[Wikipedia-l] New wikipedias created

[Mark Williamson]

On 26/03/06, Alin Dosoftei <desiphral at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

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".

> 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.

The example was my own, yes, but the idea was not, I got it from other
Roma people I have heard from in the past, and from websites, and
books. Pretty much everybody mentions the fact that the Romani
varieties are not mutually intelligible.

> 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

Alin, you would do well to read the entire sentence. I said "and it doesn't seem
possible that there is a single person literate in Devanagri but not
Latin for Romani".

This means that it seems everybody who uses Devanagari, also knows
Latin. This would be like Ronline saying "and it doesn't seem possible
that there is a single person literate in Cyrillic but not Latin for
Moldovan", a view that many people have expressed before -- it doesn't
mean all "Moldovan speakers" are illiterate, of course.

And the reason the distinction between literate and non-literate Roma
is important here is because of course non-literate people cannot read
an encyclopaedia. Yes, it is possible they will get it delivered in
the future in some other format, or that they will become literate in
the interim, but at the moment it is impractical to plan an
encyclopaedia for *speakers* of any language rather thna *readers*.

> 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.

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.

> 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?

I don't think it's so much a racist fear of "getting confused with the
'Gypsies'" (Ronline is a very un-racist person, he doesn't
discriminate at all on any grounds), so much as a worry that people
going to rom.wp will be expecting Romanian, which I think is
reasonable, However,

In the past there have been other things like this, for example MY is
for the Burmese Wikipedia but some people were afraid it would be
confused for the Malay WP (code MS), but nobody changed it of course.
Same with Sinhala (SI) and Serbian (SR), Chamorro (CH) and
Swyzerdutsch (ALS). It seems very little confusion resulted from this,
so I don't agree with Ronline that it would be for "confusion".

Mark