Comment by swongel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swongel | Hacker News Reader

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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?

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.

>the same problem chinese learners have with 爱 and 喜欢[https://mandarinbean.com/ai-xihuan/].

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.

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.

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?

Pennsylvania German/Deitsch comes from Pfälzisch and as spoken by plain people mostly branched off in the 18th and 19th centuries but influence from other German speakers and especially English didn’t stop in time then.

It is much closer to standard German than any dialect of Dutch. Amish read the Luther Bible (mostly 1912 edition these days) in German and sing the Ausbund in German but don’t otherwise use “Hochdeutsch” in everyday life, and they exclusively use English for reading and writing outside of church.

It’s also very important not to confuse the Amish and their language from other plain Mennonites and Anabaptists who speak Plautdietsch which is a completely different low German language and not intelligible with Pennsylvania German or standard German at all. Many of them came from Germanic peoples who were settled in Poland, Ukraine, Russia etc.

There is a word for "love" in dutch; it's the noun "liefde" (of which lieve is an adjective). However you cannot use "liefde" as a verb, hence my question if this is the case in Deitsch as they are related languages within the Germanic language family.

Usually in dutch we use "houden van" -> To hold (dearly).

But with our grammar the word "houden" may also literally mean to hold. "Ik hou een hamer vast (in mijn hand)." -> "I hold a hammer (fastened in my hand)". In dutch this is considered a different word though, as vast + houden even when written apart in a sentence is considered a compound verb vasthouden. (Like how babysitting in English is not the same verb as sitting).

In German you use the word Lieben as a verb and a noun, so in German you can say Ich liebe dich (I love you) but also like a noun "Die Liebe" (lit: the love)

In Dutch you cannot say: Ik liefde jou, in the same way in English you cannot say: I feelings you.

But you can if use the word Liefde as a noun or adjective to make it something like: - Mijn liefde is alleen voor jou. (lit: My love is only for you). (romantic) - Jij bent mijn ware liefde (lit: You are my true love). (romantic) - Mijn lieve vriend (lit: My lovely friend) (platonic or romantic) - Onze lieve vrouw (lit: Our lovely lady) (exclusively used in reference to Maria AFAIK) - Dat was lief van hem (lit: That was lovely of him). (platonic)

In contemporary Dutch, people use a lot of code switching with English words, so you could hear someone say "love you" romantically, or even just the word "love" mixed in dutch like this:

- Love you, schat (I love you honey) (lit: Love you, treasure) - Ik ben in love (I am in love)

Language purist and language prescriptive Dutch teachers do not like this and would not consider it to be correct dutch. (Which personally I think is absolutely hilarious, as dutch to me is very much a "bastard language" and the notion that we should cling prescriptively to the current version of our language as some sort of canonical form is absurd).

But that's also why I was wondering if _that_ is why the author in the original article was using Liebe instead of Liewe, as code switching with a cognate might allow the loanword to be used as a "verb" while the original word cannot be as it is in contemporary dutch with Liefde/Love. (And I doubt the author would not be aware that Liebe could become something like Liewe in Deitsch as the B in standard high German words when near the end of a word often shifts in dialects and related languages).

Gelb (SHG) -> Geel (NL) Dieb (SHG)-> Dief (NL) Lieb (SHG) -> Lief (NL)

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