Low German

We Don't Want to Fight, But By Jingo, If We Do, was in some measure saved by the vigor and unanimity with which the chorus was thrown forth into the night.

I observed a Plattdeutsch mason, entirely innocent of English, adding heartily to the general effect.

And perhaps the German mason is but a fair example of the sincerity with which the song was rendered, for nearly all with whom I conversed upon the subject were bitterly opposed to war, and attributed their own misfortunes, and frequently their own taste for whiskey, to the campaigns in Zululand and Afghanistan.

Every now and again, however, some song that touched the pathos of our situation was given forth, and you could hear by the voices that took up the burden how the sentiment came home to each.

The absence of this linguistic knowledge could not disturb our confidence.

At the worst one could make shift to carry it off with Plattdeutsch.

Footnote.

The low German dialect which is the home tongue of many of the German seamen.

The absence of this linguistic knowledge could not disturb our confidence.

At the worst one could make shift to carry it off with Plattdeutsch.

Footnote.

The low German dialect which is the home tongue of many of the German seamen.

But they all speak Hochdeutsch.

And many of these people have a Plattdeutsch vernacular, which is really, really quite different.

That's the first thing.

Yeah, I don't know the difference between those two.

We don't want to fight, but by jingo, if we do, was in some measure saved by the vigor and unanimity with which the chorus was thrown forth into the night.

I observed a Plattdeutsch mason, entirely innocent of English, adding heartily to the general effect.

And perhaps the German mason is but a fair example of the sincerity with which the song was rendered, for nearly all with whom I conversed upon the subject were bitterly opposed to war, and attributed their own misfortunes, and frequently their own taste for whiskey, to the campaigns in Zululand and Afghanistan.

Every now and again, however, some song that touched the pathos of our situation was given forth, and you could hear by the voices that took up the burden how the sentiment came home to each.

Yeah.

The, the thought is it came from Middle English, um, or from Low German, commonly spoken German or Dutch, like heyday or hedar.

Um, and then in the late 1500s, it began to mean, um, a state of wild excitement, high spirits or youthful passion.

Shakespeare wrote about the heyday in the blood in Hamlet to describe the pulsing heat and passion of youth.

Gerhard was a teacher, newspaper editor, broadcaster, and storyteller.

Originally written and told in the Low German language, Entz's story, titled The First Threshing in Canada, 1876, paints an historic but fictional picture of the first grain harvest for Mennonites who had arrived in southern Manitoba just two years earlier.

Gerhard's story is told through the eyes of 10-year-old Henry.

papa don't people in this land ever take time to thresh their grain papa was silent as usual little henry couldn't bear the long pauses between his questions and papa's answers While waiting, Henry fondly reflected on his former home in the Kronstal village of Gortyts colony in Imperial Russia.

His dad had owned a large farm and eight big strong horses.

Papa had grown wheat, rye, barley and oats and then mowed the ripened grain, let it dry and threshed it.

They'd worked with a horse-powered threshing machine called a Drachmaschine in Low German.

Pairs of horses walking in a circle turned a large wheel that powered the machine.

We're actually fairly closely related to German in that we are West Germanic languages.

Yeah, us, the Low Countries languages like Dutch, Flemish, Low German as well, closely related to English and indeed Old English.

I've said this before and I stand by it.

I think a German has a better chance of understanding Old English than a modern English speaker, just because it had the three grammatical genders, the same phonetics.

So I just made note of that.

But I, I was ready to go home, and I was walking out the door, and the dad of the little girl that passed away came, and, and he's barely spoke any English, kind of this broken Low German and had a translator there to help.

But he asked if I would mind running by his sister's house, who had two little babies, eight-month-olds, I believe they were, twin boys, baby babies, had measles, super sick, respiratory distress, were in the parking lot of the small little emergency room, the hospital in that county, the little rural county hospital, waiting to be seen apparently for forty-five minutes is what they were told me, and were worried the babies were deteriorating.

They couldn't be seen, or they were-- it was a long wait.