[108] For instance, when Borrow makes Chai denote the men of Egypt or the sons of Heaven, when it simply signifies children, being a dialectic variety of the Hindi Chokra, Chokrí.
[109] A second “Tsiganida” was in the hands of the late M. Pierre Assaki, possibly composed by one of his kinsmen.
[110] Rom (man), masc. sing.; Romá (men), masc. plur. Romni, Romniá, woman, women; Romaní, adjectival, belonging to man. Hence our phrases “rum fellow” and “pottering Rommany.” Lom is a mere popular mispronunciation of Rom, and Ro is a vulgar abbreviation. The latter word I would derive from the Coptic [Greek: ρωμε: rôme] (romé), a man.
[111] The bond of language has perhaps been exaggerated by M. Alexandre G. Paspati, Étude sur les Tchinghianés en Bohémiens de l’Empire Ottoman (Constantinople, 1870), and others, where they assert “l’histoire entière de cette race est dans son idiome.”
[112] As the Jews all have especial Hebrew names for the Synagogue besides the Gentile family-names known to the world, the Gypsies are also binominal. Thus the Stanleys are Bar-engres (stony fellows); the Coopers, Wardo-engres (“wheel fellows,” coopers); the Hernes, Balors (hairs, hairy fellows); the Smiths, Petul-engres (“horseshoe fellows,” blacksmiths); and the Lovells, Camo-mescres (amorous fellows). See The Zincali.
[113] Getæ, Goths.
[114] History of Sindh, pp. 246, 247, and Notes, p. 411; Scinde, or the Unhappy Valley, Vol. II., pp. 116-19; Journal of the Bombay Asiatic Society, pp. 84-90; without including the Grammar and the Vocabulary.
[115] Scinde, or the Unhappy Valley, Vol II., pp. 116-19.
[116] Alluding chiefly to Captain Postans’ Personal Observations on Scinde, chap. iii.
[117] Both of these statements have been modified by subsequent experience. The Jats are not immigrants, nor is their language corrupt Panjabi. It is connected with the Sindhi; but it wants those intricacies and difficulties, and that exuberance of grammatical forms, which, distinguishing the latter from its Prakrit sisters, renders it so valuable for the philological comparison of the neo-Aryan tongues. The vernacular of the Sindh Valley has preserved many forms for which we vainly look in its cognates, and it is notably freer from foreign admixture than any other of the North Indian dialects, the Panjabi, Hindi, and Bengali of our day. It has, in fact, remained tolerably steady to that first stage of decomposition which attacked the Prakrit of the ancients. Hence Dr. Trumpp (loc. cit.) holds it to be an immediate derivation from the Apabhransha, which the old grammarians placed lowest in the scale of Prakrit speech. “While all the modern vernaculars of India,” he says, “are already so degraded that the venerable mother tongue (Sanskrit) is hardly recognizable in her degenerate daughters, the Sindhi has, on the contrary, preserved most important fragments of it, and erected for itself a grammatical structure which far surpasses in beauty of execution and internal harmony the loose and levelling construction of its sisters.”