[Wikipedia-l] New wikipedias created

[Alin Dosoftei]

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