3. TIL the Italian words widely used in New Jersey differ greatly from mainstream I...

TIL the Italian words widely used in New Jersey differ greatly from mainstream Italian today not because of bad "copying" but because the words came from people speaking an Italian dialect that subsequently died out in Italy

Also German-Russians... I love sharing info about them

They were mostly Catholics and Mennonites, they had Oregon Trail'd from Germany to Russia with the covered wagons and everything in the 1700s under a free religion, land lease, and retention of German citizenship offer from Catherine the Great. It was about a year long journey over 2000 miles. The settlers could farm and work the land they moved to for free, but never owned it.

A lot of them came from areas greatly affected by the 30-years war, and I think the land they settled had been taken by the Russians by killing a lot of natives.

They lived there for about 150 years in their own communities in what is today Moldova and Western Ukraine all the way to Odessa. Then, Alexander III started conscripting, killing, or deporting them. So a lot of them came to the USA with the Homestead Act which allowed them to actually own the land if they farmed it for a period of time.

They would punish the kids for speaking German because they wanted them to become assimilated into American culture so they'd never have to flee their Heimat again. The little bits of German we know from our grandparents isn't very understandable by German speakers...

Bonus story: I researched for a long time and eventually found a very very distant relative. It was my 9th great-grandfather's sister's 7th great-grandson. He was living in Germany so I asked what happened to his family when we left to the USA. He said his family stayed in Russia and was deported to Siberia. After that, they were deported to Kazakhstan. He said that with Gorbachev and Perestroika, his family was finally able to move back to Germany after some 250 years and nearly 1/3 of that in Siberia/Kazakhstan.

Here is a really good video documentary about the German-Russians. There are a bunch of videos on youtube if you search german-russians or germans from russia.

/r/todayilearned Thread Parent Link - nj.com
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