THE ORIGIN OF THE GYPSIES. 543 



and Doms and Jats themselves, as peculiarly and distinctly gypsy. 

 We have met in London with a poor Mohammedan Hindoo of Cal- 

 cutta. This man had in his youth lived Tvath these wanderers, and 

 been, in fact, one of them. He had also, as is comman with intelli- 

 gent Mohammedans, written his autobiography, embodying in it a 

 vocabulary of the Indian gypsy language. This MS. had unfortu- 

 nately 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 Trablus 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 Syi'ian gypsies. 

 They had a peculiar language, and called both this tongue and them- 

 selves Bom. In it bread was called manro." Manro is all over Europe 

 the gypsy word for bread. In English Romany it is softened into 

 7ndro 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 Trablus. 



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, Dum being a Syrian gypsy word for the race. And the 

 very great majority of even English gypsy words are Hindi, with an ad- 

 mixture of Persian, and not belonging to a slang of any kind — as in 

 India, churi is a knife, 7iaJc 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 Trablus, 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 desii-ed that 

 some resident in India would investigate the Trablus. 



Next to the word Rom itself, the most interesting in Romany is 

 Zingan, or Tchenkan, which is used in twenty or thirty different 

 foi-ms 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-fatims. That there are 

 leather-working and saddle-working gypsies in Persia who call them- 

 selves Zingan is a fair basis for an origin of the word ; but then there 



