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RE: Can a white man play the blues?
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tf10music
Posts: 112
Joined: Jan. 3 2017
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 RE: Can a white man play the blues? (in reply to devilhand)
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quote:
All english speaking authors copy each other leading to the same result. I believe any research on this topic is a dead end. The fact is there is a lack of evidence backing up both hypothesis. You guys stick to your story and I stick to my story.
I'm not drawing from English-language sources. The three sources I drew from were Cristina Cruces Roldán, who does original anthropological and ethnomusicological research in Spanish, Lope de Vega, who was a literal honest-to-god Spanish playwright and who should really need no introduction, and Richard Pym, whose book is written in English, but draws on medieval and early modern Spanish archival records, census records and court records that nobody else has written about in any language.
You are drawing on your feeling that a particular narrative is true, without any evidence to support it.
You are right that there is no definitive evidence available, but most of historical study is about putting the puzzle pieces together and settling on the most likely explanation based on a number of social, political and circumstantial factors. The explanation that you want to be true is not the most likely one, based on every available indication.
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Date Apr. 26 2021 19:39:29
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Can a white man play the blues? (in reply to devilhand)
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quote:
Of course white western men or women with their 1st world problems can't sing blues or flamenco. Even if they have the voice and technique.
Oh horror of horrors! The Voice of Authority has decreed that even with a voice and technique, we Westerners who are melanin-deprived can't sing blues or flamenco.
Would the Voice of Authority, then, decree that blacks cannot play Bach?
It is truly amazing that at this moment, when attempts are being made to look beyond race and skin color, the Voice of Authority decrees that melanin matters after all.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Apr. 27 2021 17:08:05
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kitarist
Posts: 1715
Joined: Dec. 4 2012
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RE: Can a white man play the blues? (in reply to Piwin)
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quote:
From the same book:
"That they were called Germans, may be accounted for, either by the supposition that their generic name of Rommany was misunderstood and mispronounced by the Spaniards amongst whom they came, or from the fact of their having passed through Germany in their way to the south, and bearing passports and letters of safety from the various German states. The title of Flemings, by which at the present day they are known in various parts of Spain, would probably never have been bestowed upon them but from the circumstance of their having been designated or believed to be Germans,—as German and Fleming are considered by the ignorant as synonymous terms."
Excellent. I forgot to do a word search for flem* 
But here is another recent article that I'd really like if you can take a look at, Piwin, because the guy is a linguist. I wasn't really sold on his arguments about an undocumented Calo word which morphed into the existing 'flamenco' word. Maybe I am wrong and the linguistic argument is quite strong (?)
The article is Sayers, W. (2007). Spanish flamenco: Origin, loan translation, and in-and out-group evolution (Romani, Caló, Castilian). Romance Notes, 48(1), 13-22. (It can be read online for free at https://www.jstor.org/stable/90011890 with a free JSTOR account.)
Sayers does provide a summary of the most viable hypotheses, first making sure to dismiss the ‘fellah mencus’ stuff as not being one of them.
The article beginning:
And the ending paragraph:
And from the middle:
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 Attachment (3)
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Konstantin
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Date Apr. 28 2021 0:52:09
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: Can a white man play the blues? (in reply to kitarist)
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Short answer: just put it in the pile with all the other maybes.  "Flamenco" is to etymology what "copla" is to flamenco. Just put anything you want in it. ^^
Caveats first: I'm not an etymologist and I'm just reacting after a first reading of the article.
I'd be curious to know what these "linguistic grounds" for readily dismissing "fellah mengus" are. I don't know what those could be. Perhaps comparative cases where they see that words with that kind of ending went from Arabic to Spanish but ended up with different kinds of ending than -enco? Dunno. To me the case against it was more on historical grounds than on linguistic ones. I'm careful with the "linguistic grounds" argument, because the literature is ripe with examples of scholars saying "X can't happen because Y", only to be shown a few years later that it actually can, and did, happen.
Ultimately his thesis has the same problem as all the others: there is no shortage of etymologies that make perfect sense linguistically, and since the word seemingly pops out of nowhere, then we're left speculating about undocumented words and how they may or may not have evolved.
Since he's relating it to germanía, I'll say this: there's plenty of scholarship that relates that term to the Catalan germá (brothers), and not to the German ethnonym. There are plenty of historical occurrences of that term, probably the most famous of which is the rebellion of the Germanías in Valencia. The term goes back to the Latin germanus, meaning brothers (which gave us words like germain in French or germane in English). The Latin for German seems to have been a loan word taken from some Northern tribes and bears no connection to the Latin word for brothers.
Point being that there's a sort of consistency in all of these theories, that if they opt for one particular origin of the word "flamenco", they're going to also reach pre-defined conclusions on the origin of other words. So if you think "flamenco" comes from the Flemish ethnonym, you're likely to gloss over the possible Catalan origin of Germanía and instead see it as rooted in the German ethnonym, exactly like Borrows did. It sometimes leads to very bizarre conclusions. Like, for instance, this idea that the "Roman de Flamenca" somehow had some connection to Flemings because skin colour. I guess, but man that's a stretch. The book predates the political presence of Flemings in Southern Europe by several centuries, yet we are somehow to believe that it was already a term used to describe people of fair skin based on the Flemish ethnonym.
