Those who love German Lieder are familiar with some of the settings to
Heinrich Heine's Loreley, like the one by Liszt or by Clara Schumann.

Those of us who grew up in a German cultural milieu, unpolluted by
Third Reich philosophy, are probably more likely to be familiar with the
charming, artless, setting by Friedrich Silcher (1789-1860).  It was so
popular in Germany that even the Nazis couldn't suppress this song to a
text by a non-Aryan poet and therefore had it attributed to "an unknown
German poet" ("ein unbekannter deutscher Dichter").

The text, plus translations into Latin, English, and a German dialect can
be found on the following Web page:

   http://ingeb.org/Lieder/ichweiss.html

(The Silcher melody can be accessed in what I think are two different MIDI
renditions, by clicking on the first two links in the line below the Web's
title.)

My question, should any care to undertake a reply, is, what is the dialect
in which the last translation is written? I thought at first it might be
Yiddish, but I quickly rejected that in view of the contents.  The story is
changed to that of Papa, Mama, and the kids taking a boat or raft up the
Elbe, either from East Germany or possibly Czechoslovakia.  The text is
clearly a variant of German and not Czech.

Walter Meyer