Tag: gypsy

The number 73

I did a little customised walk for some people this morning, taking in planned and unplanned (ie gypsy shanty and troglodyte) housing developments at the point where Barcelona crests and breaks on the Collserola ridge, and ending with drinks at my favourite spouse-swapping club. We started amid the tower blocks of airy, light Nou Barris.…

Spider styles

Gerald Howson’s The Flamencos of Cadiz Bay is a damn good book that stays well clear of the “Andalusia, soul of Spain” myth-making that poisoned much foreign writing from Washington Irving on. Catalonia was for a long time the home of Spanish bull-fighting and I reckon it also houses more of what I in my…

Chav/chaval

A new one to me: chav is British English for “a young working class person who dresses in casual sports clothing” (via Naked Translations). The standard etymology is Romany, and the term’s Hispanic cognate, chaval, forms part of the lexicon of Spanish gypsy language, Caló. (The Grec Catalan dictionary suggests, on the other hand, that…

Dog meets dog

I love it when dog owners go on about racial purity: Gammel Dansk Honselhund The origin of this race goes back to around 1710 when for eight generations a man called Morten Bak (who lived in the district of Glenstrup near the cities of Randers and Hobro) crossed gypsy dogs with local farm dogs. So…

Happiness and the medium

Mark Liberman notes that Nuer is considerably more irregular than English, which leaves me wondering how to measure linguistic irregularity. For example, Can we include orthography as one of our criteria? Nuer orthography looks pretty rational, and certainly has none of the ghoti-ness of English. What about actual use? I’ll bet Nuer isn’t as rich…

Novel choices in Chinuk-wawa

One way of passing evenings when a talking pig looks like being the highlight of the televisual entertainment is to improvise stories on the basis of collections of found words. Here is a short Chinuk-wawa glossary, taken from an article by Nancy Bartley on the language revival which appeared in the Seattle Times: chinuk-wawa english…

Picture of Eric

Here’s a photo of Gypsy Eric in his first proper job after attempting to cycle to the Ends of the Earth with two pigs, Space and Time, in his panniers. He was quite frequently stoned during the trip, and children also threw rocks at him, partly on account of his clothing but principally because of…

Blogs@Google News/Gypsy Eric the Beerstainvoyant

Submerging Markets is the only blog I know of that gets scraped by Google News. I don’t know if they’ll take Kaleboel now that Gypsy Eric the Beerstainvoyant has finally signed up to float by occasionally. Send in your photos…