Similarly, this article says that the fla- of flamma was retained in certain Andalusian dialects, whereas in most Castilian dialects it shifted to lla-, which he then uses to explain why the pha- of phabarel turned into fla-. OK, fair enough. But fla- was also retained in Catalan, both North and South, and it also has the advantage of neatly explaining the -enc suffix (with quite a few examples of -enc words turning into -enco/-enca in Castilian). The point isn't to say he's necessarily wrong. It's just to point out that there's a sort of consistency in what possibilities they dismiss. Meaning that since he dismisses Catalan influence out of hand, then of course Germanía to him can't possibly come from Catalan either, despite strong evidence to the contrary. I'd be really funny if that origin of the word flamenco turned out to be true. Unlikely, but man I'd love to see that revenge of the rumberos moment lol ^^
Related to that, footnote 20 is rather telling. Since he's making a case for this kind of encrypted "secret" language, he cites somebody saying that distorting "a foreign language's name" is common in such languages. I guess, and I don't know about the other examples he cites, but to relate the French "Bohémiens" to cryptic slang is AFAIK incorrect. There was nothing cryptic about that, it wasn't some kind of in-group signal. It followed the exact same rationale as "Gypsies": namely, people thought these Roma came from those regions, i.e. Bohemia in the case of "Bohémiens" and Egypt in the case of "Gypsies", and that's it. So yeah, just a tendency to gloss over certain things and overgeneralise in a way that would support his own argument.
Anyway, I'm not dismissing his theory more than any other. Ultimately its value is that it opens up new possibilities that can then be refined, but as is it's not particularly convincing to me, nor does it seem to me to be more plausible than other theories.
Dunno. As long as there's this lack of documentation, I think a lot of that work of refinement will have to be less about "flamenco" per se and more about clarifying other terms. For instance, if I really wanted to put an Occitan/Catalan origin to rest, it would be helpful if they could explain why the Kalderash of pelota land called their Southern brethren "red-legs" (I forget the exact word but that's what it translates to). There's no morphological or etymological connection to "flamenco" there at all. As you know, Basque is a language isolate. But for some reason there's that colour again, which would also be involved in a Romance origin of the term. I guess in a way it means trying to chip away at the number of unrelated coincidences there would be for any given etymology of the term. And what I'm seeing is that many of these scholars are very good at multiplying the coincidences, but not so good at reducing their numbers.
edit: also, Grisha is flamenco, and estebanana's mother was a hamster and his father smelled of elderberries. ^^
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Date Apr. 28 2021 19:54:32
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Can a white man play the blues? (in reply to Piwin)
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Just a caveat ~ I’m not an entomologist
quote:
Short answer: just put it in the pile with all the other maybes. "Flamenco" is to etymology what "copla" is to flamenco. Just put anything you want in it. ^^
Caveats first: I'm not an etymologist and I'm just reacting after a first reading of the article.
I'd be curious to know what these "linguistic grounds" for readily dismissing "fellah mengus" are. I don't know what those could be. Perhaps comparative cases where they see that words with that kind of ending went from Arabic to Spanish but ended up with different
Occams Razor -
What’s most probable when the facts are assembled is probably the reason-
There already existed a word in common usage by the late 18th century, the term Flamenco meant that which is derived from Flanders ( Ned Flanders from the Simpsons? ) and the concept that Felu- mengu us a grouping of phonemes that we can’t be sure of in terms of origin; and accuracy of how those phonemes were gleaned from Arabic.
Occams Razor #2
That Arabic is so present in modern Spanish and the word flamenco is so common indicates that if there was a root word in Arabic that flamenco is extracted from, modern Arabicists would very likely know the sister word in Arabic.
When it comes down to equal speculation as to a northern or southern origin of the word flamenco, the northern hypothesis already contains the exact word and it’s not obscure, it’s common and is used in several ways. It means Gitano Rom people in Spain who make flamenco music and it means items or people from Flanders. It also has a connotation of wild behavior as when Spanish parents tell children to behave and “ not act flamenco “
In Japanese there is a similar reprimand, parents say “ don’t be Yankee!” And I’ve heard Spanish parents say that as well. Also in Japan to say someone is ‘ Yankee’ is to label them a bit low life or socially rebellious. So it is in the nature of the way we use language to adopt regional or words that describe a group of people and use that as a label for another group, as a description of their behavior in our eyes.
We take attributes in culture and behavior of one group and use our own evaluations of that group, very much a linguistic stereotyping, and overlay that on another culture to emphasize a line of behavioral traits that we see. Our perceptions can be racist, true or untrue, or partially correct, but it’s a way of labeling and creating a euphemism that describes our relationship with a culture.
Then it gets interesting, the labeled social group that is being ostracized by a dominant group calling it names becomes self aware of the epithet and adopts it as a point of cultural pride in defense of the dominant group.
An example of this is how Trump voters called themselves “deplorables” because the news media misrepresented a speech given by an opposition politician. The transcript says clearly that the vast majority of people are not deplorable, but that there was a subgroup of people that were perpetrators of deplorable behavior on gay women.
In the end the subgroup the opposition politician was speaking of proved to be deplorable. Some Japanese kids prove to be Yankee and some Spanish kids prove to be Flamenco, but all for the reason of labeling a behavior that a dominant group finds deplorable.
Flamenco from the north is the most open path to a reason why flamenco is called flamenco and in light of the dearth of real hard core linguistic evidence in a field with a lot of researchers... lots of Arabists, very little hard evidence. Prado museum uses the word flamenco as a matter of course.
Occam’s razor
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Date Apr. 29 2021 2:54:36
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