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An old benediction:
I just thanked a kind Irish Traveller, who had sent me an e-mail Thanksgiving message, with my own reply in the Cant that was used when our families arrived in this country. As in any language, and it was a complete language, Cant had a number of ways to say the same things. In this case I chose the most literal way to make for easier association with the translation, word by word. Then, on reflection, I thought that others might be interested as well:
Mwil nyok duilsha munyaths a Dalyon Swuda.
(I wish you blessings from God Almighty.)
A note on the site's name, "Travellers' Rest":
In addition to being a common old reference (as in the poem above) to a sojourn for travelers who are not Travellers, if you get my drift, there is an historic connection. I believe that "Travellers' Rest" was the name given to the grove in North Augusta, SC, where virtually all Irish-American Traveller ancestors once camped together. This was before our families had fully formed into the various geographical clans of Irish Travellers that exist today. In later times, when the land was purchased and turned into a trailer and mobile home park, the campground was renamed "The Pines."
A little humor:
A priest and a rabbi are very good friends; so when the rabbi comes back from Israel after a six month stay they get together over a drink or two to catch up and compare notes. Eventually the priest asks his old friend what it's like to pray directly to God in the Holy City of Jerusalem. The rabbi looks around, sees no one within earshot and says, "Every once in a while, it's wonderful, but mostly I've got to tell you: it's just like talking to a Wall."
(:>D)
I expect that there will be disagreement by some Travellers with a few of the statements I make below. I want to make it quite clear that I speak only for myself. If you disagree, and have a point to make, E-mail me here and I'll present it on this page for all to see and consider.
Anyway, here's more of that correspondence with a Young Rom in Norway:
Is Cant originally a secret language? Romani is, and among my tribe we
keep the language as secret as possible.
I don't think anyone knows anything for sure about an "original" Cant. It seems to have deep but slender
roots in some cryptic language of the far past, (so some scholars say, I've read) and has been added to with slang
and "pidgin" words from Gaelic originally, then from English. At the height of it's usage, 150 years
ago, it was what the experts call a "creolized" language, that is a fully functioning non-mainstream
"first" language (only) used on an everyday basis by what could be called "native speakers."
Much of the additional wordage had a lot in common with the processes and motivations that formed Cockney rhyming
slang, except that there seems to be a lot more construction through back-formation (reversing successive syllables).
In the old times, we often had
to fled from the gaje, and a secret language made us able to communicate
without any police (or other "enemies") listening. It always gave our people
security - but also unity, brotherhood and pride among our selves. Today
we keep the language secret as a tradition.
Think on what you've been told, _____. Meaning no disrespect to your traditions, how much security could there
be in speaking a secret language where it could be overheard by the gaje? They (the speakers) would have been hung often enough just for speaking an unknown language, not for
the content of their speech. The use of the language itself was more of a give-away than whatever the speakers
would have been discussing.
Oftentimes "romantic" [not love-stories, though, except for grand opera(:>D)] myths grow up that overlay
simple truths, like xenophobia on both sides. That fact of the matter is: though necessary to the feudal economy
and culture, both our peoples were largely shunned by the indigenous peoples we traveled among; the Romany perhaps
more so because of physical appearance in some tribes and areas. It's not so much of an achievement to keep the
"crypto"-language as a "first" language for it's native speakers when those people are socially
isolated.
It's not a nice story to tell the kids: We still speak the Cant (for example) because we were shunned and when
we weren't, we liked being able to insult the "reffs"
(a vulgar word meaning "low-class non-Travellers") without them understanding. Well, xenophobia being
what it is, the "locals" assumed that they were being insulted anyway whenever they heard the Cant spoken
for no apparent purpose, and resented that even more fiercely because their imaginations were harsher critics than
we nomads would ever be.
But I would LOVE to have a
copy of your Cant lexicon!!!!!!!!!!
So would I. (:>D) But I feel that I will need a much more whole-hearted cooperation from my family if it is
to do us any good. Please take no offense at this, but neither friendship nor scholarship would be adequate motivations
for "exposing" the Cant further than it's already been compromised. I really don't believe in needless
secrecy, though. Outsiders are more negatively interested in us because of this "secret" language notion,
not less, I think.
The secret is not worth preserving, in my opinion; the language is. But, ultimately, it's the family's choice to
make, not mine. (The Cant vocabulary used and usable by the typical Irish Traveller in the USA today is considerably
less than 20% of what our great-grandparents used, in my estimation.)
Good luck with all that! Please tell if you
ever get in touch with a IT from Ireland or any other country then USA. If I
should ask my library to order ONE book about your people, what book
should I recommend? I want as much information as possible.............
On the Irish version of the IT Cant:
"The Secret Languages of Ireland" by Robert A.S. Macalister, AMS Press, New York, NY USA, 1937
ISBN 0-404-17566-X
A traditional Romani wedding are celebrated on the graveyard, as I just
read in a Swedish book(!). Then we celebrate the wedding in a giant
wedding-cake-palace, decorated with golden cars, caravans and houses
on the top! Imagination and fantasy - that is the only place Norwegian and
Swedish authors get information when they are going to write about the
Romani or Norwegian Travellers. Maybe we should write books too?!
