M. Paspati satisfactorily proved that the wandering tribes of the Romá, e.g. the wild Zapáris or Dyáparis (Szapary?),[122] have preserved in Rumelia the langue mère of their ancients, whereas the “domigence,” the sedentary dwellers in cities and towns, have “falsified” the tongue. The same is said by the Bedawin concerning the “Jumpers of Walls,” the settled Arabs. This part of the subject leads to notices of Gypsy tales and legends, in which, by the way, Gypsies rarely figure, and to other productions of la pauvre Muse tsigane.
After some discursive matter, our critic passes from M. Paspati to M. Bartalus, who has quoted from certain very rare tracts (La Véritable origine, etc., a.d. 1798 and 1800) on the rise of the Gypsy nation. The Bohémiens, it appears, are descendants of Cham or Ham, “which is admissible”; and, like their brethren, they were damned by Noah. But, on the destruction of the Plain cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, Adama and Saboim—Segor being honourably excluded—Zoar and its inhabitants were saved because they harboured one Lot. The lands, however, were assigned to this “patriarch”; and the Hamites, being dispersed, became Gypsies. Once more that myth of Noah!—for how much false anthropology is it not responsible? Again, we do not fail to meet another old friend. The wicked king of Egypt appears in a famous “Pharaoh Song,” whilst in Iceland he gave his name to a cavalry of seals. The oath formula of the Hungarian Gypsies prescribed by the courts was: “As King Pharaoh was engulfed in the Red Sea, so may I be accursed and swallowed up by the deepest abyss if I do not speak the truth! May no theft, no traffic, nor any other business prosper with me! May my horse turn into an ass at the next stroke of his hoof, and may I end my days on the scaffold by the hands of the hangman!”[123]
The critic then passes to a second and a remarkable characteristic of the Gypsy race, the musical, which is now becoming known throughout Europe. At the Paris Exposition of 1878 the “nightingales of Koursk,” a troop of forty Romá from Moscow, followed the Hungarian Cziganes, and were equally admired. Even the celebrated Catalani appreciated the Chingáneh girl of Moscow, “who performed with such originality and true expression the characteristic melodies of the tribe”; and threw over her shoulders a papal gift in the shape of a rich Cashmere shawl. Most Englishmen now know that Mr. Bunn’s “Bohemian Girl,” thus unhappily translated from La Bohémienne of St. George, was a Romni girl. The far-famed Abbé Liszt[124] attributed to these “tinklers” the chief rôle in treating the musical épopée; but this opinion of the great master is opposed by the artistic M. Bartalus. I, however, incline to Liszt’s view. Let me note that the popular Romani word for musician, Lautar (plural Lautari), may either be the Persian Lútí,[125] or more probably a deformed offspring of the Arabic El `Aúd[126], which gave rise to our “lute.” Our critic holds that the Gypsy’s music, like his tales and poetry, is his own; whilst the matter of the songs and ballads is borrowed from Hungarians, Rumans, and even the unimaginative Turk: he also points out that many of the legends are cosmopolitan. When the Catalan Gypsy, met by the author in 1869 at St. Germain, told him that the état (Dharma or religious duty) of the Romni-chel, the “sons of women” (i.e. their mothers), is to cheat their neighbours; that they learned this whole duty of man from St. Peter, who as our Lord’s servant habitually tricked and defrauded his Master; that le dieu Jesus, who established all human conditions on the creation day, had taught them, by example as well as precept, to beg and to vagabond naked-footed; that his tribe were veritable Christians “who knew only God and the Blessed Virgin”; and that all these things were written in the “Book of the Wanderings of our Lord,”—we recognize the old, old tale. The ancient Rom, like a host of other facetious barbarians, was solemnly hoaxing a simple student, a credulous “civilizee.” Still the joke has its ethnological value; it shows that the pseudo-Christian saints of the Gypsy Evangel are thieves and “sorners.” Highly characteristic also is the address to the Gypsy deity: “Good, happy God of gold!” On the other hand, such laical legends of the Apostles are current even amongst Christian peoples, from whom they may have been kidnapped by the Romá. Witness the French peasant’s tale of Jesus and St. Peter, the horseshoe and the cherries, which has for moral the market value of thrift.
