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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
“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.
> 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.
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).
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.
Comparing changes in nuclear doctrines with people choosing a different way of life (granted, also for their children) than the majority seems totalitarian, to me.
Minorities are, well, in miniority. Noone is at any point waging "everyone's supper" by trying out alternative ways of farming within their small miniority. (Meanwhile the majority IS risking everyone's supper in some decades).
Nuclear is different from your other examples because the choices of a small minority can drastically affect the vast majority.
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 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 used my old fashioned bio neural net trained on standard German and also understood it that way. What else is it supposed to mean?
Or "high lede" in English
[dead]
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!
> 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.
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?
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.
It's completely plausible the author's experience is a valid projection of the people they were surrounded by and also valid.
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.
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'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.
"squiz"?
> 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.
[dead]
[flagged]
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).
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.
Comparing changes in nuclear doctrines with people choosing a different way of life (granted, also for their children) than the majority seems totalitarian, to me.
Minorities are, well, in miniority. Noone is at any point waging "everyone's supper" by trying out alternative ways of farming within their small miniority. (Meanwhile the majority IS risking everyone's supper in some decades).
Nuclear is different from your other examples because the choices of a small minority can drastically affect the vast majority.
Unfortunately we don't really have any premodern (i.e. operating under the same constraints) atheistic societies to compare against.
Maybe its just human nature to try and rationalize the world around them? (using whatever framework they have a available)
This is about language, though. Religious oddities are merely the background.
s/religion/text editors/
s/religion/sponsors/
s/religion/politics/
s/religion/nationalism/
s/religion/insecurity/
s/religion/intolerance/
...
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.