I don’t see how your “shift” makes it any better. Did you really think people did exhaust mods purely to torment everyone around them? The noise and the its effect on listeners is the entire point. The fact that it’s primarily to gain kudos from “other loud car lovers” and especially attention from vapid women doesn’t alter the fact that they know and more likely relish if not most charitably are completely indifferent to the effect on everyone else. Which is fundamentally bad character when you’re revving these around populated areas.
After all any “loud car lover” is also either annoyed when their sleep is interrupted or they can’t hear themselves think for hours on end, or they have the IQ of a box of rocks. They want to hear loud revving only when it is convenient and enjoyable to them. So you can choose either complete self-centeredness and hypocrisy at that (likely) or being borderline too dumb to operate a vehicle.
> Did you really think people did exhaust mods purely to torment everyone around them?
I didn't, but the OP wrote:
> So it is about subjecting OTHER people to his car
So my comment was in response to that. I don't think people should ignore the suffering they cause for others, but to me it's different if the motivation is to cause pain vs bringing joy to like-minded people.
Lol I guess. I think there's a massive chasm between being ignorant of your effect on someone else and actively inflicting pain, but I'm sure I won't convince you that this is a meaningful difference if you don't already believe it. I think you could argue that tons of modern human activities cause negative experiences for other people, I don't think that means the people doing those things are terrible people. Something as simple as watering a lawn could be construed as "not caring about other people" due to failure to conserve public resources, but I don't get a lot of person benefit from cursing every person with a green lawn in the summer.
It's possible that nobody has ever complained to them about the noise. It's possible that they have never been annoyed at loud noises. Anything's possible.
Also, you are telling on yourself about woman drivers. Moms don’t drive worse than childless women. And men don’t put those bumper stickers on their cars if they can help it.
The author here didn’t even recount doing any work on his car or demonstrate any real knowledge of basic mechanics. Just talks about the high-end shops that did the work.
He did a great job painting himself as completely self-absorbed and lacking in personality that he’s making up with consooming. Down to the whining and performative identitarian victimization. Like if you just enjoy cars and love your Vietnamese-American hyphen culture awesome do that. But this whole article reeks of LOOK AT ME.
A lot of people on this forum actually have investments in SpaceX, directly or indirectly, and they're interested in this stuff as a signal of the health of the company.
I reckon a lot of people on this forum have poorer health thanks to man-made pollution.
The more money a person has, the greater the chance they spend it in ways that increase environmental harm. (Travel is a big one, and buying large homes, remodeling homes, heating and cooling those homes, well beyond the private sufficiency that would be enough for us if we also supported public luxuries instead of playing Smaug)
Rather than corporate health I'm more concerned with ecosystem health (actual eco-system, as in interconnected living beings, not the word applied to software...), and care much more about investing in the performance of the ecosystems (based on land, water, and air) that sustain life in the region I have this tiny bit of influence on.
Corporations are fictions, a game we're playing. After they go up in smoke, the land will still be here.
Again: I reckon this article is posted here not to alert people to the news about their jet Internet price hike, but as a signal into the health of a product/company that are of significant interest across the community.
It seems the words aren't making their way to your brain, so you're on your own to figure it out from here.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
That isn’t the sense it’s used in Pennsylvania at all. A side hill dirt farmer with one striped shirt he wears six days a week and goes to a Methodist church every Sunday and a mustache with his beard is “hoch” and a man who wears solid black and white with buttons and suspenders and no belt or mustache, drives a buggy to church at a district members house every other week and owns a mill that employs 500 people is a “Kirche/Plain” person.
