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panativetoday at 7:43 AM2 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

lproventoday at 10:37 AM

> the Ordnung

What does that mean?

(This entire thread is very hard for this Brit to follow. So many unknown words and whole concepts.)

show 1 reply
eythanatoday at 8:31 PM

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.