Page:Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant (1889) by Barrere & Leland.djvu/21

 Though the gypsy contribution to canting was not extensive, it was much larger than many extensive writers on vagabonds have supposed, and it is worth noting that a number of our most characteristic slang words, such as row, shindy, tool (in driving), mash (i.e., to fascinate), pal, chivvy, and especially the arch-term slang itself, are all Romany. It is not remarkable that Cock Lorrell recognised in the gypsies "a race with a back-bone," and one from whom something could be learned. Their blood "had rolled through scoundrels ever since the flood," and from the beginning they had spoken not a mere slang, but a really beautiful and perfect language resembling Hindustani or Ūrdū, but which was much older. The constituents of this tongue are Hindi and Persian—the former greatly predominating—with an admixture of other Indo-Aryan dialects. It was first suggested in "English Gypsies and their Language" that the true origin of the Rom or gypsy was to be found among the Dom, a very low caste in India, which sprung from the Domar, a mountain tribe of shepherd-robbers; and recent researches by Mr. Grierson among the Bihari Dom have gone far to confirm the conjecture. Its author also discovered that there exists to-day in India a wandering tribe known as Trablūs, who call themselves Rom, and who are in all respects identical with the Syrian and European gypsies. About the tenth century, owing to political convulsions, there were in India a great number of outcasts of different kinds. Among these the Jâts, a fierce and warlike tribe, crushed by Mahometan power, seemed to have coalesced with the Doms or Rom, the semi-Persian Luri or Nuri (originally Indian), and others, and to have migrated westward. Miklosich, in a very learned work, has, by analysing the language as it now exists, pointed out the Greek, Slavonian, and other words which they picked up en route. It was about the beginning of the fifteenth century that a band of about 300 of these wanderers first appeared in Germany, whence they in a few years spread themselves over Europe, so that within a decade many thousands of them penetrated to every corner of the Continent. They were evidently led by men of great ability. They represented themselves as pilgrims, who, because they had become renegades from Christianity, had been ordered by the King of Hungary as a penance to wander for fifty years as pilgrims. They had previously by telling the same story, but adapted to the faith of Mahomet, got a foothold in Egypt. They thus obtained official license to make themselves at home in every country, except b