“Amish” isn’t a language but Pennsylvania Dutch has plenty of written material, although most speakers of it prefer to write in English with the occasional person who prefers German.

I live adjacent to a few thousand speakers of it and I doubt there is a single person over the age of 8 who can’t speak English fluently.

Due to the lack of a standard orthography don’t expect LLMs to do anything remotely usable other than generate a few laughs.

> (I assume Amish has a large corpus)

Pennsylvania Dutch does not, it is primarily oral and the Amish generally don't allow themselves to be photographed or recorded.

"squiz"?

That would be "Höhergestellte" nowadays.

Or "high lede" in English

Apologies for being nit-picky, but there is no etymological sense. The output of your LLM has the same etymological root, but a different meaning. In terms of translation, it is therefore plain wrong.

Honestly, I was triggered to correct this comment mostly because it illustrates how we tend to explain away mistakes made by an LLM. It's not about subtle 'connotation', but the meaning is just incorrect. No offense meant to the poster, this is a trap the world has been falling into at scale for the past few years.

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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.

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.

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.

Even Dothraki has a word for love!

Spanish has distinct words for love: querer and amar.

We can understand them! Especially if you are ready and used being hit with interjected English words. It is hard to get used to it the first few minutes (i speak two other languages, language switching is always hard for me), but once you know what to look out for we could be talking interchangeably.

My teacher in high school went there over 40 years ago, and he said, he never had any trouble. Listening on youtube to some samples i still can, and it sounds just like older people from my village, which younger people often can't understand, especially as these older people tend to mumble and speak faster a lot. Pennsylvanian Dutch sound just like this.

Keep in mind though: The region Amish people came from, the Palatinate, was historically a highly fractured region with lots of mini-kingdoms and small administrative clusters. While mostly Protestant, there are villages solely catholic, which were often trying to not mingle with the next villagers. (even it there was a mix of Catholics, Protestant and Jews)

This is mirrored in highly fractured words that are often different from village to village, even if they are just 5 kilometers away. (e.g. the word for soap or apple is pronounced totally different in the next village). This lead to some secludedness and distance which is mirrored in the article and why i think Amish were trying to maintain their distance from the local english population (if you discount the religious component of that population)

Funny sidenote: The highest rate of foreign migrants into the palatinate region --- where the amish came from --- is now from US citizens [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Karte_Kr...]

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

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903808. TFR is explained there now.)

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)

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).

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/

...

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.