applznorngz/linguistics

You Guys!

Referring to article below--- (crochet reef, collaborative art, Susan Boyle, loved ones...)

From Page:  
Dag:   A dag is technically the matted wool on a sheep's tail, but in typical useage throughout Australia, it refers to people who don't have a neat, tidy or cultured appearance. It can also refer to a person who tends to be quite informal.
It is not necessarily a derogatory term in modern useage, but almost always has negative connotations - ie " He's a real dag!" or as an adjective - " His clothes are daggy." Often it is used in relation to someone unfashionable.
The term "dag" is also a type of compliment as used between mates, both male and female. For example, "you dag" means you're a bud but your way of thinking sure is different from mine!
A real dag is the matted sheep droppings and dirt mixed with the wool on the sheep's backside. To clean the dags out of the wool means to clean the matted wool of droppings. It's also any long, dangling, matted part of the wool.
Dag may even refer to the long, matted, untidy and dirty parts of another animal's coat, e.g. dags on a long-haired dog, dags in a neglected horse's tail, etc.

Yes, in the old days, people were more flexible (?!?) Just kidding. My point is that people were more parochial then anyway. In the little towns around here, there was a grocery store for each nationality. Naturally, you went where your language was spoken.

From the Page: "Their study shows that until the late nineteenth century, and even into the early twentieth century, many German immigrants to that fine state still had not mastered English.

Germans made up that era's largest immigration wave to Wisconsin, which is the chief reason that the researchers focused on them. The researchers add, however, that another factor for this emphasis was because the Germans "really fit this classic view of the `good old immigrants' of the nineteenth century."

The researchers plowed through census data, court information, school records, newspapers, and all the other minutia that academics salivate over. When they were done, they had a linguistic record of German immigration to Wisconsin from the 1830s to the 1930s.

Their conclusion was that many immigrants felt no need to learn English at all, much less quickly, and that some of them, in the words of the researchers, "appeared to live and thrive for decades while speaking exclusively German."

In fact, as late as 1910 - decades after the initial wave of European immigration - German speakers still accounted for more than 20% of the population in several Wisconsin counties. Some second- and even third-generation residents (yes, even many born and raised in the United States) still spoke only German as adults.

The researchers point out that "after fifty or more years of living in the United States, many speakers in some communities remained monolingual." The researchers added that "this finding provides striking counter-evidence to the claim that early immigrants learned English quickly."

So apparently, whole swaths of America's heartland were overrun by people speaking devil languages (i.e., all languages except English) for decades. This is not exactly the instantaneous assimilation that we have been led to believe took place.
According to the researchers, many of those hard-working Gunthers and Schultzes of the past were “committed Americans. They participated in politics, in the economy, and were leaders in their churches and their schools. They just happened not to conduct much of their life in English…. There was no huge pressure to change.” Speaking only German “did not act as a barrier to opportunity in the work force.”

It’s a different story today. People who come to America and don’t learn English are doomed to perpetual lower-class status. Certainly, every effort should be made to ensure that residents get a grasp of English as soon as possible. I would argue, however, that insulting contemporary immigrants, indulging in fear mongering by claiming they won’t learn, and mythologizing a past that may not have existed are not the most effective ways to do this."