gypsies/romany/traveller people

[Guest Jimbob]

Fuck pikies.

[Guest jim]

Fuck pikies.

 

says someone calling himself "Jimbob"

[oscillik]

I'm really confused by the word "gypsy" being used to describe 2 fundamentally ethno-genetically different and geographically/historically separate nomadic peoples.

that's because you're not from the UK and have no idea of what the word means over here.

[Guest ezkerraldean]

i'd compare them to some sort of pest but there is no multicellular creature lowly enough to merit comparison. cancer cells maybe? yeah, that's about right...

I hear that out in the Balkans the Roma are pretty much the equivalent of chavs in the UK

[AJW]

Not being a big fan of Balkan culture, music etc. I do think travelling around nomad style is a beautiful way of life. Personally I'd love to do it if I had the money. shame these greasy Balkan carnies give it a bad name.

[Guest Lube Saibot]

I'm really confused by the word "gypsy" being used to describe 2 fundamentally ethno-genetically different and geographically/historically separate nomadic peoples.

that's because you're not from the UK and have no idea of what the word means over here.

 

Well, obviously. The same could be said in reverse though, i.e. "you're not from Eastern Europe and have no idea what the word means over here."

 

then again that word wouldn't normally be USED here because it's an English term. so i guess when we use it it's just a rough translation of ""ţigan". which apparently comes from the Ancient Greek "athinganoi", while "gypsy" comes from a corruption of "egyptian".

 

then again, the OP seemed to confuse the two, when in reality he'd just been exposed to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Travellers , and thankfully not the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roma_(Romani_subgroup). there are shallow similarities, but that's about it.

[keltoi]

I'm really confused by the word "gypsy" being used to describe 2 fundamentally ethno-genetically different and geographically/historically separate nomadic peoples.

that's because you're not from the UK and have no idea of what the word means over here.

 

Well, obviously. The same could be said in reverse though, i.e. "you're not from Eastern Europe and have no idea what the word means over here."

 

then again that word wouldn't normally be USED here because it's an English term. so i guess when we use it it's just a rough translation of ""ţigan". which apparently comes from the Ancient Greek "athinganoi", while "gypsy" comes from a corruption of "egyptian".

 

then again, the OP seemed to confuse the two, when in reality he'd just been exposed to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Travellers , and thankfully not the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roma_(Romani_subgroup). there are shallow similarities, but that's about it.

 

woah there wiki-regurgitator guy! i didn't confuse shit.

 

Gypsy may refer, often pejoratively, to any of the following nomadic peoples:

 

* the Romani people, the largest ethnic group popularly referred to as gypsies

o Roma (Romani subgroup), a major Romani subgroup in Central and Eastern Europe

o Sinti, a European subgroup of the Romani people

* the Dom people, an ethnic group of the Middle East possibly related to the Romani

o Lyuli, a branch of the Dom people of Central Asia

* the Lom people, an ethnic group of East Anatolia and Armenia possibly related to the Romani

* the Banjara, an ethnic group of India

* the Irish Travellers (or Pavee), an ethnic group of Irish origin mostly found in Ireland, Great Britain, and the United States

* the Ceàrdannan (literally "Craftsmen"), a ethnic group of the Scottish Highlands.

* the Yeniche people, mostly in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, and Belgium

* Sea Gypsies, a number of different peoples of Southeast Asia

[oscillik]

I'm really confused by the word "gypsy" being used to describe 2 fundamentally ethno-genetically different and geographically/historically separate nomadic peoples.

that's because you're not from the UK and have no idea of what the word means over here.

 

Well, obviously. The same could be said in reverse though, i.e. "you're not from Eastern Europe and have no idea what the word means over here."

 

then again that word wouldn't normally be USED here because it's an English term. so i guess when we use it it's just a rough translation of ""ţigan". which apparently comes from the Ancient Greek "athinganoi", while "gypsy" comes from a corruption of "egyptian".

 

then again, the OP seemed to confuse the two, when in reality he'd just been exposed to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Travellers , and thankfully not the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roma_(Romani_subgroup). there are shallow similarities, but that's about it.

point is, the OP is from the UK and is obviously accustomed to the UK usage of the word.

 

if i were to go into a thread where the OP is from the USA and was talking about biscuits, i would not be assuming that they are talking about what we in the UK refer to as biscuits.

 

you tripped yourself up by stating that you, in your native Eastern Europe, wouldn't use the term "gypsy" but would rather use whatever dialect it is that you speak.

 

so you are right to be confused about this thread, if you're not taking this thread in context. which you obviously aren't.

[berndspring1974]

the "my big fat gypsy wedding" documentary was very interesting. these irish traveller people seem to be more or less civilised - a bit chavvy, but not that different from other non-gypsy-lowerclass folk. it would be more interesting to see how the balkan/ roma etc. gypsies live. would be a totally different story.

[Guest Lube Saibot]

i'd compare them to some sort of pest but there is no multicellular creature lowly enough to merit comparison. cancer cells maybe? yeah, that's about right...

