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Cikánština v jazykovém prostředí slovenském a českém: k otázkám starých a novějších složekv její gramatice a lexiku by Jiří LípaReview by: Zdeněk SalzmannLanguage, Vol. 45, No. 2, Part 1 (Jun., 1969), pp. 408-412Published by: Linguistic Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/411672 .

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LANGUAGE, VOLUME 45, NUMBER 2 (1969)

Ciknnstina v jazykovem prostredi slovenskem a ceskem: k otazkam starych a nov6jsich slozek v jeji gramatice a lexiku. By JiRf LfPA. (Rozpravy Cesko- slovensk6 Akademie V rd, rada spolecenskych v6d, rocnik 75, sesit 11.) Praha: Nakladatelstvi CSAV, 1965. Pp. 64.

Reviewed by ZDENPK SALZMANN, University of Massachusetts

Changes in languages as a result of mutual contact were noted with interest in some of the earliest grammatical treatises. However, it was scarcely two decades ago that the effects of mutual interference of languages in contact began to receive systematic attention. Even though the language of the Gypsies, customarily referred to as Romany, has been subjected for centuries to pressures from a great variety of speech communities and would therefore appear to be an exceptionally suitable topic for the study of language contact, it has been un- deservedly neglected by linguists. Works dealing with language in general or with Indo-European languages in particular are conspicuously silent on Romany; the rare references they do make are often disappointingly vague and puzzling.' Lipa's study of Romany (in translation: 'The Gypsy language in the Slovak and Czech environments: on the problem of early and more recent components of its grammar and lexicon') therefore deserves an unqualified welcome. Though unprepossessing in size, this monograph contains a wealth of descriptive and

comparative material accompanied by sound analytical commentary. In an effort to acquaint American linguists with some of Lipa's findings, which other- wise may go unnoticed (the monograph unfortunately is without a r6sum6 in

any of the major European languages), I will sample and illustrate below what

Lipa has managed to bring together in this work. Following their arrival in Europe from the Indian subcontinent, the Gypsies

spent some three centuries in the Balkan peninsula before resuming their migra- tion and separating into a number of independent groups identified with par- ticular areas. Just as Romany was first influenced by some of the languages spoken in the Balkan countries, it was later affected by contact with the local dialects of the new environments. The result of all these contacts and of further localized migration was considerable differentiation of Romany and the blending of some of its dialectal varieties. Hence not all Romany dialects are mutually intelligible at first hearing.

Before the beginning in 1958 of an organized effort to settle permanently all

Gypsies living in Czechoslovakia, the following groups were distinguishable according to the nature of the external linguistic contact:

A. Gypsies in contact with the speakers of Czech and Slovak dialects. (1) Those in Bohemia and most of Moravia, nomadic. (2) Those in southeastern Moravia and most of Slovakia, settled.

B. Gypsies in contact with speakers of Magyar dialects-in southern

Slovakia, settled. C. Gypsies in (former) contact with speakers of Romanian dialects.

1 Weinreich's pioneering study of language contact (1953) serves as a good index of this general neglect by the linguistic community; his extensive bibliography does not list a single item concerning Romany.

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REVIEWS

(1) Those in Bohemia, settled since approximately 1940 and until recently engaged primarily in kettle-tinning.

(2) Those in Slovakia, semi-nomadic, the so-called Wallachian Gypsies (olagsti Cikani). (a) Horse traders, particularly in southern Slovakia. (b) Trough carvers.

D. Gypsies in contact with the speakers of German dialects-very few, scattered, nomadic.

Most of the Czechoslovak Gypsies have always lived in Slovakia.2 The major portion of the monograph (12-53) is devoted to a concise description

of Romany and of its dialectal differentiation. The dialect spoken by the Gypsies from the area northeast of Humenn6 in eastern Slovakia is used as the reference.3 There are five vowel phonemes in RomSH: i, e, a, o, and u. There is some question as to whether or not the distinction between short and long vowels is phonemic. Apparently vocalic length was not significant at an earlier stage in Romany, but did become so subsequently in some of its dialects as a result of foreign influence. After further migrations and contacts with still other languages, length as a significant feature was lost in several local varieties and may be currently being lost in others. The conditions of these interesting tendencies deserve further descriptive and comparative study. RomMV has the additional vowel phoneme e, both in older morphemes and in borrowings from Magyar. RomG has a reduced vowel a in certain weakly stressed syllables, but from Lipa's description the status of this vowel is not fully clear.

Stress in RomSH is largely on the penult, reflecting in part the stress distri- bution of an earlier stage, and in part that of Slovak in the Humenn6 region. In RomMV, stress is on the first syllable, as it is also in Magyar.

