Are the Romani criminals?

I didn’t use it. It’s the OP who did (see the thread title). I believed it was the current generic PC term in english or somesuch.

Once again a terminology issue. If “Roma” is the generic term for the people who came from somewhere around India, use related languages and have common cultural traditions, yes, they are “Romas”. The group diverged over time (Though I believe I’ve read at least once somewhere that the various sub-groups could have existed before they migrated to the middle-east and Europe) in Roms, Sintis, Manouches, etc…
As for the word “Gypsy” being an umbrella term, it’s a question about english vocabulary and its uses I couldn’t answer to. According to ** Gorilla Man **, it seems that at least in England it’s a generic term that includes non-Roma (using here Roma…argh…that’s darn confusing :smack: I hope you’re still following me).

This issue doesn’t exist in France, though, because all these people belong to the same general ethnic group (but to various sub-groups of it). There’s no equivalent to the non-Roma irish travellers, so there’s no posible confusion (well…actually, there is a very small nomad group living in the Loire valley that isn’t Roma, but possibly of german origin, but I didnt mention it because it’s so small and in order not to confuse the issue even more).

This issue is further complicated by the fact that not even the “Roma” associations agree about what term should be used to refer to whom. One association for instance apparently insists on “Rom” being the only proper term, all other being derogatory, while another states that only people belonging to a sub-group from central Europe can be called “Roms”, hence that Sintis, for instance, shouldn’t be called so. Another group claims to represent the “gens du voyage and Tziganes” while the fourth one states that “Tziganes” is derogatory.
I don’t know if the terminology issue is somehow clear in english-speaking countries, but it’s definitely not in France.

Is Shelta a dialect of Irish, or is it a completely unrelated language? And in the latter case, where did these “Pavee” come from?

Actually, I misunderstood, and thought that clairobscur was making a common mistake-assuming that the Roma are the same as Romanians, because of the similiar names.

My bad.

Okay, having read over some of the older threads about Romani, here’s my layman’s take on them. Please correct me where I am wrong. This is a fascinating topic, and i won’t pretend to have a handle on the whole thing.

  1. Romani, Roma, etc. are very much like Jews- there is both an ethnic component and a cultural component involved.

  2. Not all Roma are nomads and not all nomads are Roma by ethnicity (like the Irish Travelers, for instance)

  3. Cultural Roma (of all ethnicities) do not believe in nation-states or the modern concept of property- they travel in family or tribal bands and engage in the underground economy

  4. This makes them troublesome to governments and law enforcement

  5. Some proponents of race theory are also against the mixed cultural roots of this culture (seeing them as an inferior people)

  6. there is an aversion on both the part of the Roma and authorities to integrate- social pressures and legal barriers make it very difficult

  7. Every once in a while, someone feels the need to purge/banish/exterminate the Roma population in their nation-state

Is that about right?

C’est moi qui va traduire cela…

(March 2005) Le Bourget/Wildland of Alstom 200 Roms have built a real shantytown

Only a few days ago, the hammers stopped hitting and the little village made of scrap materials halted its expansion. In the space of one week, the wildland of Alstom, situated smack in the middle of town in Bourget, has seen an authentic shantytown grow up with 200 Roms living in it today.
[…]
So part of the camp residents come directly from Eastern Europe, the others have been expelled from an encampment at Sarcelles (Val-d’Oise). Round about, everyone’s busy with their occupations. With a big crashing sound, an old man makes a wood stove. Women, with their hair done in braids and wearing long skirts, chat in front of their homes.
THE TENSION MOUNTS around the Rom shantytowns of Val-de-Marne. Having taken root several months ago on the communes of Choisy, Vitry, and Orly, south of Paris, these camps of fortune, who have nearly a thousand occupants all told, take on more and more the aspect of unhealthy sewers paralleled by genuine traffic hubs of all kinds, some kilometers from Paris. After having tried in vain to draw attention to the problem, the Communist mayor of Choisy-le-Roi, Daniel Davisse, has just written to the minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, to demand emergency solutions.

Because there really is an emergency.

Whereas the caravans of the beginning have become shanties worthy of the worst South American favelas, the families present at first, some of whom served as spokespersons with the authorities, have little by little given way to actual mafias.

My understanding is that Shelta is a cant or a type of code in which an English sentence or phrase is the basis and individual words are replaced by words of Irish origin. The result is a sentence that, although using some Irish words, doesn’t make sense in Iriah.

Shelta contains a lot of Irish words, but is really a separate language, with it’s own grammatical rules. I would guess that Pavee is from an Irish word, off the top of my head I can’t remember.

For more information check out
www.paveepoint.ie

Merci pour la traduction :slight_smile: . I was too lazy to translate it. That’s more difficult than just writing in my own words.

Stonebrow observes the similarity to Jews. Also like Jews they are a people(s?) amidst other peoples. Oil on the waters. For Jews it resulted in a people who traded in intellectual property. How so different between the groups? Were Jews just more cohesive admidst themselves?

It seems to me that my last comment needs to be fleshed out some.

The various Romani/Gypsie groups, I have been led to believe, are quite seperate from each other. This is different than the historic norm among Jews who preserved some sense of one group even as individual segments placed themselves as superior to others (e.g. pre-Holocaust German Jews felt quite the cultured ones compared to Eastern European Klezmer listening Jews). Ideas flowed between different cultures via Jewish connections.

This flow of ideas does not seem to be part of the Romani culture, perhaps because the groups are so autonomous of each other? Or is it more because some larger segment of Jewish culture tried to assimilate than the Romanis historically have. Jews have people “on the inside” of societies institutions to at least advocate for a nonprejudicial portrayal and to complain about stereotypes when utilized. The Romani seem not to have that, nor to especially desire it.

Certainly both were hated for being “the other” in the midst. And not trusted for the same reason. The commonalities are striking. But the differeneces just as much so.