LANGUAGE. It is a very prevalent impression among English-speaking people that the language of the gypsies is a simple jargon or cant. Noth ing could be further from the truth. The broken dialect of the English gypsies, indeed, is a stranga mixture of English and romani, in which the grammar has almost wholly disappeared, and it is this fact that has created the popular impres sion. But in the farther East, where the race is more compact and has preserved far better its habits and instincts, romani is a true and com plete language, with a considerable vocabulary and a highly developed system of inflections. A brief characterization is all that is possible here; but the student is referred to the list of valuable works appended to this article.
There are fourteen distinct dialects of romani, in Europe: (I) The Greco-Turkish, (2) Ruma nian, (3) Hungarian, (4) Slavonian, (5) Polish Lithuanian, (6) Russian, (7) Finnish, (8) Ger man, (9) Scandinavian, (10) Italian, (II) Basque, (12) Spanish. (13) Anglo-Scotch, (14) Welsh. Any one of these dialects is not easily
intelligible to the speakers of the others. The purest are those of Turkey, the Balkan States, and Hungary-Transylvania; the most corrupt are those of England, Scotland, and Spain. We may first select the dialect of Turkey as an example of the pure romani—the lacho romano then illustrate its corruption in the hybrid dia lect, the posh and posh romani, of the English gypsies. For the Turkish dialect we owe our accurate knowledge to Dr. Alexander G. Paspati, of Constantinople, whose extensive researches are summed up in his Etudes sur les Tchingianes, ou Bolugmiens de l'Empire Ottoman (Constanti nople, 1870).
Aunt...BET. As romani is not a written lan guage, it properly has no alphabet; but it is very rich in sounds, both vowel and consonantal.
ARTICLE. (a) Definite masc. o, fem. i, from the Article. (a) Definite masc. o, fem. i, from the Greek 6, 6. (h) Indefinite: properly 'one.' Examples: o rakld. 'the boy'; i rakli, 'the girl'; yak chard, 'a child.'