The repertory of consonant phonemes in RomSH is extensive. Stops occur in three series: voiceless--p, t, f, k;4 corresponding voiced-b, d, a, g; and corre- sponding aspirated-p', t', {', k'. Affricates are c, c; 3, 5; and c'. Continuants contrast in two series-f, s, s, s, x and their voiced counterparts v, z, ?, x, h. The remaining consonants are nasals m, n, n; laterals I and l; the trill r; and the semiconsonant j. The aspirated stops, including c', have no parallel in Slovak; they are part of the original Romany consonantal repertory.

There is comparative evidence that originally there was a contrast between a 2 According to Davidova 1966, the Gypsy population in Czechoslovakia is the fourth

largest in the world, following Rumania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. There are reportedly nearly 200,000 Gypsies in Czechoslovakia, of whom about three-fourths live in Slovakia. (The figure for Czechoslovakia as of 1969 is probaly close to 250,000.)

The resettlement policy, enacted and begun in 1958, was completed at about the time of the publication of DavidovA's article. However, efforts to assimilate the Gypsies have met with several unexpected problems, one of the most serious being the discrimination against them by much of the autochthonous population, and the resulting social isolation to which they are subject.

3 Hereafter, the designation 'RomSH' will be used for this dialect. 'RomG', 'RomR', and 'RomM' will represent the dialects of Gypsies in (former) contact with speakers of German, Rumanian, and Magyar dialects, respectively. 'RomMV' designates the dialect spoken in the community of Vliany in southern Slovakia.

4 d, t' , , , n, and I are palatalized sounds.

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LANGUAGE, VOLUME 45, NUMBER 2 (1969)

short and geminate r in Romany. This contrast is preserved today only in a relatively few dialects; its loss, or retention, is attributable to contact with non-Romany dialects. Thus, the presence of a syllabic r in some Romany dialects is likewise coincident with that in the local dialects.

The palatalized phonemes ? and g entered RomSH with lexical items borrowed from the local Slovak dialect. Insofar as these two consonants also occur in native Romany words, their distribution is only partially identical with that in words of the local Slovak dialect (viz., before other palatalized consonants, in particular I and n, and before front vowels). As a result of this addition of two new sibilants in RomSH, the articulation of original ? and z shifted toward a more dorsal position.

A palatalized lateral, 1, was a member of the phoneme inventory of the orig- inal Romany. As a result of the contact with Slovak of Humenn6, RomSH I has been substituted for I before i within native Romany morphemes, e.g. lik'a > lik'a 'nits'.

In RomSH, the contrast between paired voiced and voiceless consonants is neutralized in word-final position; the same is true of the local Slovak dialect. In RomMV, on the other hand, the contrast between voiced and voiceless con- sonants obtains also word-finally, as it does in Magyar.

Derivation in RomSH is by means of both prefixes and suffixes. Suffixes belong for the most part to the original morpheme stock, except for a few that were borrowed from those other languages with which Romany came into con- tact. Today, because Romany freely borrows new lexical items from other languages, derivational suffixes are largely unproductive. Regarding prefixes in RomSH, most have been borrowed from Slovak, including all of the verbal prefixes. Thus RomSH te odmuken 'to forgive', based on te muken, corresponds to Slovak otpu?ic (in standard Slovak, orthographically odpustit') 'to forgive', based on pucic (pustit') 'to let go'. This wholesale borrowing applies not only to those verbal prefixes which have a primarily lexical meaning, but also to those which function aspectually.

Inflected forms offer many interesting examples of language contact both in declensional and in conjugational paradigms. Thus, those borrowed RomSH masculines whose direct case ends in -us are based on the Slovak vocative, which also functions as the Romany vocative, e.g. Slovak ujec, voc. ujcu, RomSH ujcus, voc. ujcu 'uncle (mother's brother)'.

In some cases, a Slovak genitive served as a model for a form which in Romany was originally derived by the modification of the indirect (oblique) case (p'rales to the stem p ral 'brother', gen. p'ral-es-ker-o); thus one finds today among animate nouns such forms as le c'as ndne 'there is no boy', paralleling Slovak constructions employing genitivus negationis. RomSH interrogative pronoun savo 'which' takes on the local Slovak suffixes -ho and -ej in the sequences savoho

ada4ive? 'which is today's date?' and o savej tuke ... ? 'at what time (hour) ... ?', resulting in idiomatic loanblends.

Among verb forms, the conditional mood, which originally was without a

separate set of forms, is now optionally marked in RomSH by the morpheme

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REVIEWS

bi (or bo), following Slovak, e.g. p'enehas bi (-bo) 'you would say' (cf. Slovak riekol by si).

A construction which came to function syntactically as an infinitive originated in some dialects of Romany as a result of contact with languages with formally differentiated infinitival forms. Thus, the native Romany conjunction te 'in order that, that' coupled with the verb form in -en, marking the second and third persons plural of the present, petrified into such RomSH sequences as te keren 'to make' (in other Romany dialects, the formation of an infinitive proceeds from other sources).

