Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

Many comments here are along the lines of: "we have ... gypsies ... here too and they are called ...".

I recently visited a museum in (Kingston upon) Hull - 'ull. The Streetlife one. A wall board managed to describe most of the wandering tribes hereabouts (UK and Éire), where they hail from, their modus operandi, a brief history and how to refer to them with a fair chance of not causing offence. I had no idea that Roma and Romany were not the same thing ... well it hadn't crossed my bows.

That is probably most people's approach - largely indifference and a fair dose of what is effectively racism - passive but nonetheless ... racist.

There are several TV series here eg "My big fat gypsy wedding" and some serious documentaries that are educating us and at least shining a light on travellers and travelling societies. The interplay between staid society and travelling societies has always been a tricky one. I think the world would be a much poorer place without travellers.

My house overlooks a park - its on the side of a valley. Our garden has a 40' drop to the lawn, with a zig zag path down. An urban stream (Dodham Brook, Yeovil, Somerset, UK) runs along the bottom. On the other side of the stream is the QEII meadow - about an acre of flatish ground, with a cafe at one end.

For a couple of years a bunch of travellers have rocked up on the meadow - Irish. I think. Their boy trotted his pony and trap up the path of the old railway line (long gone - cheers Mr Beaching) for a few quid. They repaired some cars and sat around a fire, long into the night. Funny thing is that late night noise went down. My new neighbours simply fitted in. All they left was some scorch marks on the grass, which was better than the twats who allowed a barbie to set fire to the meadow. There are some concrete BBQ stands less than 50m away.

You didn't think it was a bit fucked that kids don't get to go to school but rather trot their ponies up the old railway line?

If parents don't need to go away to work then homeschooling is much better, just as long as kids socialize in some way.

The origin of modern schools is daycare while parents are away slaving at the factory and to make more obedient industrial cogs. The fact that kids are bunched up together randomly with each other to grow into bullies/bullied/abuse victims (and taught by strangers who let's be frank could not do better than teaching career) is not a concern.

Education is essential if we want to give children a chance at social mobility. Traditional schools have their problems, including those you list, but at least children taught in them can get some qualifications, and those qualifications give the children a shot at doing something other than the same as their parents.

If the only education the parents themselves got was walking a pony up and down a railway line, it's unlikely that they are in a position to effectively homeschool a child.

Why do you assume it's the only education? It's clearly a way to make money which is needed to get by in some particular society they happen to be in. Maybe they don't get the exact same uniform training as at regular schools but I don't know whether it's as "fucked up" as those schools are in many countries.

Homeschooling only works when the parents are educated. Pre-industrial homeschooling only occurred in wealthy families, or perhaps learning a trade - the closest most people got to an education was what they were told in church. Modern western homeschooling is the result of state-directed schooling bringing the average person up to the level of education of an 18th century nobleman.

Itinerant children in Europe are not getting anything like the education of an American child who's well-to-do parents decided to homeschool them. The boys learn the family trades and the girls learn to look after the household. Parents often have poor literacy and numeracy and are not capable of or interested in providing an academic education.

Whether or not that's enough is up to you, but the opportunities of children raised without anything resembling a modern schooling in today's society are limited. The failure to provide adequate education to the children of itinerant communities is a huge driving factor of their continued poverty.

> I had no idea that Roma and Romany were not the same thing ...

They aren't? Would you mind saying more about what this?

There are several different groups which speak the Romani language(s). As the Romani spread throughout Europe, they began to diverge into different groups, with separate identities, dialects, traditions, etc. These groups have various names, including Rom, Sinti, Kale, Vlax, among others. The term Rom/Roma is ambiguous, because some authors use it to refer to the Romani-speaking groups collectively, others use the term to refer to particular subgroup(s) known by that name, as opposed to other subgroups such as the Sinti. So the above commenter had learned the “synonym for Romani collectively” definition, but is now exposed to the “specific Romani subgroup” definition, and is being introduced to that by people who view the first definition as incorrect. (I’m not much of a linguistic prescriptivist, so not sure if I agree it is “incorrect” per se, but certainly if one dislikes unintended controversy it is better avoided.)

The easiest way to understand where the difference comes from is that they didn't all travel to Europe in one big wave, it was in multiple waves hundreds of years apart, and they settled into and were influenced by very different European cultures (as well as cultures they passed through on their way to Europe). We tend to lump them all together into the term Romani, but there's cultural distinctions within, different dialects, etc.

Probably the biggest split is a so-called North-South divide, with Romani people you'll find in the wider Balkan area being fairly distinct from those in the west-ish Europe, which themselves are distinct (but slighly less distinct) than those you'll find in the north-east-ish Europe (Belarus, Baltic states, Russia), with many smaller groups scattered across. They're pretty much all billingual and very used to borrowing words from the local languages, so it'd be rather difficult for two Romani people from opposite sides of Europe to understand each other. And we're trying to discuss them in English, which requires another translation on top of the Romani → local European language translation, which tends to get quite complicated rather quickly.

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