Preservings 11 (1997) - Plett Foundation

as they read other women’s accounts of what
they did during their pregnancies and births,
or what they might have done. Prospective parents
will find it is a valuable source of information
on what to expect and plan for. Those
who have had their children may be prompted
to re-think their own experiences and put them
into perspective. Men will have opened to them
a world they have traditionally avoided or been
excluded from, and will be the richer for having
the adventure.
Katherine Martens and Heidi Harms have
done a great service in allowing us to hear
these female voices. In western civilization,
it is the men who have done the public speaking;
In Her Own Voice helps to redress that
imbalance.
Reviewed by Ralph Friesen, Winnipeg
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Randy Kehler, Kehler 1808-1997 (Box
20737, Steinbach, R0A 2T2, Manitoba, 1997),
107 pages. Private edition. A limited number
of copies are available from the author at
$35.00.
What do you do, and where do you start
when you want to write a family history
where both the patriarch, Peter Kehler (1836-
76), and his father, Gerhard Kehler (1808-
77), died within two years of arriving in
Canada. These were the questions which
HSHS board member, Randy Kehler, asked
himself several years ago before he started
the research for this book.
The answer, obviously, was dig, research
and then dig some more. The result, Randy
has traced the family back to Michael Kähler
(b. 1732) and has developed biographical profiles—albeit
brief—of both Peter Kehler and
his father. Some of the treasures which he unearthed
include the 1870 “No. 5 Thielungs
Kontrak” of the Bergthaler Waisenamt covering
the estate settlment made for the children
at the death of Peter’s first wife, Aganetha
Groening Kehler. Another find was the original
Russian passport of Peter Kehler. Copies
of both of these documents have been reproduced
in the book.
Title page of Kehler 1808-1997. The children of
Johann and Maria Kehler.
Preservings
The rest of the book consists of a section
for each of the five children of Peter Kehler
(1836-76) with a listing of their descendants
and short historical annotations. Short biographies
of each of the children were published
by Randy Kehler, “Peter Kehler (1836-76),
Blumengard,” in Preservings, No. 9, December
1996, pages 30-31.
Randy Kehler deserves much credit for the
time and effort he spent researching this book
and also publishing it from his own resources.
I know that young writers sometimes wonder
if their efforts are truly worthwhile and appreciated.
I hope that members of the Kehler family,
who were fortunate that Randy took up the
call to complete this book for them, will find
ways to express their gratitude.
The book will certainly be a valuable addition
to the growing literature about the Kehler
family and the village of Blumengard where
Peter Kehler (1836-76) established his young
family in 1875, Only little did Peter realize how
soon he would find his rest in the soil which he
had newly broken.
Reviewed by Delbert Plett
_____
Reuben Epp, The Spelling of Low German
& Plautdietsch (The Reader’s Press. Hillsboro,
Kansas, 1996). 167 pp. US$ 12.95 ISBN 1-
9638494-1-7
Plautdietsch once seemed doomed to the
dustbin of history, but now Lawrence
Klippenstein in his cover comment on The
Spelling of Low German can boldly proclaim
it as “solidly undergird(ing) the Low German/
Plautdietsch renaissance which is underway
now in North America and in other parts of
the world.” This renaissance is evident in the
dramatic rise in Plautdietsche Owents in our
Steinbach area, from none twenty years ago,
to at least five a year in 1997. Over two thousand
attended the run of Jeschaftsmaun, the
Plaut-play of Paraguayan writer Erdmann
Harder, in its tour of southern Manitoba this
fall. Do not write off Plautdietsch prematurely.
This new book by a respected scholar of
our language is therefore very timely, because
those of us working with literary forms in
Plautdietsch desperately need a consensus on
its spelling. In The Story of Low German and
Plautdietsch, Epp renewed our pride in a venerable
language that was the dominant speech
of northern Europe in the Hanseatic period of
medieval times; in this book he tackles the
thorny problem of the principles best used in
its spelling.
Jack Thiessen’s 1977 Mennonitische
Wörterbuch had the very spiritual goal “of promoting
a unique sense of
Gemeindschaft...(with) a world which I experienced
and of which one could say: it still had
a semblance of happy order.” He is therefore
content to describe his orthographic principle
as a necessary compromise between the phonetic
and the phonemic. At a meeting of Mennonite
linguists and writers at the University
of Winnipeg in 1982, we attempted to standard-
102
ize the spelling of Plautdietsch following basic
principles of High German. The success of this
was demonstrated in A Sackful of Plautdietsch,
where easy recognition of word images made
the stories easy to read. This was enhanced
when Herman Rempel’s 1984 edition of Kjenn
Jie Noch Plautdietsch used this orthography
with only minor exceptions. (However, the
Arnold Dyck family did object to the substitution
of this standard for the original Dyck spellings.
Rueben Epp’s The Spelling of Low German
and Plautdietsch explores the problems
others had struggled with, and advances the
cause of standard spelling significantly. He
differentiates between those writers who see
Low German as a separate language, and
those who see it as a dialect. He believes that
if we present it as a separate language, we
will make idiosyncratic choices of spelling
that will be radically different from other
writing, and so separate us from the mainstream
of Low German. Writers in English
have faced the same problem. So Hardy presents
his Dorset, and Twain his Southern
Negro dialect, in a non-standard English orthography
that makes it hard to read. If, on
the other hand, we see Plautdietsch as a dialect
of Low German, the 300,000 users of
Plaut can be in audible and visible harmony
with the phonetic structures of the millions
who write in Low German. Then it becomes
possible to achieve the modestly stated aim
of this book-”to investigate and advance the
possibility of establishing a uniform
Plautdietsch orthography”.
To this end, Epp proposes acceptance of
the guidelines formulated in 1956 by
Johannes Sass. Within this framework, a consistent
spelling would provide easy word recognition.
At the same time, regional variations
would be accommodated as they are in
every written language. Prince Philip can still
say ‘pleazha’ where ordinary Canadians read
`pleasure’ (9.) But our Kjleeda would be in
visible harmony with Low German forms
such as Kleder, Kleddasch, Kleeder, or
Kleeda. Using ‘Tj’ may be more satisfying
to some Molochnaya ears, but it is visually
confusing.
The greatest usefulness of this book will
come in the collection of 30,000 Plautdietsche
words that form the last section, and which
exemplify the Sass principles Epp proposes we
use. We may disagree with some details- I see
‘Jch’ as essential in many words such as
‘sajcht’- here rendered ‘sagt’. Perhaps a cultural
event of the magnitude of Luther’s or of
the King James translations of the Bible, which
established the precedence of High German and
of London English may come along for
Plautdietsch. But till then we need to set personal
preferences aside for the sake of uniformity,
or our potential readers will find the reading
of our language too difficult to attempt regularly.
Reviewed by Wilmer Penner.
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