Rendered at 05:57:55 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
skissane 21 hours 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.
woodruffw 23 hours 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!
schoen 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
That would be "Höhergestellte" nowadays.
em-bee 17 hours ago [-]
"höhergestellte" are "superiors". "hohe leute" is more like "upper class people"
unkeen 14 hours ago [-]
Traditionally, it also has the meaning of "Personen von höherem Stand", meaning upper class people.
usrnm 24 hours ago [-]
Or "high lede" in English
fuckyah 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
carschno 23 hours 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 22 hours 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 19 hours 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 19 hours ago [-]
the Order, as in community sharing/following a set of rules
eythana 9 hours ago [-]
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.
schoen 13 hours ago [-]
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.
pantalaimon 22 hours ago [-]
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?
hexnuts 5 hours 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.
I'd recommend giving it a squiz. (I assume Amish has a large corpus)
trollbridge 20 hours 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.
cactacea 13 hours 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 9 hours 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-writ...
tptacek 3 hours ago [-]
Neat! Thanks for taking the time to add to this thread!
xenadu02 5 hours ago [-]
One thing you learn if you study the Amish or interact with them personally: there is no "Amish generally" or "the Amish usually".
Every Amish congregation makes their own rules. The local deacons vote on changes. Each "Fellowship" of congregations has tenets and rules they require to be "in fellowship" but otherwise don't have control over the individual groups. Splits are often driven by disagreement over the fellowship rules.
There are Amish that own cars but the group might specify that each family may only own one car and it must be model X and of color Y with a specific set of features. Most people are aware of the groups that prohibit cars - requiring use of horse and buggy.
Some Amish allow electricity, but only connected to the barn or only when provided by solar power. Or they might only allow it to the extent required to comply with regulation - for example refrigeration for milk on a dairy farm. Some allow cell phones, but not in the home (you leave it in the barn or a lockbox). Some prohibit them entirely. Some Amish groups allow machinery but apply restrictions that don't allow use of the machinery to end up with one farmer greatly out-producing others. So when a farmer gets old they may allow them to buy a tractor for fieldwork but require it be pulled by horses.
You might also be surprised to learn many Amish experiment with new technology. Often the deacons will appoint a "nerdy" (for lack of a better term) person in the community to use some new thing. They'll evaluate its effects and costs. Then hold a vote on whether to allow it and what the rules will be. Sometime their answer to changes is not "no" but "not yet".
The decisions are nominally driven by a desire to be independent and to avoid negatively affecting family life rather than rejecting technology directly. Most don't allow electricity, cell phones, or internet inside the home because it would lead to people not interacting or connecting with each other. When power tools are allowed they're often pneumatic so they don't need to be tied to the grid and thus dependent upon "the English" - though with Solar and batteries that has rapidly changed.
Most don't allow extensive use of farming machinery because it could lead to your neighbor out-producing you, leading to them getting much richer and having more than you leading to discord in the community. If cars are allowed they may require everyone to buy the same car so there is no jealousy or "keeping up with the Joneses".
Amish are just people so they certainly have assholes and jerks but many are friendly people and if you treat them genuinely they'll repay the favor. They will not be offended that you use a cell phone or drive a car.
Surprising how often things boil down to "they're just people and most people, if treated with respect, will repay in kind".
lproven 19 hours ago [-]
"squiz"?
kzrdude 20 hours 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 14 hours 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 9 hours 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.
michalpleban 22 hours 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".
panative 22 hours 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.
swongel 19 hours ago [-]
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?
avyeed_desa 17 hours ago [-]
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.
BalinKing 10 hours ago [-]
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.
hommelix 12 hours ago [-]
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?
eythana 9 hours ago [-]
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.
michalpleban 21 hours ago [-]
Thank you, that makes much more sense now.
simonask 22 hours 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 22 hours ago [-]
It’s not correct though, because “liiwe/liewe” is a direct translation for it.
avyeed_desa 20 hours 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], 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.
trollbridge 20 hours ago [-]
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.
eythana 9 hours ago [-]
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.
beacon294 18 hours ago [-]
It's completely plausible the author's experience is a valid projection of the people they were surrounded by and also valid.
orangelimesoda 14 hours ago [-]
"anecdote" is the word you are looking for - which means based only on personal stories and not systematic research.
beacon294 8 hours ago [-]
I know the word, thanks I think?
22 hours ago [-]
anthk 20 hours ago [-]
Spanish has distinct words for love: querer and amar.
dnpls 20 hours ago [-]
Even Dothraki has a word for love!
exoque 22 hours ago [-]
> Ich hab honestly really struggled
Funny. That's how (swiss) german gen z sounds to me.
anthk 20 hours 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.
DiogenesKynikos 18 hours 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 17 hours 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)
Hi, I’m the author. I’ve never met someone from the region so I haven’t been able to test this but I’d love to at some point. Thanks for sharing.
quickthrowman 6 hours ago [-]
Wow, aside from ‘shprakh’ that is easily understood as an English speaker.
