The book will be a welcome addition to the library of academics and lay people alike, as it fills an obvious lacuna in the story of the
Low German Mennonites and in Canadian transnational history more generally.
Relations between the
Low German words for 'May' and 'May tree'
In case of dubious Estonian Swedish loans either a Swedish source is possible (tups 'tassel'), or Swedish or Finland Swedish (holm 'reef), Finland Swedish (rool 'steering wheel'),
Low German (viik 'bay'), Baltic German (karbus 'hood'),
Low German or Baltic German (porss 'gale'), or Finnish (pass 'ram').
In the case of the linguistic minorities of
Low German and Frisian, several Lander are involved, while the Sorbs, divided into two quite different dialects or rather languages, inhabit two Lander, one of which, Sachsen, seems more interested in the support of its High Sorbians, while the Land of Brandenburg is passive in its attitude to the weaker, and more complicated case of the Low Sorbians, who inhabit the watery and lignite-extracting areas of Eastern Brandenburg (Oeter, Walker 2006).
Low German, beyond public school and church systems alike, could not become a commodified language within the English, capitalist economy which eventually surrounded and for the most part assimilated rural Mennonite village culture (Francis 1955, Loewen 1993, Warkentin 2000).
It originally was drafted in
Low German in 1528 by Johannes Bugenhagen (1485-1558), who also produced similar documents for Hamburg (1529) and Lubeck (1531).
Wiebe is at his most original, however, in the area of language, thanks to the fact that he grew up speaking three languages almost interchangeably:
Low German at home and with neighbours, High German at church and on formal occasions, and English at school and increasingly among friends as he grew older.
Instead he prefers to consider Scandinavia at that time as a large language region based on spoken variants of
Low German, rather than the specific languages, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian.
I will not contest their claim that the still comparatively
low German wage spread has to do with German institutions of industrial relations and their high stability.
Currency changes hit the company both because of the strength of sterling and the fact that
low German domestic steel prices were setting those in the rest of Europe.
The final essay sorts out the almost unbelievable complications of the various redactions (in Latin and Middle
Low German) of St Birgitta's Revelations and the final transformation of that work into a somewhat diminished treatise of edification and stimulation of christian virtue.