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

[Hans-Werner Hatting]

Dear list members,
I've been away on business fo quite a while. Some interesting discussions
seem to be going on, but I post only on this one (for now), as it concerns
some earlier input by me.

On Tue, 10 Jul 2001 17:29:45 -0400 Vidyanath Rao wrote:

>I had asked, regarding Anglo-Romani as 'relexicalized English', how the
>lexicon was preserved? I think that I need to be more detailed as to what I
>was asking. I also took some time to try to get information on the language
>of English Gypsies, and thought the results might be of interest to some.
(snip)

>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) [...]

>I interpreted this, when combined with the use of "relexification", to mean
>that auxiliaries, their conjugation, endings etc continued from Stage 1 to
>Stage 3 (with only the categories common to English and Romani being found)
>while the speakers in the intermediate stage were completely ignorant of
>Romani grammar. That I found, and still find, incredible. My question as to
>how the lexicon was preserved was about bridging the first and third
>stages.

(snip)

>Thus far the evidence seems to point to language death. The "new dialect"
>is what those without adequate control of the ancestral language spoke, not
>a "relexification". This is underlined by the fact that extent of the use
>of English function words varied from person to person, with older persons
>having more control.

(snip)

>In any case, contemporary Anglo-Romani looks like a case of arrested
>language death or a resurrected language. I am not sure if "relexification"
>is a suitable word to use, at least in the sense I understand it. After
>all, I have never heard anyone call Sanskrit of drama dialog as 'Prakrit
>relexified with Sanskrit' though in syntax the two are much closer than
>either is to Sanskrit of Panini/early upanishads. Even in morphology, there
>is variation in the amount of Prakrit influence when we look at the
>puraanas or Buddhist texts. Long compounds of medieval Sanskrit are often
>attempts of reconcile MIA syntax and rhythm to Panini's morphological
>rules.

>It should be noted that Kenrick who proposed that Anglo-Romani be
>considered a register of English (and thus the name Romani English) still
>endorsed a view similar to the above about the historical origin of
>Anglo-Romani.

This was the view which was conveyed to me at the time I did my (very
limited) studies of Romani.

>This should not affect how we view its history. Obviously, dying languages
>and language shifts in progress are going to cause fuzzy-wuzzy type
>problems for genetic classification, just as sound changes in progress
>won't conform to the rules used in historical linguistics. If the process
>is arrested by "schooling" (of formal or informal types), as seems to have
>happened in Anglo-Romani, this can continue indefinitely. We should not
>throw out the rules due such exceptional cases, nor should we attempt to
>forcibly fit the cases to the rules without extensive investigation of the
>history.

Well, I'm certainly no expert on Angloe Romani (or any other variant of
Romani). The central question for me would be:
is Anglo-Romani *now*
(a) a different language influenced to a big extent by English lexicon and
grammar or
(b) a group-language variant of English using lexicon from a non-English
source?

V. Rao has clearly shown that Romani went through a stage of strong English
influence in the past. For me, the question to answer in order to classify
Romani as (a) or (b) is whether there is an uninterrupted chain of
"Romani-as-a-first-language" speakers which leads to the speakers of "old"
Anglo-Romani to its speakers today (which means (a)), or whether the chain
was broken, and Anglo-Romani became a dead language, learnt by its speakers
when being initiated into the Romani community by elder people, so that a
typical Anglo-Romani speaker would be first language English, and uses the
Romani vocabulary only in cases when he/she wants to underline his/her
affiliation to the Romani community and/or exclude outsiders (which means (b)).
The last view was the one I got from what I learnt about Anglo-Romani, but I
may be wrong.
For the time being, I would propose the following distictions to bring a
little order into the world of "fuzzy-wuzzy" ;-)

1. Full-blown Romani (the "old dialect"): certainly an independent,
non-English language (despite some loanwords, loan-suffixes, and
loan-syntax) , genetically IA;

2. Dying Romani: a language heavily influenced by English, but still being
taught to children as a first language, would still be classified as
genetically IA. The question is, to what extent does what is recorded as
"new dialect" reflect such a stage of development, and to what extent it is
simply the result of an attempt of Romanis raised in English to acquire and
use the language of their elders?

3. Romani as a group-language used by English-as-first-language speakers as
secret group language - a register of English, as would be any other group
language substituting (say) Russian or Latin vocabulary for English.
And there may be

4. Romani English - a variety of English Romani children might be raised
with, being basically English, but containing lots of Romani words - the
difference to (3) being that it is learnt as a first language, and that no
systematical attempt is made to substitute Romani words for English.
In summa, for me the dividing line is whether the language is acquired by
children as a first language *and* the question of the independence of
morphology. If (1) there is no un-borrowed core of morphology any more *and*
(2) the transmission chain as a first language has been interupted, then a
language ceases to be genetically independent of the language it has
borrowed the morphology from and becomes a variety of it. From what I know,
and V. Rao has shown, (1) is true for Anglo-Romani; whether (2) is true, has
to be explored.

Best regards,
Hans-Werner Hatting