Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tarish language (2nd nomination)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.  

The result was delete. However, I do urge the nominator to make shorter nomination statements next time, to save the sanity of our editors, or whatever is left of it.  Kurykh  03:47, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

Tarish language

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A "Romani community called the Tarish people" does not exist, nor is there a "dialect of Shelta" or of Angloromani or Para-Romani called "the Tarish language". The article is based on a hoax and should be deleted.

The notion of a "Tarish language" goes back to Patrick R. Saucer who in a book published in 1999 (The Children of Wisdom: An Introduction to the Tarish Rite Apostolic Church, 1525-1999, Universal Publishers, ) claimed to be "bishop" of a certain invisible "Tarish Rite Apostolic Church", founded, according to him, in the 16th century in England by Elizabeth Barton and John Fisher. This is of course pure phantasy, nowhere confirmed or even discussed by historians of this very well documented episode of English history.

Nevertheles, according to Saucer, catholic churchmen and scholars persecuted by Henry VIII for being members of this secret church, created the "Tarish language" as a "dialect of Shelta" by adding their own artificial inventions to the the secret language of the English "criminal classes". Saucer does not supply any further linguistic specifications of this "holy language", "chosen language", "language of the angels" (except the word "domina" for Maria), nor does he link it in any way wiht Romani or Roma communities.

When this present WP article was first proposed for deletion in November 2004 (see  Votes_for_deletion/Tarish_language), Saucer, contacted via email by some WP users, admitted to not having been aware of the fact that Shelta is the traditional language of Irish Tinkers rather than of criminals or "nomadic peoples in Great Britain", yet he claimed to have found out in the meantime that the "Tarish people" had been Spanish Zincali gypsies from Tartessia migrated to England and then influenced by followers of Elizabeth Barton. Which means that he now tried to link his invention with the myths surrounding the biblical Tarshish (identified by some with Tartessos/Tartessia in Spain) on the one hand, and with possible historical relations between Romani groups in Spain (Kalé, "black people") and speakers of Angloromani in Great Britain, on the other.

On these grounds, WP users assuming Saucer to be a reputable source (the article had even misrepresented him as a bishop of the Anglican Church!), tried to improve the article by conflating his earlier understanding of a "Tarish language" with notions of Angloromani, turning the earlier pure phantasy of this article into its present mixture of phantasy (regarding "Tarish") and facts (about Angloromani). Saucer, author of two books on his "invisible church" and possibly its only member, is of no encyclopedic relevance, or at least his phantasies about "Tarish language" and "Tarish people" are not sufficiently relevant for deserving an own WP entry.

It is due mostly to Wikipedia that Saucer's hoax about "Tarish language" and "Tarish people", which otherwise would have gone unnoticed like the rest of his book, has gained wide distribution and even scholarly credit. It was picked up on 24 November 2004 by a certain Lilith adding an article "Tarish language" to the Urban Dictionary, and, on that same day, by an anonymous IP creating the WP article Tarish, at this time still without a reference to Saucer, which was then added on the next day by User:Historia (signing also as "Ms. Greenberg", most likely the same person as Lilith) when she created the page on "Tarish language" and added a few more phantasies of her own both to this article and to the disambiguation article Tarish (see, later deleted by herself when she left WP).

User:Iota who was certainly familiar with matters Irish but somehow took this wild goose for a real bird added it to the article Irish Travellers ("Some argue that the Irish Travellers are descended from another nomadic people called Tarish"), and from there it was translated with some additional inventions or misunderstandings to other Wikipedias (namely French and German). The French version (turning the Tarish into "another nomadic people in Ireland": "un autre peuple nomade d'Irlande") was even picked up by a recent relatively scholarly printed publication, Christian Bader, Yéniches: Les derniers nomades d'Europe (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2007), who, in a short chapter devoted to Irish Tinkers, turned the Tarish people even into "preceltic" nomades ("Les Pavee ... revendiquent des origines préceltiques et se disent issus d'un groupe de nomades appelés Tarish" p.104).

So "bishop Saucer's" phantasy, transformed and diffused by Wikipedia, has finally been well received in the world of scholarly publications! If you read German, please see my more detailed analysis of this story in the German WP:. --Otfried Lieberknecht (talk) 10:37, 21 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Wow, I've seen shorter nomination speeches than this at a political convention. Mandsford (talk) 13:18, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment: I dunno, Bill Clinton could probably beat it. - Realkyhick (Talk to me) 13:58, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
 * On the other hand, it does address in detail the objection that could have been raised by editors such as myself, who can and did find the first book, and might well have gone on to find the second. &#9786; Uncle G (talk) 15:45, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom's long-winded rationales. - Realkyhick (Talk to me) 13:58, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, you are right, sorry for the length. The short version is: this article is based on a hoax published in 1999 by Saucer (and slightly modified via email in November 2004 during the WP delete discussion), reproduced in November 2004 with additional inventions by user Historia, then changed by other users who tried their best to make sense of it. There is no "Tarish language", neither as a dialect of Romani or Para-Romani (I have checked a few standard works by Matras, Bakker and others, plus the ROMLEX project at the Univ. of Graz ), nor as a dialect of Shelta (Saucer himself admitted to this, and I too have found no evidence that "Tarish" was ever used as a name for Shelta or for another secret/ingroup-language). The only scholarly reference that I have found (to Tarish as a "preceltic" people) is in Christian Bader, and he is adopting the info that he found in the French WP, and which in turn had been translated (and transformed) from the English WP. We should delete this nonsense, before it will create even more confusion. --Otfried Lieberknecht (talk) 14:01, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
 * This is becoming a problem in verifiability. Other people take our articles and regurgitate the information in things of their own that they publish (see Articles for deletion/Pea Ridge, Florida for example) that editors then take to be reliable sources that support the articles (see Articles for deletion/Userbar, for example). Uncle G (talk) 15:45, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom: article is likely a WP:HOAX. Mh29255 (talk) 14:12, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom; Though convoluted, this has all the appearances of a WP:HOAX, and should go. Evidence to the contrary would, of course, be given due weight - but I can find no such evidence at this time. UltraExactZZ Claims~ Evidence 15:43, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete, per nom., seems reasonably certain to be some kind of self-published hoax. The language can't be simultaneously a kind of Romani and a version of Shelta;  Shelta is originally a sort of back-slang or Pig Latin style transformation of Irish, while Romani is an Indo-Iranian language, originally not too dissimilar from other contemporary Indian languages, that took on a lot of other vocabulary during the course of its speakers' travels.  Both languages are used as sources of cant vocabulary with the syntax of the majority language where they are spoken.  So it seems implausible.  The hoax itself may be notable, in an article describing it as such. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 18:18, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete. "The hoax itself might be notable" was my own first thought - it could be better to keep an article clearly saying that "Tarish" is a hoax. But so far no indication that the hoax itself is notable: google only gives Saucer once, Lilith once, and a dozen wikipedia mirrors. Nothing on google news, and only Saucer's book on google books. --Paularblaster (talk) 22:02, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. Tim Q. Wells (talk) 22:21, 21 January 2008 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.