First of all he ascertained which letter occurred most frequently in the advertisement, for this must be the letter e according to rules made and provided by the great Edgar A. Poe, the American poet-cryptographer. But to reveal the secret in full, I may as well say, dear reader, that you must take printers’ type in their cases, and follow the proportions according to the size of the boxes. By doing this you cannot fail to unrip the seam of any of these transmutations.
But, alas! this cock would not fight—it was a dead bird in the pit. My friend at once apprehended that he had to deal with an old hand—one of those aggravating fellows who are up to cryp—a man who can write a sentence, and be capable of leaving the letter e entirely out. For there are people who will do this.
So he went to work afresh upon now hypotheses, and pleasantly the hours fled by. Quires of paper were exhausted; he worked all day and all the evening with no result. That it was not in a foreign language my friend was well assured.
“For well hee knows the Latine and the Dutche;
Of Fraunce and Toscanie he hath a touche.”
Russian is familiar to him, and Arabic would not have been an unknown quantity. So he began again with the next day, and had been breaking the Sabbath until four o’clock in the afternoon, when I entered, and the mystic advertisement was submitted to me. I glanced at it, and at once read it into English, though as I read the smile at my friend’s lost labour vanished in a sense of sympathy for what the writer must have suffered. It was as follows, omitting names:—
“MANDY jins of --- ---. Patsa mandy, te bitcha lav ki tu shan. Opray minno lav, mandy’l kek pukka til tute muks a mandi. Tute’s di’s see se welni poggado. Shom atrash tuti dad’l jal divio. Yov’l fordel sor. For miduvel’s kom, muk lesti shoon choomani.”
In English: “I know of ---. Trust me, and send word where you are. On my word, I will not tell till you give me leave. Your mother’s heart is wellnigh broken. I am afraid your father will go mad. He will forgive all. For God’s sake, let him know something.”
This was sad enough, and the language in which it was written is good English Rommany. I would only state in addition, that I found that in the very house in which I was living, and at the same time, a lady had spent three days in vainly endeavouring to ascertain the meaning of these sentences.
It is possible that many Gipsies, be they of high or low degree, in society or out of it, may not be pleased at my publishing a book of their language, and revealing so much of what they fondly cherish as a secret. They need be under no apprehension, since I doubt very much whether, even with its aid, a dozen persons living will seriously undertake to study it—and of this dozen there is not one who will not be a philologist; and such students are generally aware that there are copious vocabularies of all the other Gipsy dialects of Europe easy to obtain from any bookseller. Had my friend used the works of Pott or Paspati, Ascoli or Grellman, he would have found it an easy thing to translate this advertisement. The truth simply is, that for scholars there is not a single secret or hidden word in English Gipsy or in any other Rommany dialect, and none except scholars will take pains to acquire it. Any man who wished to learn sufficient Gipsy to maintain a conversation, and thereby learn all the language, could easily have done so half a century ago from the vocabularies published by Bright and other writers. A secret which has been for fifty years published in very practical detail in fifty books, is indeed a secrét de Ponchinelle.
I have been asked scores of times, “Have the Gipsies an alphabet of their own? have they grammars of their language, dictionaries, or books?” Of course my answer was in the negative. I have heard of vocabularies in use among crypto-Rommanies, or those who having risen from the roads live a secret life, so to speak, but I have never seen one. But they have songs; and one day I was told that in my neighbourhood there lived a young Gipsy woman who was a poetess and made Rommany ballads. “She can’t write,” said my informant; “but her husband’s a Gorgio, and he can. If you want them, I’ll get you some.” The offer was of course accepted, and the Gipsy dame, flattered by the request, sent me the following. The lyric is without rhyme, but, as sung, not without rhythm.