I hear that out in the Balkans the Roma are pretty much the equivalent of chavs in the UK

 

No. The chavs here are known as "cocalari", which are Romanians or some other minority who've imported "culture" from the Roma (what I previously meant by a culture being genuinely outwardly damaging). I made a thread about them a while back, some lols were had. But these are mostly people from upper middle class upwards backgrounds who start listening to manele and wearing gaudy jewelry and.... actually, they go guido. Imagine a guy from Jersey Shore, that's pretty much what a "cocalar" is. A nuisance, but nothing major, and most just simmer down once they hit their thirties and they impregnate some slut and then have to settle down and run a semi-fraudulent business... but still, ultimately they conform to societal norms.

 

The Balkanic Roma however are much, much worse than chavs. They are feral, evil things. Not clueless angry kids that listen to scouse house. Simply barely-humans with a bestial, predatory pseudo-intelligence. There's a scary glow to their eyes that betray a sort of confusion mingled with violent conservation instincts. They are all inherently sociopathic, from a young age. Talking to one is literally hearing the lowest that humanity can go. They abuse torture animals as children, torture women as teens, torture children as adults.

 

They cut off their children's legs and send them to beg like that because it would engender more sympathy and hence a little more coin. These young victims, however, manage to dispel any sympathy one might begin to feel for them the second you interact with them, give them some change and then they still key your car. One of these "skaters" once nearly killed me, stuck a pipe in the front wheel (for no reason and out of nowhere) of my bike and i faceplanted. Needed surgery afterwards. And then what do you do? Do you kick a legless child of his makeshift wheeled plank? No, you just look that thing in its feral, evil eyes, sigh, and move on. Because you know that centuries of petty-violence-as-a-raison-d'etre is not something that can ever be undone. So at least you don't participate. But then you find a gang of Roma kids shooting needles through blowpipes into dogs' eyes, and them you simply have to intervene. And they laugh, and call you names, as you're kicking their ass and dispersing them. There is some small inkling of human fear there (mostly because they're not used to Romanians putting them in their place, most Romanian folk are very scared of gypsies and usually just avoid them), but mostly they have unending confidence given by their pack mentality.

 

They also sell their children for as little as 100 bucks. To whomever. Mostly prostitution rings. I would go as far as saying that each one of them would psychologically profile as a serial killer would it be not for their very stupid and cowardly natures.

 

And please spare me arguments of "here's a clip of Django Reinhardt, Biréli Lagrène, and other awesome gypsy musicians etc. you're wrong about these people". Again, that's a totally different instance of the use of "gypsy", different ethno-genetically, different background-wise. As for the "what about the lăutari" argument, you will notice that most renowned local lăutari are mixed, and thankfully only inherited to good musical ear of their gypsy parents, and not the sociopathy.

[Guest ezkerraldean]

lol yeah they sound pretty fucked

 

chavs can be like that though, very feral, lacking in any civilised behaviour. ugh god i hate chavs

 

i've heard similar stories about the first nations in Canada when you're way up north - they'll blockade runways at exploration camps and demand jobs, and when you give them jobs they just nick stuff and act violent.

[Guest Lube Saibot]

the "my big fat gypsy wedding" documentary was very interesting. these irish traveller people seem to be more or less civilised - a bit chavvy, but not that different from other non-gypsy-lowerclass folk. it would be more interesting to see how the balkan/ roma etc. gypsies live. would be a totally different story.

 

this is highly, highly, HIGHLY melodramatic and apologetic and insanely over-sympathetic but just watch it and try to ignore the bullshit:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6B8zDpAE0w

[keltoi]

an interesting thing the documentary turned up was their life expectancy. most men don't make it passed 50. and one guy who featured heavily had sired 10 children, only 5 of which survived beyond infancy... so they can't be using/abusing the NHS as much as i assumed.

 

or do they not believe in medical intervention for some reason?

[Guest Lube Saibot]

woah there wiki-regurgitator guy! i didn't confuse shit.

 

lol, you've taken way too much offense from me posting a couple of links. would you rather I'd posted "let me google that for you" links? or extracts from academic discourse on the matter? puh-lease, wtf is a "wiki-regurgitator" in this day and age, besides something you could yourself qualify as being that right after that you post a quote from wiki?

 

simmer down.

[Guest ezkerraldean]

an interesting thing the documentary turned up was their life expectancy. most men don't make it passed 50. and one guy who featured heavily had sired 10 children, only 5 of which surved beyond infancy... so they can't be using/abusing the NHS as much as i assumed.

 

or do they not believe in medical intervention for some reason?

I think they're just too backwards to know about healthcare lol

 

it's the same with pikeys though, they don't live long. they get killed in fights (I might have seen that happen in Hereford once - pikeys versus Polish farm workers - some nasty headbutts involved) plus they're obviously massive smokers and drinkers and don't eat anything except burger van shit and McDonalds.

