thunder of Thuggism! Lost, lost, irreparably lost forever! And in this
book John had embodied a vocabulary of the real Indian Romany dialect.
Nothing was wanting to complete our woe. John thought at first that he
had lent it to a friend who had never returned it. But his wife
remembered burning it. Of one thing John was positive: Rom was as
distinctively gypsy talk in India as in England, and the Trablus are the
true Romanys of India.

What here suggests itself is, how these Indian gypsies came to be called
_Syrian_. The gypsies which roam over Syria are evidently of Indian
origin; their language and physiognomy both declare it plainly. I offer
as an hypothesis that bands of gypsies who have roamed from India to
Syria have, after returning, been called Trablus, or Syrians, just as I
have known Germans, after returning from the father-land to America, to
be called Americans. One thing, however, is at least certain. The Rom
are 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 cannot 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
admixture of Persian, and do not belong to a slang of any kind. As in
India, _churi_ is a knife, _nak_ 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 Hindu 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
desired that some resident in India would investigate the Trablus. It
will probably be found that they are Hindus who have roamed from India to
Syria and back again, here and there, until they are regarded as
foreigners in both countries.

Next to the word _rom_ itself, the most interesting in Romany is
_zingan_, or _tchenkan_, which is used in twenty or thirty different
forms by the people of every country, except England, to indicate the
gypsy. An incredible amount of far-fetched