Most of us know them as Gypsies, but since the term itself is misleading (their diaspora fanned out about 1000 years ago from India, not Egypt) and in most contexts disparaging, they prefer to be called Rom or Roma and their Indo-European language to be known as Romany [accent on middle syllable]. There are about three million speakers. Linguists subdivide Romany into Vlax, Balkan, Sinto, Italian, Finnish, Iberian and Greco-Turk — each of which in turn branches into innumerable dialects. There's also an Anglo-Romany, spoken in the British Isles. Most of these are mutually intelligible to a greater or lesser extent and differ primarily by the vocabulary each has borrowed from the particular sedentary culture surrounding it. In addition, the Roma who settled in the Slavic and Balkan areas tended to preserve their noun cases (most flavors of Balkan Romany, for example, have eight) whereas those who migrated to northern and western Europe dropped them and instead, in the manner of English, resorted to prepositions and word order to distinguish between subjects, direct and indirect objects, and so forth within a sentence. Their history has been one of almost unrelenting persecution and heartache. Roma enslavement in the Old World was only outlawed in the nineteenth century, and to this day conditions are still desperate in parts of eastern Europe where hate groups routinely single them out for lynchings and house-burnings. English borrows the word pal from Romany which means "brother." As you can see below, Romany has two genders and a corresponding definite article for each. Although modern usage borrows most of its planetary terminology from English and/or Latin, presumably there were older names used at one time that would have been closer to Sanskrit. |
