Scandinavian languages

[Rick Mc Callister]

	Pennsylvania Dutch, spoken by the Amish and other similar groups,
is more or less a "relic language" in that the vocabulary and not much else
are from the original language [mainly a mix of German dialects of the
Upper Rhine valley such as Swiss German, Swabian and Alsatian]. The syntax
and the morphology are principally from American English. I taught for a
while at a college in an Amish area and my colleague in German thought they
were pulling his leg until he heard little kids speaking it.

[snip]

>LARRY TRASK:
>> I might add that the well-known Pennsylvania tree for the IE family sees the
>> entire Germanic branch as having done something similar: this view sees
>> Germanic as having started off as part of an eastern cluster of IE
>>languages,
>> but then as having "migrated" (linguistically, I mean) into a western
>> cluster.  The authors' final decision is to put Germanic into a western
>> branch, but they explicitly acknowledge the inadequacy of this decision.

>If Germanic started off as part of an eastern IE cluster, then even today
>I would group it into this cluster to show its Eastern IE heritage.

[snip]