It's getting awefully serious out there,: I thought some of you might like to
think about this:

There are a number of people working on proto dictionaries of various Romani
dialects. Like the Roma themselves, the people putting the dictionaries
together are scattered to the four winds. The guy whose research I'm currently
translating is Italian, and the dialect he mainly works in uses a lot of Slavic
loan words. It looks very like Serbo-Croat or Bosnian. (At least, to a
non-Serbian, non-Croatian, non-Bosniac Gadjo!)

I thought a Swiki would be helpful: people could put up pictures and use them
much as one uses a pictorial dictionary. Folk could post their suggestions as
to how a particular word ought to be translated, or pronounced, or put up an
illustration which captured a word precisely (an example close to Roma
traditions would be pictures to illustrate the colours of horses), or simply
run links between words in different languages. We could upload tiny mp3 clips
of how to pronounce various words.

Of course, in all this, the prime advantage of using a Swiki would be the
collaborative aspect. We'd be able to work together at a distance.

The only "but" is that, in my pretty limited experience,  there can be issues
when using the full range of Central European and Italian characters together. 

Anyone any experience (at any level) of doing something like this?

As a reward, there's a terrific (and rather large) version of the Sao Roma here
(as mp3) -- get dancing:

http://www.geocities.com/chavale_2000/music.html

Cheers

John (dashes off to flash bios -- may be gone till next payday!)



  -- 
M$ convicted of software piracy:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/25227.html
Peruvian Senator cuts through M$ FUD:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/25157.html