Anglo-Romani (Long, was Re: Genetic Descent)

[Rick Mc Callister]

	By coincidence, when this e-mail came in, I was looking at Carlos
Clavería's "Estudios sobre los gitanismos del español".
	There is a linguistic phenomenon in Spanish-speaking countries
called calo/, which can mean "Romany, Hispano-Romani, Gypsy Spanish,
thieves' argot, Andalusian slang, Mexican slang, Mexican-American slang,
etc."
	Curiously enough, it's also called germani/a, since it also is said
to include elements supposedly brought back by veterans of the Dutch Wars
of the 16th century.
	A great deal of Spanish and Latin American slang is supposedly
derived from calo/.
	The big problem is the actual origin of the lexicon. Just as
Ibero-Romance linguistic historians tend to assign a Basque origin to every
anciently-attested Ibero-Romance word of unknown origin. there is tendency
to assign a Romany origin to just about every word of unknown origin that
pops up in Andalusia and or in Peninsular popular Spanish after about 1500
or so.
	Most of what I've seen on Calo/ has been done by literary scholars
rather than linguists and generally involves trying to hook up a word in
Calo/ with something found in a dictionary of Romany or Sanskrit. There
doesn't always seem to be much consistency (or precision) as to WHICH cal/o
the investigators are talking about. And there don't seem to be many
examples of complete sentences in what I've found, just discussions of
discrete lexical items..
	The result includes items such as Spanish guita, English geeta
"money" --which I've seen claimed as of Romany origin by Hispanic scholars
and as of Yiddish origin by at least one English-language source. I'm
ignorant as to which, if either, is correct.
	I've even seen Spanish ganso "effeminate", which corresponds to
American-English gunsel (which appears in the Maltese Falcon), as Romany
when it's of Germanic origin.
	From what I've seen (which is not a whole lot), Calo/ goes a bit
beyond relexification by perceiving nouns, verbs and adjectives as having
interchangeable stems and differing only by morphological endings. Verbs
seem to be formed by adding 1st conjugation (-ar) endings to any noun,
often with an intensive -elar variant.
	In slang calo/ this is expanded, often humorously. to Spanish
lexical items, e.g. <<nos vidriamos>> "see you later (lit. 'we see one
another')" < vidrio "glass (the material)".

[snip]

>Secondly, it seems that in cases where language is used for
>self-identification, it is easier for syntax to be borrowed than (core)
>vocabulary or morphemes. In fact, sprachbund phenomena are much more
>about syntactic convergence than others. Yet we do not consider a
>sprachbund to form a new family.

	This seems to be the case for what I've seen of calo/

>Turning now to Anglo-Romani:

>H. W. Hatting wrote, in a message dated May 16, 2001

>> Let me put in some information I recollect from a seminar on Romani
>> 1. English gypsies were speaking a version of Romani with *Romani*
>> grammar when they immigrated into England;
>> 2. Gradually, they started to use English among themselves [...]
>> 3. Nowadays, English Romani (with Romani lexicon and English
>> morphology) [...]
>> English Romani goes farther than most other secret languages (like
>> German "Rotwelsch" or Russsian "blat", in which the basic function
>> words (pronouns, conjunctions, auxiliaries etc.) are normally from
>> the "base" language which provides the morphology) [...]

	Yes, calo/ uses <<sos>> for Spanish <<que>> "that (relative pronoun)"

>Some browsing in the library (which I should have done sooner) suggests
>that the intermediate stage was more complicated. "The dialect of
>English Gypsies" by Smart and Crofton (1875, reprinted by Gale
>Research, 1968, Detroit) talks about two "dialects", termed there "Deep
>Romanes" and "Shallow Romanes" or the "vulgar dialect". The former
>seems to preserve quite a bit of East European Romani morphemes (S&C
>refer to "the Turkish" dialect, presumably the Romani of Gypsies in
>(the European parts of?) the then Ottoman Empire), though there were
>losses of categories not found in English. The latter dialect seems
>closer to Blat etc than Hatting suggested. Here is the beginning of a
>story "How Petalengo went to Heaven" retold in both dialects:

[snip]

>   Mandi      pookerova    toot sar  Petalengro
>   I          tell-nonpast you  how  P.
>   Mandi<'ll> pooker tooti <how>     <the> Petalengro

	see calo/ menda, mangue, man "I, me"; men "person", manu/s "man"

>   ghi/as  kater mi Doovelesko keri.
>   go-past to    God-possesive house
>   jal<d>  adr/e mi Doovel'<s> kair.

>[Notes: Doovel (God) is always prefixed with mi (my). Keri is adverb
>from kair.]

	see calo/ devel, undevel, ondebel "god"

>"O stor-herengro
>bengesko koli ta jal<s> adr/e o paani so piova" [the four legged
>diabolic thing that swims in the water which I drink] (this by Wester
>Boswell).

	see Calo/ mengue, bengue, beng "devil"
	Clavería says it's from Sanskrit vyanga "limbless, maimed, cripple,
toad, frog"

>It seems that the inherited word for frog 'jamba'/'jomba' had
>come to mean toad, though it was considered to be a form of 'jumper'.

	So, Professor Rao, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a look at calo/

Rick Mc Callister
W-1634
Mississippi University for Women
Columbus MS 39701