Abstract

Among the various dialects established in colonial America, Pennsylvania German occupies a unique position. As a non-English dialect, located in the midst of notably different varieties of col­ loquial English, it absorbed and preserved a number of features of English which have since become obsolete, substandard, or at least strictly regional.1 An examination of English loan words in Pennsylvania German, therefore, permits us to make certain enlightening conjectures as to the manner in which loan words such as these are to be studied and evaluated. In an article published in 1938, Professor Herbert Penzl dis­ cussed the preservation in Pennsylvania German of an early modern English pronunciation of Middle English a before r.2 His study reminds us, among other things, of two very significant facts: (1) a given dialect, existing and operating within a struc­ tural system of its own, tends to perpetuate its loan words in the same form in which they were borrowed, or at least in a form com­ patible with its own development; and (2) archaisms, preserved as loan words in such a dialect, often become legitimized as “na­ tive” forms once they are dissociated from their bilingual equiva­ lents. In this connection, we note that a non-English dialect such as Pennsylvania German is not subject to the same corrective influences as an English dialect in an area where English is the standard language. Penzl was particularly interested in the Pennsylvania German pronunciation of such words as start and parlor, where the a is frequently pronounced as a low-front vowel. Although the quality of this vowel varies a good deal, there is little doubt that the Pennsylvania German pronunciation is a genuine archaism, a specimen of earlier English in fossilized form, and not merely an adaptation of one phonemic system to another.3 Penzl’s reluctance

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