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RE: The death of a productive day (Ulog #14)
Sounds like a good day. When you said Dutch classes, it made me think of my wife's family. Where I live, there is a strong Pennsylvania Dutch community, and they teach Pennsylvania Dutch, which is a butchered for low German. But they call it Pennsylvania Dutch. Thanks for sharing your day.
That's really interesting! Is it real Dutch (which does sound like a weird version of German)? Or a dialect that has evolved over time, like Afrikaans?
1783, Johann David Schopf (translation by Schopf 1911)
"The language which our German people make use of is a miserable, broken, fustian salmgundy of English and German, with respect both to the words and their syntaxis. Grown people come over from Germany forget their mother-tongue in part, while seeking in vain to learn the new speech, and those born in the country hardly ever learn their own language in an orderly way. The children of Germans, particularly in the towns, grow accustomed to English in the streets; their parents speak to them in one language and they answer in the other. The near kinship of the English and the German helps to make the confusion worse. If the necessary German word does not occur ot the memory, the next best English one is at once substituted, and many English words are so currently used as to be taken for German. In all legal and public business English is used solely. Thus English becomes indispensable to the Germans, and by contact and imitation grows so habitual that even among themselves they speak at times bad German, at times a worse English, for they have the advantage of people of other nationalities, in being masters of no language. The only opportunity the Germans have of hearing a set discourse in their own language, (reading being out of the question) is at church. But even there, the minister preaching in German they talk among themselves their bastard jargon. There are few isolated spots, for example in the mountains, where the people have less intercourse with English understand nothing but German, but speak none the better."
http://home.ptd.net/~tconrad1/dutch_history.html