Mice and lice

On the "funny language" border.

We kind of owe you a few lines about the "funny language" mentioned as a crucial trait of the folks in our post "Hillbillies R us".

In some of the smaller towns around here, time has passed very slowly, leaving largely intact very old language patterns.

As a native speaker of English listening in on the locals, you might pick up some words and wonder if your ears are playing a trick on you.

If it sounds like "(h)our", chances are it really is the unit of time of "sixty minutes" on that wall clock.  And when a farmer talks about "mice" in the barn or "lice" on the dog, you can nod in sympathy (standard German for these is "Mäuse" and "Läuse") as he is describing two common pests.

In one place you can hear "dat" (indeed, this and that), whereas a mile over, they say "das" -- as seen in the VW car commercial "Das Auto".

These language patterns, dialects unless you live in Luxemburg (where they insist it is a language in its own right), indicate some of the changes that make modern German sound the way it does today. In some instances, a change remained inexplicably "incomplete". As if the people living in the 8th or so century had decided to apply the change to one syllable in a word and then decided to stop, thus creating a meandering linguistic boundary of "partially changed" words.

This post is not a forum for detailed linguistic discourse (please read as: we are lazy), but we do want to give you one example of this using the word "pepper".

In order to be standard German, all the instances of "p" in Pepper will need to display a shift of the "p" to "pf" at the beginning of the word and "f" inside the word.

In English, it is "pepper", in Dutch "peper", in modern German it is "Pfeffer", and then somewhere in the hills around here, you can find "peffer". The normal shift of the "p"s in the middle of the word happened, but the shift at the beginning (from p to pf) never did.

Maybe we should not be surprised about the persistence of "incomplete" shifts. Despite the changing ethnic makeup of the population, despite modern education homogenizing language, the old lines are still there -- like the foundations of the Roman villa in the woods.