[10] i.e. Pretend to be ill. English Gypsies employ the same phrase alike in Rómani and in English. [↑]
[12] See note on No. 6, ‘God’s Godson.’ [↑]
[13] Baldpate makes the same remark in No. 2, p. 8, but the conventional answer is wanting there. [↑]
[14] So I had written; but I have since read Maive Stokes’ story of ‘The Demon conquered by the King’s Son’ (Indian Fairy Tales, No. 24, pp. 173 and 288). Here it is the demon step-mother, who, pretending her eyes are bad, sends the hero to fetch tigress’s milk, an eagle’s feather, night-growing rice and water from the Glittering Well. He speaks, however, of her as his ‘mother.’ e.g. on p. 180. Compare ‘The Son of Seven Mothers’ in F. A. Steel’s Indian Wide-awake Stories, pp. 98–110, and Knowles’ Folk-tales of Kashmir, pp. 1 and 42. [↑]
[15] There is obviously an omission, at this point, of a wager or something of that sort. [↑]
[17] See footnote 2 on p. 16. [↑]
[18] Clearly Mr. Mayhew was no folklorist. The boy’s claim to have invented the story is worth noting. [↑]
[19] The Roumanian-Gypsy word is Baht, which in one form or another (bakht, bahi, bok, bachí, etc.) occurs in every Gypsy dialect—Turkish, Russian, Scandinavian, German, English, Spanish, etc., and which Pott derives from the Sanskrit (ii. 398–9). But the curious point is that in Dozon’s Contes Albanais (1881), p. 60, we get ‘Va trouver ma Fortune,’ and a footnote explains, ‘Fortune, en turc bakht, espèce de génie protecteur.’ Paspati, again, in his Turkish-Gypsy vocabulary (1870), p. 155, gives—‘Bakht, n.f. fortune, sort, hasard.… Les Grecs et les Turcs se servent très souvent du même mot’; and Miklosich, too, cites the Modern Greek μπάκτι (Ueber die Mundarten, vii. 14). The occurrence of this Gypsy word as a loan-word in Modern Greek and Turkish is suggestive of a profound influence of the Gypsies on the folklore of the Balkan Peninsula. Bakht, fortune, is also good Persian. [↑]