PENSYLVANIA 107 



and trade (certain and uncomplicated) to any difficult 

 pestering with books. 



The language which our German people make use of 

 is a miserable, broken, fustian salmagundy of English 

 and German, with respect both to the words and their 

 syntaxis. Grown people come over from Germany 

 forget their mother-tongue in part, while seeking in 

 vain to learn the new speech, and those born in the 

 country hardly ever learn their own language in an 

 orderly way. The children of Germans, particularly in 

 the towns, grow accustomed to English in the streets ; 

 their parents speak to them in one language and they 

 answer in the other. The near kinship of the English 

 and the German helps to make the confusion worse. 

 If the necessary German word does not occur to the 

 memory, the next best English one is at once substi- 

 tuted, and many English words are so currently used 

 as to be taken for good German. In all legal and 

 public business English is used solely. Thus English 

 becomes indispensable to the Germans, and by contact 

 and imitation grows so habitual that even among them- 

 selves they speak at times bad German, at times a worse 

 English, for they have the advantage of people of other 

 nationalities, in being masters of no one language. 

 The only opportunity the Germans have of hearing a 

 set discourse in their own language, (reading being 

 out of the question) is at church. But even there, the 

 minister preaching in German they talk among them- 

 selves their bastard jargon. There are a few isolated 

 spots, for example in the mountains, where the people 

 having less intercourse with the English understand 

 nothing but German, but speak none the better. The 

 purest German is heard in the Moravian colonies. As 



