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Comment by carschno | Hacker News Reader

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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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

As in understand it, the Ordnung are the rules themselves, but the rules are what create the community. They aren’t written down but they are collectively decided and determined and known within an individual district. Districts normally split due to growth rather than disagreements about the Ordnung but both can happen, and the Ordnung can develop differently from one district to another. An individual or family openly rejecting some aspect of the Ordnung can result in shunning/excommunication (though the intent is supposed to be for them to come back fully to the community, doesn’t have to be permanent, and it doesn’t always mean they are completely estranged).

Thank you!

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.

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.

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?

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