Maybe it is GermAn???
Gosh...I feel silly.
it is an OLd Dutch song...but in reading a few paragraphs later...the people who would be singing it are German. So maybe Dutch origin--but GermN words? I'm not familiar with either language.
Here is quoted text so that maybe someone can shed some light:
"Perhaps you would like to know the rest of the lullaby that Gertrude Van Alstyne sings in this story. It is a real old Dutch song, and lots of mothers sang it to their children up and down the Hudson valley and in And around Albany in 1757, when New York State was still a British Colony, when the French were still leading Indians out of Canada against the settlers, and when the raid that came all the way to Guilderland, just outside Albany city, took place.
This is the way the song goes:
'Trip a trop a troenje;
De varken en de boenjan,
De koejen en de klaver,
De paardje en de haver,
De kalfie en de langen gras,
De eenjen en de vater-plas;
So groet myn klyne pappatje vas.'"
it translates it and then says:
"The Van Alstynes were real people. Teunis was a Dutchman, as most of the early settlers round Albany were."
His wife is Gertrude and she was a Palentine. It states that her people
originTed in Palatinate along the Upper part of the Rhine river in Germany.
I'm not sure if the song was "real old" by 1757...or...since this is a children's novelette...if that the author is saying it is real old in present day
the only German...I think...words that I can say:
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (probably spelled that horribly)
and Scnitzel and Volkswagon
so if the song is not Dutch but instead German...I'm very sorry. I was assuming by context that it was.
Thanks for everyone's help. My dd like me---prefers to know as close to how to say a word correclty for ease of reading. A foreign word that we can't read is a visual road block..so I really appreciation everyone's input.
W is pronounced like V, and when you see a V, it's pronounced a little more like "pf".
