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

[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 :-)