Syntactic influences upon Romany are no less common. Thus RomSH has borrowed a great majority of Slovak conjunctions and particles-only two conjunctions appear to be original, te 'if, that' and t'e 'and'-or has imitated conjunctional constructions from Slovak, as in the blend ca ze (Slovak lenze) 'only that'. Other parallels with Slovak dialects include the ellipsis of a copula, resulting in equational sequences of the type me nasvdli 'I (am) ill [feminine]'.

For a sample of 2616 different RomSH words, excluding only the numerals, Lipa has compiled the following statistics: of 1162 nouns, 620 are loans (53.4 %); of 255 adjectives, 107 are loans (42%); of 911 verbs, 328 are loans (36%); of 186 adverbs, 68 are loans (36.6%); of 23 interjections, 14 are loans (60.9%); of 27 prepositions, 9 are loans (33.3 %); of 13 conjunctions, 11 are loans (84.6 %); and of 3 particles, 2 are loans (66.7%). Among the 36 pronouns of the sample, loans are very rare. Numerals are mixed: for low numbers ('one' through 'ten'), original forms, or old loans, are still in use, while higher numbers derive from Slovak. However, loans from Slovak are also employed for the numbers of the first decade when preceding borrowed nouns. Even this partial sample of the RomSH lexicon is indicative of an unusually extensive borrowing (44.3 % of the total corpus), characterizing all classes of morphemes.

The heterogeneity of the lexicons of Romany dialects can best be illustrated by a few examples. RomSH preserves the old form gindardo 'long', while RomMV has dugo, based on Serbo-Croatian; RomR (Wallachian) lungo, based on Roman- ian; and RomG lenkstu, based on German. RomR has borrowed the word for 'hat' from the Magyar kalap in the form of kolopo; RomSH has the form kalapa, besides the native archaic form std1i, which is still actively employed in the shape of stadi in RomG. Quite commonly, Romany dialects have pairs of syn- onymous words, the morphemes of native provenience being used by members of the older generation, the synonymous loans by the younger, e.g. RomSH mol and vinos 'wine' (cf. Slovak vino).

Sample texts from several Romany dialects (54-7) and a selected bibliography of nearly a hundred entries (59-62) conclude the monograph. To sum up, Lipa has managed to contribute a great deal of new and interesting material on the subject of Romany structure and language contact in general. One can only hope that he will soon follow this and his earlier study of Romany (1963) with a report in English on his extensive Romany research. The distinction between comprehensive borrowing of features of another language and creolization may then become better understood.

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LANGUAGE, VOLUME 45, NUMBER 2 (1969) LANGUAGE, VOLUME 45, NUMBER 2 (1969)

RElJERENCES

DAvIDOVk, EVA. 1966. Bl16 misto v na?em svedomi: cikgnskg ot6zka. Kulturni Tvorba (Prague), vol. 4, no. 1 (January 6, 1966), pp. 4-5.

LfPA, JiRf. 1963. Priru6ka cikAnstiny. Prague: StAtni Pedagogick6 Nakladatelstvf. WEINREICH, URIEL. 1953. Languages in contact: findings and problems. New York:

Linguistic Circle of New York.

Marathi etymological dictionary (Marathl vyutpattikog). By K. P. KULEARNI. 2d edition. Poona: Thokal Bhavan, 1964. Pp. 829.

Reviewed by FRANKLIN C. SOUT'WORTH, University of Pennsylvania

This book will be of more use to the educated speaker of Marathi who wants to know something of the history of his language than it will be to the indologist or the historical linguist. The author has assembled etymologies of some fourteen to fifteen thousand Marathi words, with comments based on the works available at the time of the first edition in 1946. (Though this new edition claims to be a sub- stantial revision of the earlier one-which was unavailable to the reviewer-the

bibliography contains no relevant works published since 1946, and the etymolo- gies examined contain no references to later works.) Though it is doubtless worth- while to have the material relating to Marathi assembled in one place, this dic-

tionary nevertheless leaves unanswered many interesting questions regarding the

history of Marathi forms. But a work of this scope is no small undertaking, and the author is to be congratulated for his patience in carrying it through. The value of the work is somewhat limited for those who do not know Marathi, since all the discussion is written in that language (though brief English glosses of each word are given).

