It is probable that much light will yet be shed on the obscure wanderings of the gypsies through a more detailed study of their lan guage and a comparison of its many dialects and the words it has borrowed from other tongues during these wanderings. These dia lects and additions to the language should help to fix the date of the gypsies in various coun tries; for it is now known that the gypsy tongue has carried many Greek, Latin, Hunga rian and Germanic words almost unchanged for long periods of time. Persian and Rumanian words primitive in form also exist in the gypsy speech; and it is probable that further investi gation and comparative study will show that gypsy words have been gathered from still other more primitive forms of speech. The gypsy language has, therefore, since the middle of the 19th century, when students of languages first began to pay attention to it become of very considerable importance in the compara tive study of the languages of Europe and southern and western Asia.
Romany, as the gypsy language is called, consists of 14 distinct dialects in Europe alone, which show among themselves as much vari ation as exists in Spanish and Portuguese or Italian, for example. This means that gener ally a gypsy who speaks one dialect cannot understand a gypsy who speaks another dialect. Of all these dialects, the freest from foreign influence appears to be those of Hungary. Tur key and the Balkan states. As the gypsies moved westward their language gathered more and more foreign words on the way. Thus the dialects of Spain, France, the British Isles and America have gathered more foreign addi tions and lost more of the grammatical forms of the earlier tongue and have thus become noticeably corrupted. All these dialects, how ever corrupted they may be, exhibit Romany as a tongue rich in both vowel sounds and con sonants and still possessed of inflections. The nouns have eight cases. There is a regular masculine ending for the article. which is nearly always go? The pronouns are also de clined and have the same number of cases as the nouns; and the verbs are conjugated with and complex forms which make the ac quirement of the language difficult. This diffi
culty is increased owing to the fact that there are many irregular verb and other forms in Romany. The wanderings of the gypsies have also affected the structure, inflections and other forms of their language so that a very consid erable difference in grammatical structure ex ists between the dialects of the British Isles and those of eastern and southern Europe and western Asia, for example. In the latter countries the older grammatical forms still per sist while in England they have largely broken down. This makes the study of Romany still more difficult and calls for as much compara tive investigation as does the comparative phi lology of the Romance tongues. This work is being done by a considerable body of enthusias tic students, the works of the more important of which are given in the following reference list.
Bibliography.—