Plumbers, and even politicians, think meanly of Gypsies. The Oxford English Dictionary, apparently regarding them as a species of vermin rather than a nation, denies them the barren honour which it awards to Gallovidians, and spells their name with a little g. As an old witch complained to Lavengro, some very respectable persons go so far as to “grudge the poor people the speech they talk among themselves,” and, like the magistrate, brand it “no language at all, merely a made-up gibberish.” Mrs. Herne very properly retorted, with an ironical curtsey: “Oh, bless your wisdom, you can tell us what our language is without understanding it”; for to learn to understand Romani is a far easier task than to trace it to its sources.
The central mystery of a mysterious race, it is their greatest treasure, whether, with Borrow, we regard it as a means “to enable habitual breakers of the law to carry on their consultations with more secrecy,” or share the enthusiasm of scholars who have found in it the most fascinating, yet most baffling, problem of linguistics. On the language of the Gypsies one of the greatest philologists wrote two volumes, containing more than a thousand closely-printed pages, although he confessed he had never heard it spoken; another devoted eight years to the gradual publication of a huge quarto which, when completed, weighed nearly a hundred ounces; and countless humbler contributors have added their stones to the cairn of learning under which Romani lies buried. All believed that in this unwritten tongue, the conversational currency of “the most unfortunate and degraded of beings,” lay hid answers to riddles which have perplexed the learned for five hundred years: Where was the original home of the Gypsies? When did they leave it? By what route did they reach Europe? But the hopes of scholars have been grievously disappointed, and at the end of a century of diligent gleaning and scientific analysis the mystery of Gypsy origin is as deep as it was at the beginning!
Far from being gibberish, Romani is an inflected language possessing more cases for its noun than did Latin; and it is Indian, although the Gypsies, true to their reputation, have begged words with which to supplement their vocabulary from Persians, Greeks, Slavs and other peoples among whom they have dwelt. It has been said that “the Arabic of the Bedouin in this century is incomparably more nearly identical with that of the tribes through whose borders the children of Israel were led by Moses than is any one of our contemporary European tongues with its ancestor of the same remote period.” A similar cause has enabled the Gypsies, ever wandering, separating and reuniting, to resist more successfully than a sedentary race could have resisted the gradual changes which ultimately part a language into mutually incomprehensible dialects. Their speech is an echo which has reverberated through the centuries, for in it may be heard ancient Indian forms that have been lost in India itself, and dearest of all to the philologist, though most perplexing, a number of words which are almost pure Sanskrit. But if you ask the linguistic student of the Roma whence they come, you will receive no reply more definite than a reference to north-west Hindustan and the inhospitable mountains thereabouts; while for the date of the Gypsy exodus you may choose at will any period between 300 B.C. and 1300 A.D. and find high philological authority for your choice.
To satisfy, or, better still, to stimulate curiosity about the language of the “Brahmins of the roads,” a short nursery story in the dialect of the coppersmiths is here reprinted from the pages of the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, by the kind permission of Mr. E. O. Winstedt, to whom it was dictated by one of Kola’s sons-in-law. Most of the consonants may, without serious error, be pronounced as in English, r being rolled as in “rural,” g hard as in “gas,” and s unvoiced as in “sago.” The symbol zh represents the French j or the z in English “azure,” while sh is the corresponding unvoiced sound in “ash”: with t prefixed the latter becomes tsh, the double sound heard twice in “church,” which would be written tsh?(r)tsh. In Romani the letter h is often found after p, t and k, where, except in the mouths of Irish speakers, it is not used in English. Thus ph and th have not the values they have in “philosophy” and “theology,” nor kh (as in Oriental languages) that of the ch in Scottish “loch,” but the h must be sounded after the other consonant: p+h, t+h, and k+h. The vowels may be pronounced as in Italian, the additional vowel ? representing the vowels in English “but” and “cur,” and the diphthongs ai and au being similar to the sounds in “aisle” and “ounce.” The vowel in English “law” is written aw. For examples the following words may be taken:—
but (much) as “boot.”
hai (and) as “high.”
hÁide! (come!) as “high-day.”
kothÉ (there) as “coat-hay.”
le (take) as “lay.”
meklÉ (they allowed) as “make-lay.”
per (belly) as “pair.”
ye (even) as “yea.”
The acute accents indicate the stressed syllables and do not alter the quality of the vowels. They were not marked in the original, and are added here merely to assist readers and not as an accurate record of the coppersmiths’ method of accentuation.
