[schoen]

I asked an LLM to help me find the standard German equivalent for "hooche Leit", and it said "hohe Leute" 'high people' (here in the sense of 'fancy people'), which of course doesn't have the same connotation, but that's the etymological sense.

[unkeen]

That would be "Höhergestellte" nowadays.

[em-bee]

"höhergestellte" are "superiors". "hohe leute" is more like "upper class people"

[panative]

That isn’t the sense it’s used in Pennsylvania at all. A side hill dirt farmer with one striped shirt he wears six days a week and goes to a Methodist church every Sunday and a mustache with his beard is “hoch” and a man who wears solid black and white with buttons and suspenders and no belt or mustache, drives a buggy to church at a district members house every other week and owns a mill that employs 500 people is a “Kirche/Plain” person.

[em-bee]

can you elaborate please? the way i read this it directly contradicts what you say here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48903436

“hooche Leit” is PA dialect for standard German “hohe Leute,” literally “high people” in the sense of “fancy” people

but that supports what i said, because upper class people are also fancy.

[wildfireday2]

“Fancy” is has a very specific meaning as as opposed to “plain” here and “upper class people are also fancy” is not generally true. “Plain” refers very specifically to lifestyle rules and modes of dress and sometimes speech adopted by conservative Anabaptists, most notably Amish, and historically, Quakers (very few of whom are meaningfully plain anymore although “simplicity” is still taught as a Quaker value). It has nothing to do with social class, there are many examples of plain peoples who were better off as a whole than their “fancy” neighbors. Fancy, in the context of plain people in America, is just anyone who lives according to the dominant culture or otherwise isn’t bound by the rules of plain people. Those being things like what kind of fasteners or colors you can have on your clothes, what kinds of hats men wear, head coverings and dress standards for women, etc., and for the Amish extending to bans on mains electricity, automobiles or self propelled vehicles, etc.

[ButlerianJihad]

Closely related, and not limited to the sects which you mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holiness_movement

[unkeen]

Traditionally, it also has the meaning of "Personen von höherem Stand", meaning upper class people.

[usrnm]

Or "high lede" in English

[carschno]

Apologies for being nit-picky, but there is no etymological sense. The output of your LLM has the same etymological root, but a different meaning. In terms of translation, it is therefore plain wrong.

Honestly, I was triggered to correct this comment mostly because it illustrates how we tend to explain away mistakes made by an LLM. It's not about subtle 'connotation', but the meaning is just incorrect. No offense meant to the poster, this is a trap the world has been falling into at scale for the past few years.

[panative]

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.

[lproven]

> the Ordnung

What does that mean?

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

[pantalaimon]

the Order, as in community sharing/following a set of rules

[panative]

As in understand it, the Ordnung are the rules themselves, but the rules are what create the community. They aren’t written down but they are collectively decided and determined and known within an individual district. Districts normally split due to growth rather than disagreements about the Ordnung but both can happen, and the Ordnung can develop differently from one district to another. An individual or family openly rejecting some aspect of the Ordnung can result in shunning/excommunication (though the intent is supposed to be for them to come back fully to the community, doesn’t have to be permanent, and it doesn’t always mean they are completely estranged).

[lproven]

Thank you!

[eythana]

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.

[schoen]

I don't think I understand your criticism.

The etymological sense of the Pennsylvania Dutch phrase is in fact, as far as I can tell, 'high people' or 'fancy people'. This is not the literal meaning or connotation of the phrase in Pennsylvania Dutch today. I did not think (and the LLM did not claim) that the phrase is used in Pennsylvania Dutch with this meaning, or that it was borrowed from standard German at any time. Essentially, the LLM helped me find recognizable cognates to understand how the phrase originated.

[pantalaimon]

I used my old fashioned bio neural net trained on standard German and also understood it that way. What else is it supposed to mean?