Romani- The Gypsy Language

Filed in archive More Information on June 30, 2010

© Alaskan Dude

What their religion has been to the Jews, that their language is to the gypsies- a bond of universal brotherhood as the gypsies everywhere speak the selfsame Romani chic( GYpsy tongue). In the gypsy Romani vocabulary ( five thousand words rich perhaps), besides the Indian element that constitutes its basis, there is also a large percentage of borrowed words- Persian, Armenian, Slavonic, Rumanian etc. Thus the English dialect has "ambrol" i.e., pear, ( Persian amrud) , "grasni" mare i.e., ( Arm: "grast"- beast of burden) "parmiseri" (Mod Gr. paramu- the story), "vari"- any ( Rum: vare); and stiffipen i.e., sister-in-law ( Ger: stief). These words and the like are a record of the route by which the English Gypsies arrived in England;and as the fifty Greek and the thirty Slavonic words outnumberall the other borrowed words put together, it follows that the gypsy history tarried longest in the Greek and Slavonic lands.