I tried that. Got a little praise but no money. By the way, our wedding cake palaces have gold dust in all the
water closets and bathtubs. Filthy rich, you know.
Munya Cess & But Bahi!
Bahai and Munya Cess, as well.
Dick
The Cant:
An English scholar named Charles Leland encountered a man he named as Owen MacDonald about 120 years ago in Philadelphia, PA. Leland commented on the Scottishness of the surname and spelled it with a "Mac," but insisted that the man was Irish, and a Traveller to boot. I believe the Irish Traveller was my grandfather's uncle. That given name has descended through succeeding generations in the McDonald family, of which I am part. And the surname "McDonald" or "MacDonald" was a rare one among Travellers at the time; there were few enough of us at all in the American northeast then.
Whatever his reasons for sharing some of the vocabulary of the Cant, I am grateful that he did. Had he not done so, many of the Cant words that my family used when they came to the "Groot Munkri" (New Country) would be lost forever. As always, there is some leeway, not to say doubt, in the actual pronunciation. It might be spoken something like "Grooth Munkeri."
I promised a few forgotten Cant words last week.
One of these words isn't exactly lost, just used differently. Many Travellers in Ireland, perhaps most, now call themselves "Pavee" as a group. I surmise that they intend it to mean "Merchants" or "Traders" and that sounds like a fine and suitable name to me.
One word my great-grandfather would have used frequently, that I have never heard among my family is "minker," probably pronounced more like "minkar" to the American ear. That Cant word stood for "tinker": a fine Gaelic-sourced name for a respectable trade long before it became an insult on the lips of many settled people overseas. That only occurred after it turned out that they no longer needed such tradesmen, as the Industrial Revolution caught up with Ireland. The Irish Travellers today spell that word "minceir" but I think that the pronunciation is similar.
The proverbial "Tinker's Dam":
There could not be another expression that better demonstrates the "vicious circle" concept, except perhaps for "indian giver." If you look it up in almost any dictionary, you find it basically defined as "worthless," and probably arising from the "well-known" tendency of tinkers to curse so much that a single one of their "damns" would be so commonplace as to be insignificant. And if you try to find out why tinkers are assumed to have cursed so much, you'll find that the "experts" point to such sayings as evidence that it was so.
Let's think on that for a moment. There are a number of fine curses and obscenities in Cant. The Cant, or Shelta, words for "tinker's damn" (in the sense of curse) were Minkar's Laburth, by the way. But how would country people distinguish curses from the rest of the Cant that they heard? And how much public cursing could a tinker do in the presence of generally hostile strangers before he and his family would be run out of town?
Oddly enough, there's a very simple explanation which most authorities refuse to endorse and even characterize as belated political correctness. In his repair work, the tinker frequently used mud to mold reservoirs and barriers. When dry, these would channel molten tin solder into the appropriate parts of the article he was repairing. They were called "dams" and when the tin had cooled and they had no further purpose, each "tinker's dam" was easily broken into little clumps of useless dirt.
I believe that "tinker's dam" and "tinker's damn" sound very similar in Gaelic as well as English. My guess is that Irish householders and Irish servants who dealt with tinkers knew they were referring to a "tinker's dam" when they used that phrase. It was the English landlords and administrators overhearing them who assumed, in prejudice and ignorance, that "damn" was the reference. And it was the English, after all, who wrote the English dictionaries.
They even claim that the expression was first encountered in 1839, although tinkers' dams have probably been in use for much longer than a thousand years. The melting point of tin, by the way, is just under the temperature of burning paper so there was no need for high-tech equipment to accomplish it.
What's the promised connection with safecracking? When nitroglycerine was invented, safecrackers borrowed the idea of the tinker's dam to channel it into the space between the safe door and its frame. That way, when it blew, most of the nitro would be behind the safe door, blowing it outwards.
Sad to say: if it was a tinker who first employed the dam in this way, he immediately rose a number of notches in the social scale of those benighted times by becoming a "yegg," or safecracker. It is interesting to note that one old Cant word for "tin" was similar: "yergan." One possible Cant word for "dam" might be "bwikader," meaning "holder" or "container," but that's a blind guess, of course. If anyone might know the exact Cant expression, I'd appreciate an e-mail about it.
NEXT WEEK HERE:
A few more Cant words from Old Times in the Old Country, of course.
A short discussion of what is meant by the three words generally used to name our language: The Cant, Shelta, and Gammon. There seem to be some differences in the definitions and variations in the vocabulary of each. I'll check into it.
There will be a new joke, if a good one comes my way.
I was recently e-mailed a Web site address overseas for Scots Travellers and of course I have a number of such URLs personally bookmarked for the Irish Traveller links in the Old Country, as well. I'll put together a page of those links soon and add it to this site for your convenience.
I'll also try to get to more poetry by Yeats and Synge. By the way, any poetry on these pages that is not attributed to another person was written by myself and is copyrighted as such.
Any questions or comments? Please e-mail them to: Travellers' Rest
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