Shelta? What's in a Name?
By way of an explanation of the following: In 1876, an American scholar and poet named Charles Godfrey Leland was
the first "country man" to come across the then generally unknown language of the Irish Travellers, which
its speakers have always called the Cant or Gammon, while he was doing field work on Gypsies in England and Wales
Below, an excerpt from an e-mail exchange with an academic that sums up my own particular explanation of how the Cant was somehow christened with the name of "Shelta":
Very quickly:
Leland had no Gaelic, not even the Scottish version of Irish. And he stated in another interview (with McDonald,
a few years later) that he had a great deal of difficulty understanding heavy brogues. Leland's first Irish Traveller
"informant" called his language (in "Shelta") Minkers' Thaari, or "Tinker's
Speech." When he saw that Leland didn't understand "Shelta," he switched to Gaelic, IMHO,
using the Irish terms for "Travellers" and "dialect."
Some time ago, I ran across an old reference to Travellers in Ireland as "the Walking People" (in English).
I believe that what Leland heard as his "wretched outcast...having...a fair amount of education" telling
him "Shelta...Cant," as if a Gammon and English word were being equated, was actually "The
Walking People's dialect" in Irish. The Irish Gaelic (not the Scots) verbal adjective (I guess the Eng. equiv.
is gerundive) for "walk," or "walking" is siulta. The "s" is pronounced
"sh" and the diphthong is as much like a slurred schwa sound as anything else, I think. The Irish
for "dialect" is canuint. (Both "u"s should have long-sound diacriticals, BTW.)
The similarities may not prove anything, but it seems to me as though some academic effort might have been made
over the years to recognize them and at least explain them away. Instead Macalister cites Leland, Harper cites
Macalister, and everybody since cites Harper as though he was actually present at the time when all he did is name-drop
a reference he did not understand.