[oscillik]

and don't eat anything except burger van shit and McDonalds.

i cannot stand the smell of fucking onions from those vans/stalls

[keltoi]

woah there wiki-regurgitator guy! i didn't confuse shit.

 

lol, you've taken way too much offense from me posting a couple of links. would you rather I'd posted "let me google that for you" links? or extracts from academic discourse on the matter? puh-lease, wtf is a "wiki-regurgitator" in this day and age, besides something you could yourself qualify as being that right after that you post a quote from wiki?

 

simmer down.

 

the fact i followed with a wiki quote was meant to allude to my tongue-in-cheek posturing. not a drop of offense was taken.

 

[keltoi]

and don't eat anything except burger van shit and McDonalds.

i cannot stand the smell of fucking onions from those vans/stalls

 

so stop fucking onions then

[Guest Babar]

because of the structural principle i think.

[Guest Lube Saibot]

That was an interesting documentary but it dovetails into my dim view of the capabilities of humankind. There is a reason why Gypsies haven't really made it to the U.S. because our police and armed citizens would beat the everliving shit out of these kids and force them into psychiatric or juvenile confinement. Working in a child psychiatric hospital that serves a poor city, I saw kids get "chemical" sentences of heavy antipsychotics for much lesser offenses than these kids trying to swarm ATM machines.

 

GOOD.

 

"untouchables" in ancient India

 

this is the caste i was talking about. "anthiganos" literally means "untouchable" -> ciganos/tigani

[AJW]

smell like cabbage ... small hands

[Guest Jimbob]

Fuck pikies.

 

says someone calling himself "Jimbob"

woah take it easy braaah

[Guest nene multiple assgasms]

That was an interesting documentary but it dovetails into my dim view of the capabilities of humankind. There is a reason why Gypsies haven't really made it to the U.S. because our police and armed citizens would beat the everliving shit out of these kids and force them into psychiatric or juvenile confinement. Working in a child psychiatric hospital that serves a poor city, I saw kids get "chemical" sentences of heavy antipsychotics for much lesser offenses than these kids trying to swarm ATM machines.

 

Going back 40,000 years, it appears that modern humans and the Neanderthal coexisted for a period but there are no Neanderthals here now (so far as we know ). People criticize using the fossil record because it's an incomplete puzzle but just use common sense. Look at all the examples of exclusion and marginalization of various groups throughout all of written history--"untouchables" in ancient India, Spartans heaving birth-defected babies over the city walls, Jews on the run for 2,000 years until the U.S. came along, Third Reich, etc. on + on.

 

Exclusion is even more apparent in other parts of the animal kingdom. Primate mothers leaving a newborn to die for no apparent reason. There is something deeper than society, culture and opinions going on. Whether it's Gypsies or Jews or homosexuals or whatever, humans can't seem to create a system that provides universal inclusion.

 

 

well it's hard to imagine what our relationships with neanderthals would have been like, since there's so little genetic diversity in the surviving human population. people think there are significant physical differences between different races now, but we're really all one african subspecies. there are people alive with a small percentage of neanderthal dna, though, so there was obviously some interaction between the two groups. whether it was amicable or not, who can say?

[huzur]

I wholeheartedly have to thank WATMM for this thread, I've been waiting for so so long for a multi-page discussion like this over my favorite anthropological subject: gypsies.

 

Contrary to popular belief, I like gypsies. Being from Romania, a country wide-known for it's high population of gypsies that live here (I'm sure some uk blokes will approve my words) helped me grow quite fast a sturdy tolerance to their lifestyle, actions, or even to their music, which is truly the worst music genre ever created (as Luke Saibot previously stated). But in the past couple of years, this somehow forced but relaxed point of view created the conditions needed to evolve this tolerance into a weird, constant but mild interest. Being easily relatable in social situations, now it permits me to transform awkward social encounters into fun exotic happenings, as if I was watching a live documentary about this very very widespread ethnicity. But I guess this can only be accomplished if you have an extremely polished and subtle sense of humour.

 

Musically, a lot of developments have been made in the last years, Shukar Collective being the spotlight of this slowly growing thirst for the gypsy culture and their perception of music. The video below can do more justice than my words. Gypsy (or gypsy-influenced) music is a very very vast domain in which I thrive spiritually and/or humorously, on the verge of moving from mild to high in my wide colorful spectrum of interests, a thing I can confess I'm pretty scared of.

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVLP9Ow7nfM

 

 

Sorry for the slight off-topic, but I hope my post did some justice for my beloved gypsies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BONUS: A horse and a gypsy:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGEnskha7BE

 

How on earth can you hate them? :lol:

[essines]

your english fucking wails if you were born and raised in romania! props!

 

also, as a side note, i find this thread thoroughly interesting. Lube saibot habouring murderers and just crazy culture that i do not get to experience in canada, this shit is awesome. tell me more!

 

pps fuck this board for telling me habouring is spelled wrong simply because i am canadian!