Sinti culture, language & the origin of the name Django

Svanis1337 · August 2014

Alright folks, I added it to youtube so you can share it on Facebook, and here's the updated version in mp3 as well.

And no, that is not my real name.

Teddy Dupont · August 2014

The correct pronunciation is at 0.23 on the youtube version.

Jazzaferri · August 2014

And the bells hod djingo Django djingo

Teddy Dupont · August 2014

...And this one of course:-

Russell Letson · August 2014

To add to Stuart's post on the complicated way English adopts and adapts words: I'd say that the flat-A pronunciation of "Django" is more American than UK-English, since the Brits are a bit more likely to retain "European" vowel values in their borrowed words. (On the other hand, what happened to "garage" in the US and UK reverses that rule.) Another American sound (at least to my ears) is how hard the "g" sounds, especially following a French-style nasalized vowel.

As far as pronouncing names in accordance with their origin-languages, there's no hard and fast rule--I'd say it depends on usage, which is to say, how far the adoption-into-English has gone, how much the name has become an (American) English word. Though there are some rules of thumb that depend on having a sense of how and when a word entered English (a matter of linguistic fact) as well as how the speakers of its source language feel about its spelling, pronunciation, and use (a matter of social attitude, politics, and good manners).

Look at Hawai`i: The spelling I just used is the preferred rendering of the name of the state and island, but most non-Hawaiians don't pronounce it "Havai-ee," and they certainly rarely pronounce the glottal stop represented by the ` character. (Which, by the way, isn't even the preferred rendering of the character in Hawaiian computing--it's actually ʻ and is technically a letter, the ʻokina, rather than a diacritical mark.) But "Hawaiian" is an English word, formed (and thus spelled and pronounced) according to American-English practice, while "Hawaiʻi" is the Hawaiian-lanaguage place-name. All the same, I sometimes see "Hawai`ian," which is a hypercorrection. Those of us who interact with Hawaiian musicians (or ordinary folk) take some care with their language and their sensibilities--but I don't overdo it, and my Hawaiian friends seem tolerant of a well-meaning haole's attempts to show good linguistic manners while admitting that he's a midwesterner with a mouth full of flat vowels.

I suspect there's a lot of similarity between Hawaiian and Romani sensitivities about their language(s) and other cultural materials.

BTW, Stuart--I'm not a Shakespeare prof, but I'm married to one. (My work was in medieval, with Renaissance drama as a second area. Lots of linguistics in both parts of the discipline.)

dennis · August 2014

i've already mentioned in my article that many gypsies spell their names in different ways and that this practice still happens today... Nous'che rosenberg, fijkeli prisor, etc..

very recently, on facebook, i saw a Sinti girl's name that sort of surprised me. Unfortunately , I forget who it was, but she had a name like Reinhardt or one of the common ones, maybe it was Winterstein, and on her facebook , she spelled her name something like Wintastene

If any of you read french or german or dutch, a lot of them spell phonetically when they write, an example in English would be:

i plei geetar , i lissen to jango rinehart , i am veri faymos.

i wonder sometimes if they do it on purpose or if that's really how they think words are spelled

Clearly, they don't really care as long as they re understood, and i've mentioned that in my article!

dennis · August 2014

oh btw, nice video svanis, that was the recording i was referring to in my article, he clearly says "djeango" reinhardt (from the french Jean).

If romani pronunciation is the same today as it was back then , it is nowhere near the pronounciation of I awake which is closer to the American way: "dja -ing - go" or "djan - go".. and again keeping in mind that this is a modern form of romani, the older form would be "djan-geh-vava"

klaatu · September 2014

Yeah, reely, hoo kaires az longue az yur understud?

Russell Letson · September 2014

Phonetic spelling takes me back to my historical linguistics and English regional dialects courses--before the written standard settled on London dialect, you could establish where a manuscript originated from the spelling, which reflected local pronunciation.

crookedpinky · September 2014

I'm starting to see this thread become even less clear as we seem to be veering towards developing theories around linguistics and language use and development but using the medium of writing to illustrate these thoughts and ideas. Klaatu's post is a perfect example, he uses "longue" to represent "long" yet replace the "l" with a "t" and you could read it as "tongue" or "tung" and "understud" could be interpreted as " under stud ".