 | English-gipsy songs |  |
DOG-GIPSY.
A grandmother dark and wild,
Five children, and an uncle—
A half-blood poor and mild.
But the chief was bold and haughty,
And often declared to me,
That no man in all the country
Was so deep in their tongue as he.
Seemed angry to hear me speak;
The half-blood sported a stove-pipe,
And I saw that the man was weak.
But the chief looked proudly about him,
And every motion said
To the world, that all things worth knowing
Were hidden in his great head.
Of paper, quietly,
Mere trifling, and as he wove it
He glanced at the Rommany:
At Mr Ayres the captain,
Who lifted his head to say:
“I'll tell you the deepest word now
You ever heard in your day.
Wherever our tongue is heard;
You may talk all England over,
And never hear sitch a word:
It's the very deeperest turn, Sir,
There is in all Rommany:
There's none but the Lord above us
As knows o' that word—and me.”
And gave him a hurried wink,
As much as to say: “Don't tell it
Before these Gentiles,—think!”
But the half-breed gave me another,
To do the best I could,
But to certainly make an effort,
For the credit of English blood.
And his voice came far from below;
“Gurniaver's the word, my master,
And if you can explain it—do!”
The old woman's laugh was scornful,
The half-breed glanced around
Up into my eyes, inquiring,
Then down upon the ground.
“Gurniaver's the word. It's true
You gents with your books knows something,
But this here is ahead of you.”
So we sat with our heads all bowing,
And never a sound was heard;
And we never uttered a whisper;
We were crushed by that awful word!
So he said politely, “Sir,
This here is wot is the meanin'—
Gūrniáver's a cow-cumbér:
For a gūrni's a cow in Gipsy,
And áv, you know, is ‘come;’
And the two of 'em make cow-come-r,
As certain as I'm a Rom!”
To the linguist—all in a row;
And the grandmother and the children,
And the half-blood and I, cried, “Oh!”
I never heard an utterance
So deep and so earnest. No.
I ween that the wood and water
In that dell are still murmuring, “Oh!”
This incident, for which I am indebted to a friend, occurred precisely as it is told. It is not unusual for a simple-minded Gipsy to form, after long study, some extraordinary compound of words, or some translation of them from English, on the strength of which invention he patents himself as deep Rommany. Sometimes a Gipsy is the possessor of one “deep” word, which he imparts only as a great favour. Jūkalo Rommanīs, or Dog-Gipsy, is a term like “Dog-Latin.” It is applied to mis-applied words. Thus lel, signifying to take or get, would become decidedly jūkalo if one were to say lel avrī for “get out,” or lel up pālī, apré the wárdo—“get up behind on the waggon.” “Mandy dūi” (i.e., I two), for I too, may be occasionally heard. The Old Professor, so frequently mentioned in “The English Gipsies,” on being asked the word for a daisy, suggested that “Spreadamengrō-adré-the-sāla-an'-pandamengro-adré-the-rātti” would be a very good word—its literal meaning being “A spreading thing (or umbrella) in the morning, and a shutting-up thing at night.” My friend, to whom this was said, had suggested that, for want of a better word, daisy might be literally translated dívvusko yāk, but the Professor would not hear of this—it lacked the dignity and poetry of his own formidable epithet.
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