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Location: The place where the road & the sky collide
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One of my grandfathers was a German immigrant. The family came over in 1904 to Minnesota. By WWI he was married & living in Michigan. He & his youngest brother had been put in school when they came over to learn English, to teach the family. He taught himself to speak with an American accent to avoid the anti-German sentiment during WWI. I was told that the anti-German sentiment was also strong during WWII & he was concerned about being taken away. When asked, he always said that he was born in this country.
When I lived in the upper Midwest and Amish started moving in I thought they spoke German as well until someone told me it was Pennsylvania Dutch. In the early 2,000's.
Pennsylvania Dutch (Deutch) is a dialect of low German. Evidently, there are differences between dialect low German and standard German. One time a German woman translated for my company for some Mennonite customers. She said she could understand the context of what they were saying, but a lot of words were different.
I don't advocate wikipedia as a source but it might help you a little to do some background reading on German dialects. The Pennsylvania Dutch are the largest Low German-speaking population outside of Germany itself.
I have always enjoyed the movies about WWII. Mostly made from 41 thru the mid 50's. James Cagney played in some good ones, espionage behind enemy lines kind of movies. The movies here always shows Americans winning against the Germans. Yes we won the war, but lots of raids were lost by us. I always wondered, the war movies made in and shown in Germany, always portrayed them in a winning light.
Location: The place where the road & the sky collide
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Quote:
Originally Posted by madison999
Low German?
Platt Deutsche
My grandfather did not speak High German before coming to the US. In the area that he came from, the average person did not learn High German until after WWII.
I visited the area that he came from in the 90s. At that time there were still elderly people who did not speak High German. Some of them had picked up some American English because of the military bases in the area.
During WWI in Flat River, Missouri my Mother experienced first hand the mindless prejudice against citizens of German descent. My Grandpa was a 4th generation removed from Germany, Grandma was an 8th generation Acadian French descendant.
When the US declared war on Germany in 1917, the locals started running the German families out of town. My mom's family was allowed to stay for two reasons - 1) Grandma was from an old French family and 2) Grandpa was the only mechanic who knew how to keep the machinery running in the big lead mine.
Nonetheless, my mom's friends all turned on her, calling her the "bad names" of the day ("Kaiser Kid", Heinie, Kraut, etc.), was spit on, and ostracized for the most part. After Armistice Day, they all acted like nothing had happened and let her rejoin their crowd. Mom never forgot though.
When I lived in the upper Midwest and Amish started moving in I thought they spoke German as well until someone told me it was Pennsylvania Dutch. In the early 2,000's.
The term "Pennsylvania Dutch" is a misnomer -- a corruption of "Deutsch" or "Deutschland" (German or Germany). But the German diaspora was spread over many years and was very diverse. The Mennonites and their Amish cousins were very different from the Prussians, Hessians and Saxons, many of whom came after the failed revolution of 1848. And the dialects were different -- in the same way that the Spanish used in California differs somewhat from the idioma of the East Coast.
"Wie Gehts?" -- literally "How's it going?" Pottsville's John O'Hara had a comical character named Conrad "Wie Gehts" Yates in one of his novels.
Nescopeck, PA, (pop 2000) where I grew up, was at one time about 80 percent German-surnamed -- an enclave of sorts. But these were mostly better-assimilated East Germans. Pennsylvania was so heavily Germanic-influenced that state documents were required to be printed in both German and English until sometime in the mid-Nineteenth Century.
My Dad had a story about tensions in his thrown-together infantry company composed entirely of draftees during the Second World War. There were tensions, but they were mostly between soldiers with a rural or small-town background (often Southerners and usually Protestant) vs. mostly Catholic and Jewish urbanites. As a descendant, I'm very glad that that the war ended before that company could see combat.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 10-21-2016 at 11:15 PM..
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