I do speak PA Dutch, and I think Mycroft Holmes pretty much has it. You need to keep in mind that most of the current PA Dutch Dialect isn’t formalized. For at least the last fifty years or so, it has been primarily an informal, spoken dialect, rather than a written one. Spelling is far from standardized, and pronouncation, especially of compounded words is going to vary from region to region. Remember, PA Dutch speakers have had well over 200 years to modify their dialect from it’s “mother language”, German. The language is not taught in schools (and was not even in my Grandfather’s time) and most of the people I know who still speak the dialect here, wouldn’t have the first clue as to how to write down what they are saying.
My suggestion is to spell the word the way you remember hearing it. It will mean the most to you that way, and that’s probably exactly what your grandmother would have done, had she wished to write it in “in the dutch” for some reason. Don’t worry too much about spelling it “wrong” most dialect speakers never learned proper German spelling anyway (much less grammar).
That would actually make sense, since the Pennsylvania Dutch aren’t Dutch at all, but hailed from southern Germany and probably Switzerland too. Jakob Hutter and Jakob Amman, founders of the Hutterite and Amish sects respectively, were both Swiss.
“Dutch” used to mean, in English, any of the Germanic languages spoken between the Alps and the North Sea. It’s in this sense that the phrase “Pennsylvania Dutch” was coined.
Don’t they still conduct church services in High German, or at least read from High German Bibles?
As for the spelling of PA Dutch, from a fragment I saw many years ago, I got the impression that the spelling has been much influenced by English spelling, so that, for example, the word for “to be”, spelled sein and pronounced “zine” might well be spelled “zine” in PA Dutch.
Some church services are still done in PA dutch, simply because it was the “default” common use language in my area up untill about the middle of the last century (for example, the area Catholic church used to offer Mass in latin or dutch, rather than the latin or english (or spanish for that matter) options most often seen elsewhere . But that type of thing has become less and less over the years. Some, more separated, religous sects do still use PA dutch as their primary everyday language, and their services are still conducted in that language. As an example, my family has a 150 year old high german Bible, however, no one could have really read it until I took high german in school. My grandfather (born in 1910) was basically illiterate in any language. (he had only two years of formal schooling, and that was in English), as was his father. Farther back than that I don’t know.
As I mentioned, most people who speak PA dutch today know it primarily as a spoken language, picked up naturally from family members. There’s no formal instruction, it’s not taught in school, there aren’t really any dictionaries, and there is no one to give you “spelling lessons”. People spell things the way they sound (often basing this on the english spelling rules they learned in school). English words are also commonly mixed in (especially for anything invented since oh… around 1800).
It’s fun to know, but no one writes novels in it.