As to the reliability of its etymologies, this work on the whole perpetuates the traditional approach of many European and Indian scholars who have concerned themselves with the history of Indo-Aryan languages. Where the origin of a form is obvious, the dictionary (in most cases) presents the facts in a straightforward manner. When this is not the case, the doors are opened wide to speculation with- out much regard for systematic phonological or grammatical relationships, or even the vaguest semantic similarities. The following are some of the most strik-

ingly dubious etymologies offered by Kulkarni (starred forms indicate the ex-

pected reflexes from the source forms proposed; question marks in parentheses are from the original): (1) adic 'two and one-half' <- Skt. ardhatrtiya, cf. Pall adha-

tiya (-- *dd(h)az/*cd(h)ai, cf. Hindi arhaz). (2) ithe 'here' <- Skt. atra 'in this, now, here, etc.' (-- *at); Marathi atd 'now' is derived from the same source, with the comment: 'from atra both ithe and dta, one referring to place and one to time ...'

(3) acchd 'good, O.K.' <- Skt. atyartham 'exorbitant, excessive' (-* *att(h)) or - Skt. svaccham 'clear' (-- *sas). (4) dukar 'pig' <- Skt. sukar (?). (5) culta

'paternal uncle' <- Skt. k?udratdta (-- *sud(y)d). (6) da 'mother' <- Skt. drya 'noble, Aryan' (?). (7) moj- 'count' <- Skt. meya 'to be measured'. (8) le.re 'put on, wear (esp. ornaments)' <- Skt. ratna 'jewel' (?). (9) an.ad 'appellative for older male' <- Skt. dtman 'self' (?); the phonologically regular and normally accepted reflex of the latter is Marathi apan 'you' (formal), 'we' (inclusive). (10) baz

RElJERENCES

DAvIDOVk, EVA. 1966. Bl16 misto v na?em svedomi: cikgnskg ot6zka. Kulturni Tvorba (Prague), vol. 4, no. 1 (January 6, 1966), pp. 4-5.

LfPA, JiRf. 1963. Priru6ka cikAnstiny. Prague: StAtni Pedagogick6 Nakladatelstvf. WEINREICH, URIEL. 1953. Languages in contact: findings and problems. New York:

Linguistic Circle of New York.

Marathi etymological dictionary (Marathl vyutpattikog). By K. P. KULEARNI. 2d edition. Poona: Thokal Bhavan, 1964. Pp. 829.

Reviewed by FRANKLIN C. SOUT'WORTH, University of Pennsylvania

This book will be of more use to the educated speaker of Marathi who wants to know something of the history of his language than it will be to the indologist or the historical linguist. The author has assembled etymologies of some fourteen to fifteen thousand Marathi words, with comments based on the works available at the time of the first edition in 1946. (Though this new edition claims to be a sub- stantial revision of the earlier one-which was unavailable to the reviewer-the

bibliography contains no relevant works published since 1946, and the etymolo- gies examined contain no references to later works.) Though it is doubtless worth- while to have the material relating to Marathi assembled in one place, this dic-

tionary nevertheless leaves unanswered many interesting questions regarding the

history of Marathi forms. But a work of this scope is no small undertaking, and the author is to be congratulated for his patience in carrying it through. The value of the work is somewhat limited for those who do not know Marathi, since all the discussion is written in that language (though brief English glosses of each word are given).

As to the reliability of its etymologies, this work on the whole perpetuates the traditional approach of many European and Indian scholars who have concerned themselves with the history of Indo-Aryan languages. Where the origin of a form is obvious, the dictionary (in most cases) presents the facts in a straightforward manner. When this is not the case, the doors are opened wide to speculation with- out much regard for systematic phonological or grammatical relationships, or even the vaguest semantic similarities. The following are some of the most strik-

ingly dubious etymologies offered by Kulkarni (starred forms indicate the ex-

pected reflexes from the source forms proposed; question marks in parentheses are from the original): (1) adic 'two and one-half' <- Skt. ardhatrtiya, cf. Pall adha-

tiya (-- *dd(h)az/*cd(h)ai, cf. Hindi arhaz). (2) ithe 'here' <- Skt. atra 'in this, now, here, etc.' (-- *at); Marathi atd 'now' is derived from the same source, with the comment: 'from atra both ithe and dta, one referring to place and one to time ...'

(3) acchd 'good, O.K.' <- Skt. atyartham 'exorbitant, excessive' (-* *att(h)) or - Skt. svaccham 'clear' (-- *sas). (4) dukar 'pig' <- Skt. sukar (?). (5) culta

'paternal uncle' <- Skt. k?udratdta (-- *sud(y)d). (6) da 'mother' <- Skt. drya 'noble, Aryan' (?). (7) moj- 'count' <- Skt. meya 'to be measured'. (8) le.re 'put on, wear (esp. ornaments)' <- Skt. ratna 'jewel' (?). (9) an.ad 'appellative for older male' <- Skt. dtman 'self' (?); the phonologically regular and normally accepted reflex of the latter is Marathi apan 'you' (formal), 'we' (inclusive). (10) baz

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