‘Is a dialect with (an) army and flotilla/navy’
fuckyah 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
lproven 19 hours ago [-]
"TFR"?
williamdclt 19 hours 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
skissane 18 hours ago [-]
> 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.
dang 15 hours ago [-]
I've taken the liberty of adding a macroexpansion to your post above, and detaching this off topic subthread. I hpoe that's ok!
skissane 14 hours ago [-]
Thank you
fragmede 19 hours ago [-]
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?
quickthrowman 6 hours ago [-]
To be fair, the use of TFR had approximately zero context to clue that person in to what it could mean. If you go back and read the first paragraph, there is no mention of children, birth, babies, or any other context clues that help the reader understand what the acronym is even relating to. It abstractly compares ‘TFR’ of several religious groups, it could mean anything. If you want to casually drop semi-obscure acronyms it’s good practice to give context clues by using words related to the acronym near the use of the acronym instead of being abstract like the OP.
I knew what the acronym was but I’ve spent time reading about religious groups and economic/social classes and fertility rates of those groups depending on the level of whatever you would call devotedness or strict adherence to the most conservative version of that belief system.
Which one of these two sentences makes it easier to guess what the acronym means or to google it? I could probably think of a better example using an acronym that has collisions, but this will have to do.
1. “The SOFR has not changed during 2026.”
2. “The Federal Reserve has voted to maintain the SOFR during 2026.”
fragmede 4 hours ago [-]
I, myself, documented that ACE stands for AI Compute Extensions, on a post on HN that used it without defining it, and got a couple points for it. I'm pushing back against that everything has to be spoonfed to us and that we shouldn't be expected to do any of our own work to understand something here and complaining about it.
DemocracyFTW2 14 hours ago [-]
"HN"?
dredmorbius 2 hours ago [-]
Happy Now? ;-)
krapp 19 hours 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.
cpburns2009 16 hours ago [-]
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.
watwut 19 hours 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 19 hours 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.
watwut 15 hours ago [-]
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.
krapp 12 hours ago [-]
>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."
LoganDark 19 hours ago [-]
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.
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)
dagss 24 hours 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 22 hours 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.
dagss 21 hours ago [-]
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.
drdaeman 24 hours ago [-]
This is about language, though. Religious oddities are merely the background.
sooperserieous 24 hours ago [-]
s/religion/text editors/
s/religion/sponsors/
s/religion/politics/
s/religion/nationalism/
s/religion/insecurity/
s/religion/intolerance/
...
abstractspoon 23 hours 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 21 hours 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.
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 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!
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.
“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.
What does that mean?
(This entire thread is very hard for this Brit to follow. So many unknown words and whole concepts.)
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'd recommend giving it a squiz. (I assume Amish has a large corpus)
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.
Pennsylvania Dutch does not, it is primarily oral and the Amish generally don't allow themselves to be photographed or recorded.
Every Amish congregation makes their own rules. The local deacons vote on changes. Each "Fellowship" of congregations has tenets and rules they require to be "in fellowship" but otherwise don't have control over the individual groups. Splits are often driven by disagreement over the fellowship rules.
There are Amish that own cars but the group might specify that each family may only own one car and it must be model X and of color Y with a specific set of features. Most people are aware of the groups that prohibit cars - requiring use of horse and buggy.
Some Amish allow electricity, but only connected to the barn or only when provided by solar power. Or they might only allow it to the extent required to comply with regulation - for example refrigeration for milk on a dairy farm. Some allow cell phones, but not in the home (you leave it in the barn or a lockbox). Some prohibit them entirely. Some Amish groups allow machinery but apply restrictions that don't allow use of the machinery to end up with one farmer greatly out-producing others. So when a farmer gets old they may allow them to buy a tractor for fieldwork but require it be pulled by horses.
You might also be surprised to learn many Amish experiment with new technology. Often the deacons will appoint a "nerdy" (for lack of a better term) person in the community to use some new thing. They'll evaluate its effects and costs. Then hold a vote on whether to allow it and what the rules will be. Sometime their answer to changes is not "no" but "not yet".
The decisions are nominally driven by a desire to be independent and to avoid negatively affecting family life rather than rejecting technology directly. Most don't allow electricity, cell phones, or internet inside the home because it would lead to people not interacting or connecting with each other. When power tools are allowed they're often pneumatic so they don't need to be tied to the grid and thus dependent upon "the English" - though with Solar and batteries that has rapidly changed.
Most don't allow extensive use of farming machinery because it could lead to your neighbor out-producing you, leading to them getting much richer and having more than you leading to discord in the community. If cars are allowed they may require everyone to buy the same car so there is no jealousy or "keeping up with the Joneses".
Amish are just people so they certainly have assholes and jerks but many are friendly people and if you treat them genuinely they'll repay the favor. They will not be offended that you use a cell phone or drive a car.
Surprising how often things boil down to "they're just people and most people, if treated with respect, will repay in kind".
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 wonder what it says about a community that its language has no word for "love".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Funny. That's how (swiss) german gen z sounds to me.
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.
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...]
‘Is a dialect with (an) army and flotilla/navy’
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 knew what the acronym was but I’ve spent time reading about religious groups and economic/social classes and fertility rates of those groups depending on the level of whatever you would call devotedness or strict adherence to the most conservative version of that belief system.
Which one of these two sentences makes it easier to guess what the acronym means or to google it? I could probably think of a better example using an acronym that has collisions, but this will have to do.
1. “The SOFR has not changed during 2026.”
2. “The Federal Reserve has voted to maintain the SOFR during 2026.”
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.
Otherwise said, using full expression is not "diluting 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.
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.
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."
Maybe its just human nature to try and rationalize the world around them? (using whatever framework they have a available)
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).
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.
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.
s/religion/sponsors/
s/religion/politics/
s/religion/nationalism/
s/religion/insecurity/
s/religion/intolerance/
...
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.