|
Papers > English > Pennsylvania Dutch
Featured Papers from Direct Essays |
|||
1. Influence of German and Dutch style houses in todays America
|
|||
This is a preview of a paper to view the full text you need to signup and login.
Pennsylvania Dutch |
|||
|
... is “Pennsylvania Dutch. ... As confusing as it might sound, the Pennsylvania Dutch people are of German and German speaking heritage. Even though the term has been well-established in the meantime, it would thus be more correct to talk of “Pennsylvania German. ... One explanation might be the fact that the German word for “German” is “Deutsch,” the pronunciation of which might have been corrupted in the course of time, which then might have led to the replacement of the word “Deutsch” for “Dutch” as an Americanism. Another possible explanation for this phenomenon might be that most of the German immigrants who came to the US left Europe from Dutch ports. So they might simply have been mistaken for Dutch people instead of Germans (1996: 1-2). ... Fredric Klees points out that even speakers of the dialect itself talk of their language as of “Pennsylvania Dutch” even though they are well-aware of their own roots, whereas they consider “Pennsylvania German” rather to be a sort of High German. Since “Holland Dutch is not spoken in Pennsylvania,” as the author argues in 1950, “there is no confusion with that [i. ... the Dutch] language” (278). Unfortunately, Pennsylvania Dutch is one of the many dialects of the United States that - in the process of further nationalization and industrialization and in an age of science and technology – have for the greatest part already vanished and been replaced by English in the meantime. Just as many other language varieties, Pennsylvania Dutch has become the victim of our time, which is a time of constant and rapid change, in which nothing remains stable. ... In this paper, first of all the immigration history of the Pennsylvania Dutch shall be described briefly, afterwards a closer look at the dialect itself and its special features will be taken. It is then going to be discussed why language varieties vanish in general and why Pennsylvania Dutch in specific is facing the phenomenon of the so-called “language death. ... This will be done on the basis of Pennsylvania Dutch with special account of its survival in little religious communities such as the Amish. 2 Immigration History of the Pennsylvania Dutch As mentioned above already, the Pennsylvania Dutch did not come from Holland originally, but from several regions in Germany, mostly from the eastern Palatinate. ... The first reports on the Pennsylvania Dutch in America is indicated by the foundation of Germantown in 1683. ... “By 1812 they had settled in eastern, central, and western Pensylvania over an area roughly the size of Switzerland – 15,000 square miles – and one-third of Pennsylvania’s total area of 45,000 square miles” (Yoder 1980: 770). ... This is certainly also applicable in the case of the Pennsylvania Dutch. ... 3 The Dialect of Pennsylvania Dutch As defined by Carver, a dialect in general is “a variety of language distinguished from other varieties by a set of grammatical, phonetic, and lexical features. ... Seifert, “PAG [Pennsylvania German] has held a special position, since it has a history dating back to colonial times of unbroken use in a compact area” (1971: 14-17). ... The dialect used to be spoken in about one third of the state of Pennsylvania, as well as in some parts of Maryland and West Virginia, and even in the Canadian province of Ontario. The use of the dialect reached its height between 1870 and 1880, when it was spoken by about 750,000 people - 600,000 of which lived in Pennsylvania (cf. ... Of this number, about 200,000 live in southeastern Pennsylvania in a roughly elliptical area stretching from Northampton and Bucks counties in the east to Centre and Mifflin counties in the west, from Lancaster and York counties in the south to Northumberland and Union counties in the north; the other 100,000 are scattered in smaller areas over the rest of Pennsylvania, in Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Ontario (1971: 14-17). The dialect of Pennsylvania Dutch is hard to grasp, since it has been influenced by Americanization (Anglicization), Germanization, and dialectization. ... With only minor differences between the language of the several Pennsylvania German communities to be found in the US as far as phonology and morphology are concerned, it is justified to speak of one - maybe not entirely but quite - homogenous dialect of Pennsylvania German as it has occured in the US (cf. ... Pennsylvania German is basically a spoken language with no standard spelling, which is also seen as one of the “chief obstacles to the spread of the dialect” by Klees (1950: 280). A number of cultural artifacts have, however, been preserved that are written in Pennsylvania Dutch such as old cookbooks, for instance. ... Tobias states in his article “Early American Cookbooks as Cultural Artifacts,” the cookbook’s German, as well as that spoken in all Pennsylvania ‘Dutch’ culture of the time, was of a very American variety: a sort of half-German, half-English, that has been described as a ‘mixture of archaic High German (what some linguists call ‘Bible German’), Pennsylvania-German dialect, and English loan words’ (1998: 15). To give his readers an idea of what Pennsylvania Dutch is like and, as he says “[f]or the edification and pleasure for readers with a knowledge of German”, Klees reprinted an advertisement that originally appeared in a Pennsylvania Dutch paper of the town of Bethlehem on August 28, 1869: GOOK YUSHT AMOHL DOH! ... “Ä,Ü,Ö” which do not exist in the English language, were obvioulsy no longer used by the Pennsylvania Dutch, which indicates a slight adaption to the English language. ... ” As Klees states, “even commonplace English words and phrases become strange and wonderful when they go Dutch; of course turns into uf kors, politics changes to balledicks, and life insurance is reborn as leifinschurings” (1950: 280). ... 1950] Pennsylvania Dutch is virtually the same language as the one spoken in Heidelberg or Mannheim” (1950: 280). ... ” She gives other examples such as the Pennsylvania Dutch term /re:s gaul/ which stands for the English word “race horse. |
|||
To link to this page, copy the following code to your site:
Paper Information |
|||||
Title: Pennsylvania Dutch
|
|||||
Signup & Login |
|||||
If you don't currently have a login then Signup here |
|||||
| Pre-Written Papers | |||||
|
|||||
| Custom Papers | |||||
|
|||||
Copyright 2003-2008 doingmyhomework.com. All rights reserved.