A language only for Travellers

Shelta is a language spoken by Travellers, particularly in Ireland but also parts of Great Britain. It is widely known as the Cant, to its native speakers in Ireland as Gammon and to the linguistic community as Shelta. Although this aspect is frequently over-emphasized, it was often used as a cryptolect to exclude outsiders from comprehending conversations between travellers.The exact number of native speakers is hard to determine due to sociolinguistic issues but Ethnologue puts the number of speakers in Ireland at 6,000 and 86,000 worldwide.

Linguistically Shelta is today seen to be a creole language that stems from a community of travelling people in Ireland and Scotland that was originally predominantly Irish and Gaelic speaking which went through a period of widespread bilingualism that resulted in a language based heavily on Hiberno-English and/or Scots with heavy influences from Irish and Gaelic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelta

Chir Batti & Fata Morgana

Chir Batti

Chir Batti, Chhir Batti or Cheer batti (Ghost light) is a yet unexplained strange dancing light phenomena occurring on dark nights reported from the Banni grasslands, its seasonal marshy wetlands and the adjoining desert of the marshy salt flats of the Rann of Kutch near Indo-Pak border in Kutch district, Gujarat State, India.

See the Also see links - apparently this happens in many parts of the world -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chir_Batti


Fata Morgana

A fata morgana (after the Italian translation of Morgan le Fay, the fairy shapeshifting half-sister of King Arthur) is a mirage, an optical phenomenon which results from a temperature inversion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fata_Morgana_%28mirage%29


Don't miss the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BYA0KfeSE4

Walkabout & Songlines

Walkabout refer to a rite of passage where Australian Aborigines would undergo a journey during adolescence and live in the wilderness for a period as long as six months. In this practice they would trace the paths, or "songlines", that their people's ceremonial ancestors took, and imitate, in a fashion, their heroic deeds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkabout

Songlines, also called Dreaming tracks by Indigenous Australians, are an ancient cultural concept, meme and motif perpetuated through oral lore and singing and other storytelling modalities such as dance and painting. Songlines are an intricate series of song cycles that identify landmarks and subtle tracking mechanisms for navigation. For the Aborigines all land is sacred and alive. Their ancestors gave life in singing, gave them life through song, and dwell in the land still. The songs must be continually sung to keep the land "alive". In singing they preserve the land/story/dreaming of their ancestors, and recreate it in their oneness of past, present and future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songlines