 100% controlling all borders to Gaza is not factual and untrue.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Gaza_border#Buff...