daamajor.blogg.se

Consequently, it has left little documentary trace behind it.

The migration took place over an extended period of time and was not dramatic in nature. There remain many unknowns with regard to the migration of the Gypsies out of India and as far as Europe. Much remains unknown with regard to the early history of the Gypsies. The reasons for their departure from their primordial home­land are not known, nor the period of the first migrations. Consequently, it has not been possible to locate precisely the area from which the Gypsies set off in their migration towards Europe. However, the nomadic tribes of India have not yet been researched sufficiently, while population movements have been frequent in this part of the world. In the current century, the nomadic way of life can still be found in the Indian cultural space, in not negligible proportions. Neither physical anthropology nor ethnology has been able to provide a decisive response to this question and to locate the ethnic group or caste to which the ancestors of the Gypsies belonged. The general consensus has been for either North-west or Central India.

However, in conditions in which Romanes possesses elements that are common to many Indian (and non-Indian) languages and in spite of numerous attempts on the part of linguists over the course of more than a century, it has not been possible to identify the region or population where the origins of the speakers of Romanes lie. It is a member of the Neo-Indian group of languages, making it a relative of certain languages spoken in the Indian subcontinent. The Romany language, also known as Romani or Romanes, belongs to the Indo-European language family. In later studies it was rigorously demonstrated that the spoken language of the Gypsies and Sanskrit were related. Grellmann concluded in the first modern scientific work dedicated to the Gypsies, which appeared in 1783, that the Gypsy population was of Indian origin. On the basis of this discovery, German scholar H. After centuries in which the most varied and lurid explanations were advanced for the origins and history of this people, with racial and cultural characteristics different to those of the peoples of Europe, in the second half of the eighteenth century comparative philology discovered the similarity between the spoken language of the Gypsies and Sanskrit.

Virtually everything that is known about the more distant history of the Gypsies is due to linguistics. Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena The Gypsies’ Migration to Europe Gypsy Children Alongside Their Wagon, Somewhere In America, 1950s.