The supplementary article analyzes the scholarly work of M. Franz Miklosich.[127] This erudite Slavist whose only reproach is that he finds Slavism in every place, distributes the Gypsies into twelve linguistic groups, to which he assigns an inadequate total of six hundred thousand head. Amongst the highly conservative Romá of Northern Russia he detects, besides Russian and Polish, Ruman and Magyar words, expressions borrowed from the neo-Greek of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As these Hellenisms are also adopted by the Spanish Gypsies, the natural deduction is that Greece generally formed an older home long inhabited by the wanderers, who thence passed on viâ Poland to Russia. But this theory, if proved to be fact, would not invalidate the general belief that some Gypsy tribes migrated through Egypt and Morocco into Spain without crossing the Pyrenees. The Romá, being “sturdy vagabonds,” rather than true nomads, would borrow from one another during their frequent and regular meetings the terms wanting to their scanty and barbarous speech. It appears rich enough in material and sensuous expression, and the same is notably the case with the wandering Arab and the Turkoman. M. Paspati[128] notices that “the [Rumelian] wanderer has more than forty words for his tent and the implements of his trade.” A “Thieves’ Latin” would not be required by these bilinguals; but for the purposes of concealment and villainy they would readily adopt strange vocables. Thus in the Scottish Lowlands they make their English speech unintelligible by French and Gaelic, Welsh and Irish insertions. As will appear, they have invented in Egypt and Spain, and I believe there only, a regular argot. Such irregularities prevent our attributing much importance to the general remark that the Gypsy dialect does not return; i.e. that the Polish Romá do not use Russian terms, nor the Turkish Romá Magyar words.
Finally, M. Miklosich puts to flight the “Tamerlane tenet” of popular belief which would place the last Gypsy exodus after a.d. 1399. He adduces documentary evidence, the well-known donation instruments of a.m. 6894 (= a.d. 1386-87) issued by the Kings of Wallachia; noting that during the fifteenth century, and even between 1832 and 1836, the Principalities, which have still preserved the Jewish disabilities, held the Gypsies to be a Slav race.
The Derniers Travaux has the merit of bringing prominently forward the “hypothesis of Hasse,” advanced in 1803 and presently forgotten. It would explain the purity of the Gypsy tongue by the fact of these tinklers being settled in Europe ab antiquo. It has often been remarked that the farther we go eastward, and the nearer we approach the cradle of the race, Sindh or Western India, the more completely the language changes and degrades. This is to be expected. The Jats living in close contact with other dialects would necessarily modify their own after the fashion of their neighbours; such is the rule of the world. The Romá have only two ties: one is of blood, the love of “kith, kin, and consequence”; the other is of language which serves to conceal his speech. During the dispersion of centuries the Gypsies, surrounded by alien and hostile races, would religiously adhere to the old tongue; and having a vital interest in preserving a secret instrument, it would war against change. It is the more necessary to insist upon this view, as our critic expects to find after a separation of some four centuries the Jats or other tribes speaking pure old Gypsy. The modern Gypsy may still represent the ancient Játaki. Hence also the dialect of their ancestors is dying out amongst the sedentary Romá. M. Paul Bataillard has carefully separated, and perhaps too curiously, the historical arrival of the Gypsies in Western Europe and their establishment in the south-eastern regions, Thrace, Dacia, etc. An abuse of his theory makes him urge the identity of his Tsigane with the mysterious Sicani who held Sicily before the Siculi. These and other prehistoric identifications have not yet been generally adopted.
