Book wanted: _The Cant Languages of Europe_

[Robin Hamilton]

Not quite -- Mackay, I think, had a bug in his head that it was all down to
the Gaelic, as more recently and more plausibly in _The Princes of Jargon_,
Alice Becker-Ho says The Answer Lies With The Gypsies.  Both are relevant,
of course, but Scottish Travelers' Speech and the varieties of Romani,
especially the relation of the latter to non-standard speech in the areas of
Europe in which they occur, are contested areas.

I was thinking of something a bit more simple and straightforward that would
bring it all together and discuss the various European cant languages under
one umbrella.  The old (11th edition, I think) Encyclopedia Britannica had
an article that was something along the lines I was thinking, but I can't
seem to put my hand on it at the moment.

As it is, for starters, I'm simply glumly pasting together the relevant
pieces in Wiki, for what they're worth, into a single file.

Robin

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
Sent: Friday, September 17, 2010 6:00 PM
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Book wanted:   _The Cant Languages of Europe_

> ---------------------- Information from the mail
> header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: Book wanted:   _The Cant Languages of Europe_
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 9/17/2010 12:20 PM, Robin Hamilton wrote:
>>Does anyone know if such a thing as the above book, or anything like it,
>>exists?
>
> Does the following qualify?  [via Harvard catalog]
>
> Author : Mackay, Charles, 1814-1889.
> Title :         The Gaelic etymology of the
> languages of western Europe : and more especially
> of the English and Lowland Scotch, and their
> slang, cant, and colloquial dialects / By Charles Mackay.
> Published : London : Pub. for the author by N. Trübner and co., 1877.
> Description :   xxxii, 604 p. 27 cm.
>
> Google Books.  Also WorldCat.
>
> Joel

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