The English Gipsies and Their Language eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 247 pages of information about The English Gipsies and Their Language.

The English Gipsies and Their Language eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 247 pages of information about The English Gipsies and Their Language.

{5} To these I would add “Zelda’s Fortune,” now publishing in the Cornhill Magazine.

{21} Educated Chinese often exercise themselves in what they call “handsome talkee,” or “talkee leeson” (i.e., reason), by sitting down and uttering, by way of assertion and rejoinder, all the learned and wise sentences which they can recall.  In their conversation and on their crockery, before every house and behind every counter, the elegant formula makes its appearance, teaching people not merely how to think, but what should be thought, and when.

{24} Probably from the modern Greek [Greek text], the sole of the foot, i.e., a track.  Panth, a road, Hindustani.

{26} Pott:  “Die Zigeuner in Europa and Asien,” vol. ii, p. 293.

{30} Two hundred (shel) years growing, two hundred years losing his coat, two hundred years before he dies, and then he loses all his blood and is no longer good.

{32} The words of the Gipsy, as I took them down from his own lips, were as follows:—­

“Bawris are kushto habben.  You can latcher adusta ’pre the bors.  When they’re pirraben pauli the puvius, or tale the koshters, they’re kek kushti habben.  The kushtiest are sovven sar the wen.  Lel’em and tove ’em and chiv ’em adree the kavi, with panny an’ a bitti lun.  The simmun’s kushto for the yellow jaundice.”

I would remind the reader that in every instance where the original Gipsy language is given, it was written down or noted during conversation, and subsequently written out and read to a Gipsy, by whom it was corrected.  And I again beg the reader to remember, that every Rommany phrase is followed by a translation into English.

{33} Dr Pott intimates that scharos, a globe, may be identical with sherro, a head.  When we find, however, that in German Rommany tscharo means goblet, pitcher, vessel, and in fact cup, it seems as if the Gipsy had hit upon the correct derivation.

{34} “Dovos yect o’ the covvos that saw foki jins.  When you lel a wart ’pre tutes wasters you jal ’pre the drum or ’dree the puvius till you latcher a kaulo bawris—­yeck o’ the boro kind with kek ker apre him, an’ del it apre the caro of a kaulo kosh in the bor, and ear the bawris mullers, yeck divvus pauli the waver for shtar or pange divvuses the wart’ll kinner away-us.  ’Dusta chairusses I’ve pukkered dovo to Gorgios, an’ Gorgios have kaired it, an’ the warts have yuzhered avree their wasters.”

{35} Among certain tribes in North America, tobacco is both burned before and smoked “unto” the Great Spirit.

{38} This word palindrome, though Greek, is intelligible to every Gipsy.  In both languages it means “back on the road.”

{53} The Krallis’s Gav, King’s Village, a term also applied to Windsor.

{65} Pronounced cuv-vas, like covers without the r.

{70} The Lord’s Prayer in pure English Gipsy:—­

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The English Gipsies and Their Language from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.