Tuesday, January 18, 8400

Gypsies in Romania (c. 1400) - Slavs


The Roma (as a noun, singular Rom, plural Roma; sometimes Rrom, Rroma, Rromany people, Romany people, Romani people or Romanies) belong to many ethnic groups that appear in literature and folklore, and are often referred to as Gypsies or Gipsies. The Roma have their origins in India.

The Roma are still thought of as wandering nomads in the popular imagination, despite the fact that today the vast majority live in permanent housing.

This widely dispersed ethnic group lives across the world not only near Southern and Eastern Europe, but also in the Americas and the Middle East.

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Paparuda











Paparuda is a Romanian rain ritual, probably of pagan origin, performed in the spring and in times of severe drought.

A girl, wearing a skirt made of fresh green knitted vines and small branches, sings and dances through the streets of the village, stopping at every house, where the hosts pour water on her.

She is accompanied by the people of the village who dance and shout on the music. The custom has attributed a specific type of dance and a specific melody.

A similar Romanian rain ritual is the Caloian.

The name is probably derived from Perperuna, which in its turn is a Slavic (south slavic) goddess, or as Sorin Paliga suggests, is a divinity from the local Thracian substratum.

Like the Dodola (dudula, dudulica, dodolă in Romanian, dudulë in Albanian, tuntule in Greek, dudulya and didilya in South Slavic languages), which is another name for the same custom holding similar rituals, compared by Decev with Thracian anthroponyms (personal names) and toponyms (place names) (such as Doidalsos, Doidalses, Dydalsos, Dudis, Doudoupes, etc.) and argued by Paliga to be of Thracian origin, the Paparuda is found only at Romanians (păpărudă), Aromanians (pirpirună) and South Slavs (peperuda, perperuna).

The name of Dodola is possibly cognate with the Lithuanian word for thunder: dundulis.

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The Slavic peoples are a linguistic branch of Indo-European peoples, living mainly in Europe. From the early 6th century they spread from their original homeland (most commonly thought to be in Eastern Europe) to inhabit most of eastern Central Europe, Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

Modern nations and ethnic groups called by the ethnonym "Slavs" are considerably genetically and culturally diverse and relations between them are varied, ranging from a sense of connection to feelings of mutual resentment.

Slavic peoples are classified into West Slavic (including Czechs, Poles, Slovaks and Sorbs), East Slavic (including Belarusians, Russians, and Ukrainians), and South Slavic (including Bosniaks, Bulgarians, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Slovenes).

The origin of the word Slav remains controversial. Excluding the ambiguous mention by Ptolemy of tribes Stavanoi and Soubenoi, the earliest references of "Slavs" under this name are from the 6th century AD. The word is written variously as Sklabenoi, Sklauenoi, or Sklabinoi in Byzantine Greek, and as Sclaueni, Sclauini, or Sthlaueni in Latin. The oldest documents written in Old Church Slavonic and dating from the 9th century attest slověne to describe the Slavs around Thessalonica. Other early attestations include Old Russian slověně "an East Slavic group near Novgorod," Slovutich "Dnieper river," and Serbian and Croatian Slavonica, a river.

Scholars such as Roman Jacobson and others link the name with the Slavic forms sláva "glory", "fame" or slovo "word, talk" (both akin to slušati "to hear" from the IE root *ḱlew-). Thus slověne would mean "people who speak (the same language)," i.e. people who understand each other, as opposed to the Slavic word for foreign nations, nemtsi, meaning "speechless people" (from Slavic němi - mute, silent, dumb). For example, the Polish word Niemcy means "Germans" or "Germany", as do the Serbian and Croatian words Nemci and Nijemci and the Russian and Bulgarian word Nemtsi.

There are two alternative scholarly theories as to the origin of the Slavs ethnonym, both very tentative: according to the first theory, it derives from a hypothetically reconstructed Proto-Indo-European *(s)lawos, cognate to Greek laós "population, people," which itself has no commonly accepted etymology. The second theory (forwarded by e.g. Max Vasmer) suggests that the word originated as a river name (compare the etymology of the Volcae), comparing it with such cognates as Latin cluere "to cleanse, purge", a root not known to have been continued in Slavic, however, and it appears in other languages with similar meanings (cf. Greek klyzein "to wash", Old English hlūtor "clean, pure", Old Norse hlér "sea", Welsh clir "clear, clean", Lithuanian šlúoti "to sweep").

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Wedding Song










Communal Lament










Solo Lament










Romania (dated: Rumania, Roumania; Romanian: România, IPA: [ro.mɨˈni.a]) is a country located in South-East Central Europe, North of the Balkan Peninsula, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea.

Almost all of the Danube Delta is located within its territory. It shares a border with Hungary and Serbia to the west, Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova to the northeast, and Bulgaria to the south.

The territory's recorded history encompasses such eras as the Dacians, Roman Empire (leading to the development of Romanian language), Kingdom of Hungary, and Ottoman Empire.

[8404 Clavichord / 8400 Gypsies Romania / 8400 Dufay]