Had M. Paul Bataillard reflected a little more, he would not have advocated, considering the extensive habitat of the Jats, the insufficient theory of M. Ascoli—namely, that the Gypsies are Sindhis who dwelt long in Hindustan; nor would M. Ascoli have omitted the widely spoken Játaki from his list of neo-Indian tongues, which he unduly reduces to seven. We should have been spared the “conviction” that the Romá dwelt in Mesopotamia, which was only one station on their way, Asia Minor and the Lower Danube being the general line of Aryan emigration; that they are aborigines of Kabul, in fact primitive Afghans, as supposed by another French littérateur, whose lively imagination strips him of all authority; and, finally, that they are “descendants of those ancient peoples of Bactriana and Arya, successively conquered by Persians, Greeks, Indogetæ, and Afghans.” A most trivial comparison is made between Segor, the biblical city, and the Gypsy name Cingani (Singani). When Professor Pott and M. de Saulcy find “relationship” and “close connexion” between Sanskrit and Romani-chíb, they should have explained that the latter is a Prakrit or vulgar tongue with an Aryan vocabulary reposing upon the ruins of a Turanian base. The former, as its name shows, was a refined and city language, never spoken, nor indeed understood, by the peoples of India in general; in fact, a professor’s speech, like the present Romaic of the Athenian logiotátoi.
The word Berber (Barbar), again, applied to the Gypsies in Persia, means, according to its root, a chatterer, patterer, or speaker of unintelligible cant. It is the Sanskrit Varvvara, [Sanskrit: वर्व्वर][129], a low fellow, a savage, the Barbaros of the Greeks and Romans; the Berber, [Sindhi: بڙبڙ], or Berber, [Arabic: بربر], of modern Hindustan; and the racial name of that great scattered people the Barábarah, who stretch from the Nile Valley to North-Western Africa. The lunar god, Raho, of the Norwegian Gypsies is a palpable reminiscence and survival of the demon Ráhu. The Gházieh of Egypt are not “also called Beremikeh”;[130] the Barámikah are a substitute of the Ghagar. The “Chungaló,” the “Jungaló,” and the “Zungaló” of Paspati, signifying a non-Gypsy, is evidently Jangalí, wild or sylvan (jungle) man, the popular title of Europeans, especially of Englishmen, in India. Das also, the term applied by the Romá to their Bulgarian and Wallachian neighbours, bears a suspicious resemblance to the Hindu Dashya and Dasa, vulgarly Doss, a low caste or rather a no-caste man, supposed to represent the original Turanian lords of the land.
Moreover, why assume with M. Paspati that [Greek: γ: g], [Greek: θ: th], and [Greek: χ: ch] are “Greek importations into the Gypsy tongue”? Of these letters two are Arabo-Persian: [Greek: χ: ch] is = Khá, [Arabic: خ]; and [Greek: γ: g] is = Ghayn, [Arabic: غ]; the gamma pronounced Ghámma in Romaic parlance when preceding the open vowels, á and o. The third generally corresponds with the Arabic Sá, [Arabic: ص], pronounced in Persian and Hindi as a simple Sín (s)[131]. The critic, however, should not have told us, “Le [Greek: θ: th] répond assez bien au ‘th’ Anglais.” Our sibilant has two distinct sounds: one soft, as in thy, answering to the neo-Greek [Greek: δ: d]; the other hard, as in theme, = [Greek: θ: th]. The Gypsy Owa, Va (yes) bears a suspicious resemblance to the vulgar Arabic Aywá, contracted from Ay w' Allah—aye by Allah! A man must have absolutely no practical knowledge of the Rom or of his congener the “mild Hindu” who can ask, “Les esprits grossiers sont-ils donc plus subtils que les nôtres?” This is the mere morgue and outrecuidance of European ignorance. Let the author try the process of “finessing” upon the first lad, Jat or Sindhi, who comes in his way, and he will readily be made to understand my meaning. Finally, I venture to throw out a hint that the “barbarous helot” may preserve the tribal name Nath, [Sanskrit: नट][132], a mime. This caste, with which the Gypsies used formerly to be identified,[133] certainly did not represent the “wild aboriginal inhabitants of India”; they may have Dravidian affinities, but they are certainly not of Turanian blood.