#491 words

Mazin stared at the stars above him. He couldn’t really make out many of them, with all the lights of the campus, but it was a calming thing. Remind yourself you are just a tiny spec in the universe. Find focus… balance…

Ding.

… or a message. That’s fine, too.

He fished the phone out and wondered whom he possibly didn’t blacklist and still called him at such an early hour. It was barely nine.

[This will be the last letter I look at. Otherwise, my family history book would end up taking up half of my language journal entries.]

This letter, dated significantly later than Peter and Henry's, is completely written in English. Note the change in the last name's spelling from 'Schrack' to 'Schrock,' perhaps done deliberately as an attempt to have more of an Englishy spelling.

This English is very...well, German. I assume H.P. Schrock learned German as a first language and English as a second language. I also assume he was not formally educated based on the fact that he was a (probably poor) Amish farmer.

Schrock neglects punctuation and spacing in some places, and he writes several sentences that lack subject-verb agreement (such as 'How is your Colts doing...' and 'Sleds runs hard'). These writing quirks could be an indication of several things: his education level, different or fewer standards during the time period, or his dialect.

German Influence?

Right away, one notices Schrock's weird capitalization habits. Especially interesting is the fact that he capitalizes many definite and indefinite articles; this is not characteristic of German standards. I should look into this further to find out where this may originate.

He really exposes how German he is when he writes 'hast' instead of 'have.' Curiously, going by the standard, this is the wrong German conjugation of the word.

Spelling

The most interesting thing about this letter is the way Schrock spells words. It looks like his spelling has no rhyme or reason until you consider the influence of German.

Almost constantly, Schrock uses a 'd' in place of a 't' (mostly at the ends of words). He does this with 'god'/'got,' 'twedy'/'twenty,' 'wasend'/'wasn't,' and the list goes on. This is because in German, a letter 'd' that comes at the end of words is almost always pronounced with the 't' sound.

He sometimes uses the letter 's' instead of 'z' ('blissard'/'blizzard,' 'frosen'/'frozen'). Once again, this is thanks to the influence of German pronunciation, where the letter 's' is sometimes pronounced with more of a 'z' sound.

For many words that have double consonants, he spells them with one ('I'll' as 'Il,' 'stuff' as 'stuf,' 'express' as 'Expres,' 'guess' as 'ges'...). These spelling errors may come about because German typically only has double consonants in certain arrangements of vowels and consonants.

Schrock leaves out a silent 'e' in 'come.' The German language doesn't have silent letters. If the word 'come' was German, it would be pronounced 'komə.'

Also, his spelling of 'wedding' makes me smile.

P.A. Dutch?

I do not see any hints of P.A. Dutch in this letter, but this is probably because I am not very familiar with the language and therefore am more likely to overlook things. There may be some overlap with the German and P.A. Dutch influence.