“Fancy” is has a very specific meaning as as opposed to “plain” here and “upper class people are also fancy” is not generally true. “Plain” refers very specifically to lifestyle rules and modes of dress and sometimes speech adopted by conservative Anabaptists, most notably Amish, and historically, Quakers (very few of whom are meaningfully plain anymore although “simplicity” is still taught as a Quaker value). It has nothing to do with social class, there are many examples of plain peoples who were better off as a whole than their “fancy” neighbors. Fancy, in the context of plain people in America, is just anyone who lives according to the dominant culture or otherwise isn’t bound by the rules of plain people. Those being things like what kind of fasteners or colors you can have on your clothes, what kinds of hats men wear, head coverings and dress standards for women, etc., and for the Amish extending to bans on mains electricity, automobiles or self propelled vehicles, etc.
They may have some theological distinctions but they aren’t related to the plain/fancy distinctions at all. Holiness/methodists are culturally extremely mainstream and Methodists have always been at the forefront of uniting church with “popular” worldly culture, as opposed to the separatism (in particular of culture down to dress and technology) of plain people. Holiness/Wesleyan people are “fancy.” So are almost all contemporary Quakers and many or most mainline Mennonites.
Hasidim go to school in Yiddish for up to 12 hours a day through 12 grade and their secular and English education ends in 8th grade and is afterward taught exclusively in Yiddish with a side of Hebrew. After 12th grade many men continue to study Torah and Talmud all day for many years with rabbis doing so all their lives. The Talmud is in Aramaic and Hebrew but instruction, conversation and writing about it is conducted in Yiddish rather than English. Yiddish has orthographies in both the standard Hebrew script where it has a vast literature and is intelligibly romanized in Latin script with good concordance.
By contrast Pennsylvania German has never even had a standard orthography much less a literature. In the past fancy Dutch would read and write in Hochdeutsch (the standard literary German, for their times). Old order Amish education is exclusively in English and they are taught to read and write only in English except for reading the German Luther bible for church (as well as they can; typically most do better with the English side in the King James) and singing the Ausbund in German. Education ends altogether in 8th grade. Days are consumed with farmwork or trade work, chores, family life. Other than the Bible and the Ausbund (which is just a songbook) their religious texts are in English. There are some well-regarded old order Amish authors and journalist's who write books and periodicals in English. Many publications used by the Amish aren’t written by old order Amish but other Amish, Mennonites, and others.
In short there is no opening whatsoever for Pennsylvania German to become a written living literary language. There is a translation of the Bible into Deitsch done by outsiders that pretty much no one asked for and no one uses.
> In short there is no opening whatsoever for Pennsylvania German to become a written living literary language.
I wasn’t talking about it becoming a “literary” language
Consider this website - https://www.ujcbg.org/ - it is in Yiddish, but there is nothing “literary” about it, it is simply a news source for the Hasidic community of South Blooming Grove (village next door to Kiryas Joel). It contains articles on topics such as Sabbath rules for property developers and the volunteer fire department.
There’s no great barrier to Amish people using Deitsch for those kinds of purely practical communication purposes. It doesn’t require any advanced education or a standardised orthography. Historically speaking, a “standardised orthography” is something most languages didn’t have (prior to the influence of the printing press/etc)
A starting point could be as simple as one of the English language Amish newspapers deciding to include a section in Deitsch
I'm the author of the article. I also disagree there's "no opening" for it to become written. "literary" is indeed maybe a step further than I'm looking right now, but I'm involved in efforts to spread the word about the standard orthographies that do exist but have just been siloed in random dusty academic places. Just because there hasn't been extensive writing so far does not mean it can't happen. It may be difficult and I don't have my hopes up that it will be ubiquitous or fast, but I think change is certainly possible here.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
Don't you use the word in expressions like "ihr liewe Leit" (we usually use it as an expression of astonishment, seldomly to address a group of people) or "es lieb Mädsche" (the /nice/lovley girl)?
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.
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).
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.
After all any “loud car lover” is also either annoyed when their sleep is interrupted or they can’t hear themselves think for hours on end, or they have the IQ of a box of rocks. They want to hear loud revving only when it is convenient and enjoyable to them. So you can choose either complete self-centeredness and hypocrisy at that (likely) or being borderline too dumb to operate a vehicle.