Links from Wayles Browne (a regular visitor to this blog from far above Cayuga’s waters), attached to my Ancho Rabbit posting from yesterday, which I will now expand into a posting for Groundhog Day (2/2):
The BBC reports on Groundhog Day: it’s six more weeks of winter.
And of linguistic interest: a Pennsylvania Dutch poem about the groundhog and his, or rather her, day [the BBC report “How the Pennsylvania Dutch created Groundhog Day”; in PaDu, it’s die Grundsau ‘the groundsow’] (as read by Cornell’s old grad student Mark Louden).
— poem for Grundsaudaag —
Die Grundsau kummt gewehnlich raus am zwette Daag im Hanning;
— The groundhog usually comes out on the second day in February;
Vum Wedder wees sie meh wie mir un hot doch gaar ken Lanning.
— It knows more about the weather than we do and yet has no education.
Nau wann sie do ken Schadde sehnt, dann watt des Wedder widder schee,
— Now if it doesn’t see its shadow here, then the weather will get nice again,
Doch scheint die Sunn, dann wees sie schun, mer griege widder Schnee.
— But if the sun shines, then it knows we will get snow again.
About line 2: the groundsow is knowledgable about practical things, even though it has no learning (PaDu Lanning, borrowed from English).
This is how the PaDu see themselves, and they are proud of their cleverness. Meanwhile, the “English” around them (an ethnonym that embraces Americans of English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, and even Swiss extraction, and can be roughly glossed as ‘white non-Dutch’) tend to view the PaDu as ignorant rustics, as “the dumb Dutch”. Excellent farmers, with beautifully maintained farmsteads, the source of hearty peasant food and attractive folk crafts, but clannish and slow-witted. The PaDu kid in me, the son of a B.A. in Dairy Husbandry from Penn State, sneers back, “Have you people ever tried to run a farm, seeing to both crops and animals, maintaining the physical plant, running and maintaining heavy machinery, supervising workers, marketing your products, and keeping the books for the whole enterprise?”
My mother’s mother grew up on a tenant farm in Lancaster County PA, working in the fields (picking tobacco leaves to wrap cigars in) starting at the age of 5, going to school for only the 5 years then required by law, leaving to work full-time again. She grew up speaking only PaDu until she went to school, which was only in English. At school, and then in contact with the outside, “English” world — eventually, she had a long life as a domestic servant in Allentown PA, while raising three daughters on her own, after her husband died in the influenza pandemic of 1918 — she acquired great fluency in a very heavily PaDu-accented English. As clever servants will, she learned about how the world worked by watching. (At one point she learned a good bit about the criminal law by observing, in her spare time, trials in the local criminal court.)
She introduced me to opera (the Metropolitan Opera, on the radio; it happened that the first one up was Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, weird but mesmerizing), she introduced me to vaudeville (a lot of it definitely off-color), she introduced me to musical films with Busby Berkeley choreography, which she loved. She taught me how to get everywhere on public transportation. She spoke her mind firmly, often with great humor, and she loved me unconditionally.
So of course I adored her, this strange foreign person. (All my grandparents were strange foreign people, they all spoke some version of German, they all dressed like respectable European peasants, and I admired all of them.)
I’m ashamed now that never took the opportunity to learn to speak more than snippets of Pennsylvania Dutch and Swiss German, or at least to learn more about them. (Eventually, I learned to speak (standard) German, some in high school, then seriously at Princeton.) But well, you know, kids those days!
Meanwhile, today we celebrate the groundsow, agricultural pest and weathercreature.
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