Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/569

 and Doms and Jãts themselves, as peculiarly and distinctly gypsy. We have met in London with a poor Mohammedan Hindoo of Calcutta. This man had in his youth lived with these wanderers, and been, in fact, one of them. He had also, as is common with intelligent Mohammedan's, written his autobiography, embodying in it a vocabulary of the Indian gypsy language. This MS. had unfortunately been burned by his English wife, who informed us that she had done so "because she was tired of seeing a book lying about which she could not understand." With the assistance of an eminent Oriental scholar who is perfectly familiar with both Hindostani and Romany, this man was carefully examined. He declared that these were the real gypsies of India, "like English gypsies here." "People in India called them Trablūs or Syrians, a misapplied word, derived from a town in Syria, which in turn bears the Arabic name for Tripoli. But they were, as he was certain, pure Hindoos and not Syrian gypsies. They had a peculiar language, and called both this tongue and themselves Rom. In it bread was called manro." Manro is all over Europe the gypsy word for bread. In English Romany it is softened into mãro or morro. Captain Burton has since informed us that manro is the Afghan word for bread; but this our ex-gypsy did not know. He merely said that he did not know it in any Indian dialect except that of the Rom, and that Rom was the general slang of the road, derived, as he supposed, from the Trablūs.

These are, then, the very gypsies of gypsies in India. .They are thieves, fortune-tellers, and vagrants. But whether they have or had any connection with the migration to the West we can not establish. Their language and their name would seem to indicate it; but then it must be borne in mind that the word Rom, like Dom, is one of wide dissemination, Dūm being a Syrian gypsy word for the race. And the very great majority of even English gypsy words are Hindi, with an admixture of Persian, and not belonging to a slang of any kind—as in India, churi is a knife, nãk the nose, balia hairs, and so on, with others which would be among the first to be furnished with slang equivalents. And yet these very gypsies are Rom, and the wife is a Romni, and they use words which are not Hindoo in common with European gypsies. It is therefore not improbable that in these Trablūs, so called through popular ignorance, as they are called Tartars in Egypt and Germany, we have a portion at least of the real stock. It is to be desired that some resident in India would investigate the Trablūs.

Next to the word Rom itself, the most interesting in Romany is Zingan, or Tchenkan, which is used in twenty or thirty different forms by the people of every country, except England, to indicate the gypsy. An incredible amount of far-fetched erudition has been wasted in pursuing this philological ignis-fatuus. That there are leather-working and saddle-working gypsies in Persia who call themselves Zingan is a fair basis for an origin of the word; but then there