Stichwörter (Keywords):
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- Category: German culture and food
Not far from the German Settlement in St. Croix County and the bake house/smoke house that is still used for bread baking demonstrations is the German Settlement Cemetery. Be sure to visit it if you have time on your way through Hudson, Wisconsin sometime. It's set beautifully and is a peaceful reminder of where so many of us have come from (another place) and connects you with another time.
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- Category: German culture and food
Harald Schmidt, who has since given up his late night spot on German television, is to Germany was Letterman and Leno were to the US. He's also a Schwab, he's an incredible mimic and can reproduce pretty much any German dialect.
Here his Sprachkurs (Crashkurs) Schwäbisch.
If you're not yet familiar with Swabian, here's a comparison that should help you understand how it relates to German:
Swabian is to German as Creole is to North American English.
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- Category: German culture and food
Karneval is known as "die fünfte Jahreszeit" --the 5th season. It's known as Karneval, Fastnacht, or Fasching in many places in southern Germany.
Karneval is a big deal.
Their costumes are pretty fantastic, one of Heidi Klum's favorite things, and their costumes are no exception at the parade on Rosenmontag. But let's back up a few days and a few months to give you the best idea of Karneval.
It begins on November 11th at 11:11 a.m. because 11 is known as the "narrische Zahl," the fool's number, and continues through Faschingsdienstag, Fat Tuesday for Americans, the day before Aschermittwoch (Ash Wednesday).
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As a follow-up to yesterday's post Wer sind die Schwaben?, here's a wonderful little song, completely in Swabian and entrenched in the Swabian culture.
A few helps for understanding what they're singing:
-Swabians are really frugal, so frugal in fact, that they drop the final 'n' on a lot of words. Thus "Schwabenland" becomes "Schwabeland." "Mein" becomes "Mei." An exception to this is verbs and the final 'n' becomes a 't,' thus "sparen" (to save) becomes "sparet."
-"Wir" is pronounced as "mir" so "Mir sparet unser Geld" translates into German as "Wir sparen unser Geld."
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The Swabians are the people of Württemberg, which is part of the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. (The folk of the area of Baden are Badisch and their dialect is different.) Each area of Germany has its own characteristics and peculiarities, however since I spent a lot of time there, it's worth spending a bit of time getting to know these hard-working folk. They do not speak what you normally know of as "high German*," but they speak Swabian. It's a dialect far enough removed from Hochdeutsch that many Germans can't understand it.
While I didn't grow up speaking Swabian, I worked with a bunch of them in Stuttgart and picked up a lot of Swabian. I also discovered that I have Swabian ancestry! Des isch aber schee! (Das ist aber schön!)
Swabian is the English translation of "Schwaben." Die Schwaben. A few of their specialties are as follows:
1. Schaffen
Schaffen typically means something is being created, executed, or handled. Not to the Swabians. Schaffen means to work. And work they do. They have a phrase Schaffe, schaffe, Häusle baue: Work, work, build a house. And that's exactly what they do. They are not stereotypically but in reality a very hard-working people and they have a strong infrastructure and stable economy in Baden-Württemberg.
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