Everything about Ian F Hancock totally explained
Ian Hancock (
Romani:
Yanko le Redžosko) is a renowned linguist,
Romani scholar, and human rights advocate. He was born and raised in
England, and is one of the main contributors in the field of
Romani studies.
He is director of the Program of Romani Studies and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at
The University of Texas at Austin, where he's been a professor of English, linguistics and Asian studies since 1972. He has represented the
Romani people at the
United Nations and served as a member of the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council under President
Bill Clinton, who, according to Hancock, has Romani ancestry. He also represented the Romani people at the
1997 Rafto Prize award ceremony.
Early life
According to
The University of Texas at Austin
, Ian Hancock was born in Britain of both British Romani and Hungarian Romani descent and was raised according to Romani traditions and mores. His mother, Kitty, is
Romnichal. However, his father Reginald (
Redžo) is part Romungro: in particular, he's the descendant of a Hungarian speaker of
North Central Romani named Benczi Imre. He inherited the surname "Hancock" through Imre's daughter Maria, who married a member of a British West Country showman family of that surname.
He lived in Canada for less than six years before moving back to England in 1961. There, he dropped out of 9th grade. This wasn't uncommon among Romanies; in fact, few or none of his other family members were literate.
He then took up several kinds of jobs, including that of a spray painter. It was at this time that his roommates, university students from
Sierra Leone, allowed him to learn the
Krio language of that country. His knowledge of Krio and some academic connections helped him to enter the
University of London. He was one of only two candidates in an affirmative action program who qualified to receive higher education.
In the late 1960s, he became a Romani rights activist after reading reports about anti-Romani discrimination in Britain. In particular, he took up the cause of Romani rights after British police caused a fire that killed two Romani children. In 1971, he graduated as the first Romani in Britain with a
Ph.D.
Dr. Hancock supports some of
R.L. Turner's views on Romani history based on the Romani language. In particular, he agrees that the
Dom left India much earlier than the Romani people, and that the latter left no earlier than 1000 A.D. In fact, he claims that the Indian musicians mentioned in the
Shah-Nameh and the
atsingani mentioned in
The Life of St. George the Anchorite, both of which were previously believed to be ancestors of the Romani people, may have been the ancestors of the Domari people but not those of the Romani people. It is possible, in his view, that the
Lom split off from the Romani people on reaching
Armenia.
Contrary to the popular view that the Romani people are descended from low-caste Indians who brought their occupations to Europe, he argues that the Romani people are descended from Indian prisoners of war of
Mahmud of Ghazni. As evidence, he points to the presence of Indic words specifically of military origin and to a
Banjara oral legend telling of Rajputs who left India through the
Himalayas during the Ghaznavid invasions and never returned.
He also believes that the Romani language originates in a
koiné language, which he calls "Rajputic," between the many Indian languages spoken by the prisoners of war. In this regard, he finds it similar to several other Indian languages, especially
Urdu.
Creole language studies
Aside from his seminal research on the
Anglo-Romani language, Hancock is an internationally recognized scholar on
creole languages. In addition to his research on Krio, Hancock has done important research on the
Gullah language of coastal
South Carolina and
Georgia, and the
Afro-Seminole Creole language spoken in Southwest Texas. Hancock was the first scholar to recognize that a version of Gullah, he calls Afro-Seminole, is spoken by a community of
Black Seminole descendants in
Brackettville, Texas. Hancock later did research on another variety of Afro-Seminole spoken in a village called Nacimiento in the
Mexican state of
Coahuila.
Further Information
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