Ian F. Hancock

Gypsy history in Germany and neighboring lands: A chronology to the holocaust and beyond

1407: First appearance of Gypsies in Germany, in Hildesheim. 1414: Second possible appearance of Gypsies in Germany, in Hesse. 1416: First anti-Gypsy law issued in Germany. Forty-eight such laws are passed between this date and 1774. 1417: First detailed description of arrival and appearance of Gypsies in Germany. 1418: Arrival documented in Hamburg. 1419: Arrival documented in Augsburg. 1428: Arrival documented in Switzerland. 1449: Gypsies driven out of Frankfurt-am-Main. 1496: Gypsies accused of being foreign spies, carriers of the plague, and traitors to Christendom, at the Reichstag meetings this year, and in 1497 and 1498, in Freiburg and Landau. These charges are repeated frequently over the following centuries.

The “Gypsy” Stereotype and the Sexualization of Romani Women

The fact that the representation of people of color—and women of color, in particular—has been exoticized and sexualized in the Western perception is nothing new (cf. Burney; Jan Mohamed; Jiwani; Lalvani; Negra; Parmar; Shohat and Stam; Yegenoglu). The Romani people, or “Gypsies,” have not escaped this portrayal, and the literature that examines it is growing rapidly (cf. Champagne; Esplugas; Gabor; Gordon; Hancock, “Duty and Beauty,” We are the Romani People, “The Concocters”; Iordanova; Lemon; Malvinni; Mayall; McLaughlan; Needham; Nord, “Marks of Race,” “Seen in Rare Glimpses”; Pellegrino; and Schrevel).

Lexical Expansion within a Closed System

Publisher Summary This chapter presents lexical expansion within a closed system. The establishment of any nonnative language in a community as its first language may or may not involve the retention of the ancestral tongue. The processes of the linguistic stabilization of a pidgin by adult speakers challenge the current claims made for the language acquisition device. Indigenous tribal Africans resident in the areas around the settlements have acquired some knowledge of the language and learned the language in rudimentary form only as pidginized Creole. Incoining is the creation of new terms from morphemes already existing in the language. A mother tongue as the means of expression for every experience its speakers may encounter, at some time require a term for pupil specifically. Semantic extension without reduplication occurs when the primary gloss for an item has a source form parallel, but for which a further meaning exists with no traceable English origin.

Nautical sources of krio vocabulary

Krio, the English-based Creole of Sierra Leone, is often asserted to have been imported from America. Historical evidence, however, shows that speakers of an English-based contact variety were in the Freetown area before 1600. Much of the vocabulary of the surviving English-based Creole matches nautical vocabulary better than any other variety of English. Enclaves of British seamen who mixed with Africans on the Guinea coast facilitated the spread of this nautical variety and the mixing of elements from the African languages of the area. Considerable lexical and phonological evidence supports the view that the nautical variety is the significant dialect of English to be considered in this connection. There is much parallel evidence from places like St. Helena and Tristan da Cunha.

The roots of inequity: Romani cultural rights in their historical and social context

My premise in this article is a simple one: first, that the liberty to maintain ones cultural behaviour is dependent upon ones civil liberties; and second, while not all legal rights are civil, all civil rights are nevertheless legal. Furthermore, if we are to deal with the situation effectively, we must address it not only as a cultural or civil or legal issue, but as one having far‐reaching political ramifications as well.

English in Liberia

Liberia is situated on the Pepper Coast of West Africa, some six degrees north of the equator opposite the northeastern coast of South America, and represents the last of four attempts to establish African homelands for freed slaves from the Americas.2 The first three, in 1811, 1815 and 1820-21, were unsuccessful because of ill health among the colonists and lack of adequate funds. The attempt at settlement made by the American Colonization Society in late 1821, however, proved to be successful, and with the gradual purchase of more and more land in the Mesurado River area, the colony grew. By the time of the Confederate War in this country, over 1 1,000 Afro-Americans had been established in Liberia.