Mark, this a perfect example of why Roma get sick and tired of non-Roma trying to organize their lives by thinking they finally find some exotic puppets to play with. They come with cut and dried ideas and they try to impose them irrespective of the ground reality by not listening to the people. In your case, it seems that your future plans for the Roma include the prevention of a unified Romani. I presume this by the way you come first with this preconceived idea and then you try to support it by bringing some flawless examples. The "wildly different" (to cite your speech) words for 'woman' in different dialects are pretty well inteligible by every Romani native speaker. Most of them are variations of the root džu(v) which are not hard to understand what they mean. I don't know very well the existent variations in English, but I think if a group of English speakers say 'wouman' or 'wiman' it is not hard to understand what they mean. And every, but every standardized language had at the beginning these variations (and most of them continue to have them in parallel with the generic one). As for the other forms to say woman, they are simply synonyms made with the suffix "-ni" which feminize the words with male grammatical gender: manushni and dženi are from manush and dženo (which mean "man", "chap"), words present in quite every dialect. Also "rani" has a specific meaning of "lady". If some English speaker utters "woman", other "dudette" and the other "lady" will you draw the conclusion they are mutually unintelligible? Try not to take for granted every Romani stuff you find, because most of it is not in such a good condition as being written by people with poor knowledge of the language, simply trying to show how much they know about the world. As for your comments that "it doesn't seem possible that there is a single person literate in Devanagri" I find them disparaging and racist as they allude to a presumed imposibility to be an educated Rom (the same for your "important distinction" of the " *literate* Roma community"). If you would try to know what is going on at the rom.wp you would find that both the Romani contributors write in Devanagari and in the world there are many others. And that the first priority would be the Latin script, to cater for its more extended use. I am really amazed and disappointed for the way you come and say what is good and what is bad in a field you have no knowledge and no intent to help my people, just to put in practice your theories. I don't know what is the opinion of the other readers of this mailing list, but I hope for a respectful dialogue. If you don't know too much about my people don't rush to hurried conclusions. I imagine that a comment that "it doesn't seem possible that there is a single American born Chinese or Jew literate in Chinese or Hebrew" wouldn't be welcomed at all here. I hope it will be also like this regarding the Romani side. So, as for the pending issues, the newly created rmy.wp has the code of the Vlax dialect, which is not the way was written this wp till now. The non-Roma made first the proposal about a Romani Wikipedia. Their debate reached a conclusion that a Vlax one would be better for the beginnig. When the two Romani contributors till now (me and Naayram) started the work, they wrote in a Romani used in the standadization efforts made worldwide by the Roma people. As I said before, there are already some differences in the approach for us two contribuitors but this did not impede the mutual understanding. If there will be problems about the way will go the Romani wp let us debate them first and afterwards if we can't solve them it will intervene the mediation of the outsiders. I see there are many small wp with some dozens of articles, which are patronized by non-speakers. If it will be the same like this for the Romani one, then I don't foresee a bright future for it. I don't know why some non-speakers stick to the Vlax one when there is no will by now to make it (btw, do you know that there are differences between the Vlax dialects?). What is envisaged till now is a wp for the generic Romani including the standardized and the dialects. First let us get more people (presumably much easier in this way) and if there will be standing power for making wp in dialects, it's OK, no problem. As for the code name, ROM. one is the internationally accepted for this kind of wp. It was said that it might get confusions with the Romanian wiki ( for their fear of not being confused with the "Gypsies") when I see that there a lot of other possible confusions for all the 228 wp. What then for the Romansh one, with its code RM? Waiting for serious replies, Desiphral

On 26/03/06, Alin Dosoftei <desiphral(a)gmail.com> wrote: If you think I discriminate against you, you are wildly mistaken. In my life I don't have a lot of personal experiences with Roma people, so I don't have any of the biases you may encounter with non-Roma people in your own environment. To me, Roma people are just like any other people. Not "exotic puppets to play with".

What worries me is the prospect that you will call yourself the "Romani Wikipedia" while at the same time being inaccessable to a large portion of Roma, including but not limited to readers of Ursari.