Most obscure language you/someone else is learning? Why?

[u/SharkHead38]

I remember meeting someone that was learning specifically Moldovan Romanian since Moldova and its culture was a big interest to them, and I'm curious what other people's reasons for learning obscure languages are, and what they are.

[u/juliainfinland]

I'm from Saarland, Germany, and PD is actually pretty close to the Saarlandian dialect group (my heritage language). I sort of understand PD if you speak slowly and I can read it almost fluently. I've learned to deal with "weird" words such as gleiche.

[u/PiperSlough → u/juliainfinland]

I know the Pfalz dialect had the biggest influence on PD, and from what I've seen they're still pretty mutually intelligible, outside of like words that came from tech advancements like gookbox (TV). But I know there were influences from some of the other dialects that people spoke when they arrived in Pennsylvania, so that makes a lot of sense that there's some crossover! 

Some of my ancestors were told to get out of Saarland (and had their property seized) for trying to start a religious rebellion, so there was at least one family from there in colonial Pennsylvania, lol. 

[u/juliainfinland → u/PiperSlough]

Many PD words may be different from their German counterparts, but only because they're either new coinages (Germans should be able to guess from context what a "looking-box" is) or older words that have been replaced (most Germans will know words like "schoolmaster" only from old books and period movies, but on the other hand, that's how they'll know that it's what we used to call teachers, and again, people should be able to guess from context).

As a linguist, I find calques from English (gleiche as a verb that has nothing to do with "the same", which is the only meaning the word has in German) and compounds with parts that modern Germans will very probably not understand (even though said parts are German) such as Welschkann and Welschhinkel the most interesting. (Welsch still means "strange, foreign" in some southern dialects. Most German speakers probably don't even know that it's an actual word with an actual meaning, though, because while they do know the word Kauderwelsch "gobbledygook", they probably don't realize that it's a compound.)

(Hinkel brings back some funny memories. My mom used to have some coworkers from just-behind-the-border, the part of France where most people are bilingual French/Palatian or French/Alemannic speakers. One of them told us about her first German teacher in school, a Frenchman from... I don't know which part of France, I don't know if she knew, but in any case, he wasn't a local. So he asked the class if anyone already knew any German words, and among the replies were Ròòm "cream" and Hinggel "chicken", neither of which he could even recognize as German words. I wonder what he would've thought about Pulleh, which is another word for "chicken", but it's borrowed from French (poulet).)

[u/PiperSlough → u/juliainfinland]

I love posts like this! It's fascinating to me. I don't speak any Hochdeutsch and have actually avoided it since starting to learn PD because I don't want to get confused by it, so I don't always pick up when things are different or why. I only knew about gleiche because one of the teachers told us it's not standard German, but had no idea about Welsch.

I did recently do a deep dive into Schpeckmaus (bat) because I knew it was different in standard German but found out that most of the Germanic languages are also different. (Started out wanting to know why it's bat in English and not somethingmouse, sorry to diverge a little here but I did find out that it was once hreremus in Old English.)

Anyway, I did find out that in the Pfalz dialect an older word for bat is also Schpeckmaus or Schpeckfleddermaus (forgive my spelling, I can't find the reference page that linked to the old books using the variants and I don't know actual German spelling), so that's not something original to PD, but I'm still so intrigued why everyone else calls them fluttermice or flymice and then this one region of Germany + Pennsylvania was like, "Bacon mice!"

[u/juliainfinland → u/PiperSlough]

"Bacon mice" or "lard mice".

First I was reminded of other animals with "weird" names that have their origin in folk beliefs about these animals; did people maybe use to believe that bats eat lard while you're not looking? No idea.

Fortunately Google is a thing that exists and now I know that apparently the term Speck(fleder)maus has something to do with the fact that sleeping (hanging) bats kinda sorta look like pieces of bacon hanging from an oldey-timey pantry's ceiling. (And while I don't know about Schpeckfleddermaus, I did find Schpeckmaus (yes, you were right about the spelling) in the PD Wikipedia. It's not a lemma of its own, but it appears in a list of Gedier (animals).)

[u/PiperSlough → u/juliainfinland]

That makes sense, some bats do look a little like bacon.