Quaint Idioms and Expressions of the Pennsylvania Germans

[topaz]

This is one of the booklets that keyne  is preparing to get rid of.  After looking it over I may have to veto getting rid of it.

It is by A. Monroe Aurand, Jr.  The cover page tells me that he also wrote "Little Known Facts About the Amish and the Mennonites", "Little Known Facts About Bundling in the New World", &c.  (I can barely imagine what the "&c" might include.)

Some of the words in here have entered the common lexicon -- "slobber", "dunk", "dummkopf", "befuddle".  Some, well...

"Don't be so darn DOBBICH."
"Now I'm FERSHPRITZED!"
"Don't K'NOATCH the cat so!"
"Teacher was so FARTZOON'D at the way the boys behaved when the superintendent came."
"My man G'SHNORRIX'D so loud he waked up everybody."
"Kids at that age are so NIXNOOTZICH."

I'm going to have to start using these around work.

"Dude, take a look at this function Jon wrote.  I love it!  It's totally MARICKWAERDICH."
"Oh, crud, not another NIDDERTRECHTICHA netdeploy bug."
"Yeah, you can go ahead and use that machine.  It's all OUSGABOOTZ'D."

Edit: keyne informs me that she already promised this treasure to beowabbit. It's a relatively short pamphlet -- I'll probably just Xerox a copy to save for myself. :-)


Edit 2: The full text is available online! I can't think why I didn't Google for it in the first place.

Comments

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Heh. Almost yiddish. :) (I'd love to see it. Bring to baitcon?)

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

My thoughts exactly. On both counts. ;-)

Oy, such SHPILKES I have. Can't wait to see everyone.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Sure! Though lhn reminded me that this thing might actually be online, and in fact it turns out it is: http://www.horseshoe.cc/pennadutch/culture/language/idioms.htm

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Though that says "excerpted from", so it may not have the full text.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Little Known Facts About Bundling in the New World (http://www.fortklock.com/bundling.htm)

They tell this story pretty well over the entire country.

It is about a candidate for sheriff some years ago. The office-seeker came to a rural home late in the afternoon. He inquired whether he could obtain a meal, and lodging for the night. The reply was that he could have both. The supper was a fine one, and the candidate was in excellent humor.

As was customary in those days, folks went to bed rather early, and on announcing that he believed he would be off to bed, if they would tell him where to sleep, he'd retire.

The farmer said: "We don't have much room, but you can sleep with the hired girl."

The candidate replied that he was a married man, and a candidate, too, and that if it became generally known throughout the county that he had slept with a hired girl during his campaign, that some constituents might misconstrue his motives and manners; could he have no other place to sleep? The farmer said the only other place he could think of was in the barn.

So rather than chance it to sleep with the hired girl on account of what might have happened to him, and his campaign, he decided on the barn.

Early next morning he heard the hired girl come into the cow stable to let out the cows.

After milking one or two, she came back to release a bull which had become restless, leading him to one of the cows. The story goes that the old bull sniffed around a bit, turning his head, and drawing away. This infuriated the maid, and she yelled at the bull in evident disgust: "What the devil's a-matter with you? Are you a candidate for sheriff, too?"

[sconstant.livejournal.com]

is K'NOATCH "nudge" or is NIXNOOTZICH "nudgy"? Seems like it should be one or the other.

Very close to Yiddish "Aus ge[...]zd" is something I grew up with, though with other things in the middle.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

The first reminds me of Standard German knutschen, which means "snog, make out". I'm not sure how far back this usage goes, however, and perhaps the original meaning is something like "squeeze". The second is a variation of Standard nichtsnutzig "good for nothing", from nichts "nothing" and Nutz "use, profit". (Cf. Nichtsnutz "ne'er-do-well".)

Several of them, however, I can't related to anything I know. What's the root of FARTZOON'D? No idea!

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

K'NOATSCH is defined elsewhere as "hug," though in this example "squeeze" does sound like it makes more sense.

[lcohen]

yes me too, re "aus ge [stuff]."

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

This looks like some of the words they used to use in MAD Magazine. :)

(I know, those were probably distorted Yiddish, but the image of Bill Gaines going in disguise among the Amish makes me giggle.)

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

I had a very amusing convo with keyne about this. A lot of the words in the pamphlet are clearly related to or derived from Yiddish, and it's full of FERSH- words (FERSHPRITZ'D, FERSHMEER'D, FERSHTICKED), but it does not include FERSHLUGGINER. I concluded that FERSHLUGGINER must have been one of the words that Don Knuth made up in his early MAD Magazine contributions. keyne assured me that yes, FERSHLUGGINER really is a real word even if it doesn't appear in "Quaint Idioms, &c."

[keyne.livejournal.com]

Turns out I was half-right. While it appears in some Yiddish glossaries and is plausibly derived from Yiddish farshlogn, indications of its origins say "Yinglish", "mock Yiddish", and ... "mid-1950s". :}

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I don't think you'd have a case for showing that any of these words was "derived from" Yiddish unless you could show evidence of prominent Jewish families among the early settlers in the area. Little actual Yiddish infiltrated mainstream German vernaculars and then mostly through the medium of Rotwelsch, a form of thieves' cant found chiefly in the urban underworld--as I understand it, not a substantial source of early Amish migration to Pennsylvania!

The common Standard German prefix ver- is actually pronounced "fehr-" (German v only sounds like English v in borrowed vocabulary) and there are a lot of verbal roots beginning in "sh" because of the universal palatalisation of /s/ before consonants in the dialects undergirding Pälzisch (the chief basis of Pennsylvania Dutch), Standard German, and Yiddish. Standard German equivalents for FERSHPRITZ'D, FERSHMEER'D, and FERSHTICKED would be, respectively, verspritzt, verschmiert, and verstückt.

[keyne.livejournal.com]

The common Standard German prefix ver- is actually pronounced "fehr-" (German v only sounds like English v in borrowed vocabulary) and there are a lot of verbal roots beginning in "sh"...

Oh, believe me, I explained that part at length :-)

[beowabbit]

Well, you’re welcome to keep it. I can bookmark the copy on the web just as easily as you can. :-)

"Little Known Facts About Bundling in the New World"

I am pretty sure I have a copy of this floating around somewhere.

[jostajam.livejournal.com]

Most of the idioms made sense to me.... Mostly I had to decipher the strange spelling.
DOBBICH - I have no clue
FERSHPRITZED - sweaty
K'NOATCH - squish from knautsch
FARZOON'D - Ticked off verzoent
GSHNORRIX'D - I just try to fall asleep before my guy starts schnarching
NIXNOOTZICH - Useless or nicht nuetzlich

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Wow, very good! DOBBICH apparently means "awkward" and is derived from doplich.

[(Anonymous)]

My Great Uncle, though he lived in the USA for 40 years, would mix German with english all the time. My favorite was "*&^^%#$@@@ !!! I have my finger in the auto door gebanged!!!!!!"

[rsc.livejournal.com]

A sort of introductory linguistics book that was used as a textbook in my 8th grade had a little section on "Pennsylvania German" (which it explained very carefully was not Dutch) contained an example that has stuck in my mind ever since (i.e., since before any of you were born):

Die Kuh is ivver die Fence gejumpt und das Graut gedamaged.

(I have to say that "gedamaged" is a particularly felicitous coinage.)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I have a lovely gem of a book titled Die schoenste Laengvidge which is studded with examples of promiscuous English-German code-switching from the early years of the 20th century. (I particularly like "Dann wird bei uns hausgecleant.") Mencken also has some plum examples in The American language.