(26-08-2019, 08:22 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (26-08-2019, 07:51 PM)voynichbombe Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.and never trust wikipedia.
Amen!
kneel down before me!
FWIW I wrote about this a while ago (my blog is now down so this is picked from a database dump file, so some of the sources are missing due to wordpress markup syntax):
"A more recent attempt to construct a Romani alphabet based on Devanagari was not successful. The essay "Romani Orthographies" (see Hodge, Nathanael, 2011: "Romani Orthographies", You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.) outlines some of the difficulties contemporary standardization attempts were & still are faced with. The necessity of concepts like archegraphemes or morpho-graphs does not make the task of constructing a writing system appear particularly simple.
There is a ca. 1515 account of written Romani, as outlined in a 2011 german article on hypotheses (see: Holzberger, Richard, 2015: "Das älteste Romani-Sprachdenkmal zwischen Polnisch-Tschechisch und Ungarisch", Weblink: You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.), which in turn refers to Knauer 2010 (see: Knauer, Georg Nicolaus, 2012: "The humanistic Collectanaea of a Benedictine monk, Johannes ex Grafing ..", BSB-Bestand München: You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.). The abstract of the latter:
"Thirteen unpublished lines of a Latin–Romani vocabulary in a manuscript in Munich represent the earliest document recording efforts to put words of Romani, 'primarily an oral language' (Matras 2002: 238), into writing. The Benedictine compiler and scribe of the list was familiar with important contemporary German scholars, a fact that may enhance the authenticity of his numerous excerpts and explain the almost scholarly approach to such exotic languages as Romani. It can be assumed that the 'interviewer' got his information in Vienna around 1515, preceding the often adduced vocabularies of Borde (1542), Ewsum (before 1570), Vulcanius (1597), Çelebi (1668), and Marsden (1785). He organized the results of his questioning neatly in groups, heavenly bodies, humans and animals, food, and cardinal numerals."
Why Johannes von Grafing's account in You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view." Opuscula Cod.graec. 582 a (see: Opuscula - BSB Cod.graec. 582 a, Digitale Sammlungen BSB/MDZ You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.) lists only seven of the zodiac signs remains curious.
There may be a few interesting points to note, firstly the singularity of the event. As far as currently observable the work seems not to have been influential in any way,
thus underlining the possibility of similar finds.
The aforementioned almost scholarly approach seems to be, at least to some amount attributable to education, hinting at "schools of thought".
Johannes von Grafing's use of diacritic ü seems noteworthy as well. Interestingly, the proposed use of diacritics has been rejected by participants in a 1990's university survey of spelling preference by speakers.[5. See 1., 9 pp.]
If we allow for a brief moment of speculation, let us imagine a learned (see: O'Donnovan, Diane, 2010 & 2017, "From the vaults - Gypsies (..)", Weblink: You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.) scribe from around XV. with a similar, yet slightly more ambitious project: the standardization and compilation of ancient Romani tradition from oral and (hypothetically existing) older written sources in Aramaic, Greek, Arabic, Glagolitic (or more exotic) scripts, writing all sorts of Para-Romani languages and different Romani dialects from different ages. It seems kind of a burden to take on for our scribe, and the book may very well turn out a "babel manuscript".
A group of Romani people also called Erromintxella has a particularly interesting story: formerly referred to as "[...] ijitoak 'Egyptians', ungrianok 'Hungarians', or buhameak 'Bohemians'", arrived in Basque lands in XV., integrated with Basque society, and developed a Para-Romani language using Basque grammar.
"The initial E- is the Basque prosthetic vowel, added because no Basque word may begin with an R-, and the final -a is the absolutive case suffix, used when citing a name. If this etymology is correct, it is a rare case of a native Romani name for themselves (an endonym) being borrowed by another language."
A form that jumps to eye is the verb "ajin / najin" for "to have / not to have".