The Pennsylvania German Dialect PDF Download

Excerpt from The Pennsylvania German Dialect This study of the Pennsylvania German dialect dates from the year 1884, and is, so far as the author is aware, the first attempt to offer an exhaustive scientific treament of any American-German dialect. Its only predecessor, Haldeman's Pennsylvania Dutch (Phila. 1872), was of a more general and descriptive character. After having collected the most valuable printed matter in the dialect, the author made repeated tours into various portions of eastern Pennsylvania, in order to study the peculiarities of the spoken dialect. In the year 1885 he went to the Rhenish Palatinate (Rheinpfalz) and acquainted himself with the speech of the old home of the Palatines (Pfalzer). Thus a point of view was gained from which comparisons could be made. As a pioneer attempt the work had to contend with many difficulties, the most serious of which was the fixing of a consistent phonetic orthography. When such was finally adopted, it could not be consistently carried out for lack of suitable type. Hence it was necessary to substitute v for the voiced spirant b with a stroke; y for the intervocalic palatal g. The general plan of the work includes two parts. Part I (consisting of articles reprinted from the Am. Jour. Phil., Vol. IX, 1-4 and X, 3) contains chapters on Ethnography, Phonology, Inflection, Syntax, English Mixture. Part II will treat of German Mixture and Etymology. The material here presented has been carefully sifted. The examples are quoted from original sources. The critical portions of the work have passed under the eye of one "to the manor born." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.