Loanwords in Selice Romani, an Indo-Aryan language of Slovakia 1 ...

dispense with the assumption of the presence of Romani speakers in the Karakoram
Mountains on their way out of India.
3.5. Contact with Greek
While the first historical records of the presence of Gypsies in the Byzantine Empire
originate from the late eleventh century CE (e.g. Soulis 1961), Tzitzilis (2001: 327–8)
argues on linguistic grounds that Romani contact with Greek must have occurred by the
tenth century. He also suggests that the oldest layer of Hellenisms in Romani are
loanwords from Pontic and Cappadocian dialects of Medieval Greek, which of course
also makes sense geographically. Differing degrees of morphological integration of
Greek loanwords may reflect different layers of contact (see Section 5.2). For example,
Greek ðróm-os ‘way’ is fully integrated as drom in Romani, and is likely to be an
earlier loanword than that of Greek fór-os ‘square; market’, which retains its Greek
nominative inflections in Romani. The fact that Greek is the source of numerous
inflectional and derivational affixes in Romani (e.g. Boretzky & Igla 1991, Bakker
1997) and the model of radical morphosyntactic Balkanization-cum-Hellenization of the
language (e.g. Friedman 1986, 2000; Matras 1994, 1995) suggests that contact with
Greek involved fluent bilingualism of adult Romani speakers. Since most of the Greek-
origin grammatical component is shared by all present-day Romani dialects, we may
safely assume a relatively homogeneous speech community at the time of (early) Greek
contact and locate Early Romani, the common ancestor of all modern Romani dialects,
in the Byzantine period.
Selice Romani retains three dozen Greek loanwords, a third of which are not
represented in the LWT sample, including nouns meaning ‘cabbage’, ‘carrot’, ‘fairy
tale’, ‘lap’, ‘jelly’, and several function words. This number contrasts, for example, with
twice as high a number of Hellenisms in a familiolect of Welsh Romani (Sampson
1926, counted in Grant 2003: 29). 10 Both numbers certainly represent a mere fraction of
all Greek loanwords that were in use in Romani during its Byzantine period, as
indicated by the sum of Hellenisms that have been retained at least in some modern
dialects of Romani outside of the Greek-speaking area. For example, Boretzky & Igla’s
(1994) dictionary contains a list of 238 loanwords from Greek; Grant (2003) lists over
10 Grant (2003: 29) also counts Greek loanwords in other Romani dialects such as Lovari (Vekerdi 1983),
but these represent dialect clusters rather than individual local varieties, and so these counts are, strictly
speaking, not comparable to the number of loanwords in Selice Romani.
Elšík Loanwords in Selice Romani 11 of 65