Our Amish Language

31 points by NaOH 4 hours ago | 9 comments

I've had a bit of fun working with low resource languages (aboriginal australian), and enjoying the result from Facebook's No Language Left Behind project -> https://huggingface.co/facebook/nllb-200-distilled-600M

I'd recommend giving it a squiz. (I assume Amish has a large corpus)

woodruffw 38 minutes ago |

I really enjoyed this article. I grew up with a small amount of a similarly uncommon (outside of religious groups) Germanic language, one that I’ve learned more of as an adult, and many of the experiences (around struggling to get people to speak it, even when they know it) ring true.

> I grew up using this term, but upon encountering Louden’s work, I learned that “dialect” often functions more as an insult than a linguistically useful designation.

A shprakh iz a dyalekt mit armey un flot!

schoen 2 hours ago |

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.

carschno 7 minutes ago | |

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.

usrnm 1 hour ago | |

Or "high lede" in English

unkeen 1 hour ago | |

That would be "Höhergestellte" nowadays.

jibal 1 hour ago |

I'm frequently struck by the immense amount of misdirected and wasted human energy and accomplishment because of religion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zenr4iGTykU

P.S. Strawmen in the responses. This is an accurate description of a thought that I genuinely have often had, and it should be clear why this article brought it to mind yet again--I didn't claim to be addressing the content about linguistics. I'm certainly not about to defend capitalism (me, a lifelong socialist) or any of the s/religion/.../ whataboutism or otherwise engage in debate here. I hope people will watch the Hitchens video ... it is at least something to think about and HN is about curiosity, I'm told.

dagss 41 minutes ago | |

Do you feel current western capitalistic culture is perfect and the peak of what humanity can accomplish?

There should be more, not less, experiments in alternative ways of life. I wish there was a lot more examples because we desperately need to change some things and some people need to be first.

As a non-American I don't know much about amish and there could be atrocities I am unaware of, but from what little I know I have always respected Amish for daring to be different, and for living sustainable and not contributing to climate change.

If you trade their belief in God with increased CO2 emissions -- why would that be a rational change to their culture?

So who are really misdirected humans? I would say those who sacrifice the planet on the altar of numbers stored in computer systems in banks...

Reading tip for you is "Sapiens" of Harari. Don't worry, he's an atheist, but he may contribute a more nuanced view on the role of religion in human culture (and he names capitalism as a religion too).

drdaeman 1 hour ago | |

This is about language, though. Religious oddities are merely the background.

sooperserieous 1 hour ago | |

s/religion/text editors/

s/religion/sponsors/

s/religion/politics/

s/religion/nationalism/

s/religion/insecurity/

s/religion/intolerance/

...