The Romani Morpho-Syntax Database (part of the Romani Linguistics Page) is operated by
the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester. According to Anggarrgoon, where I found the link, it features:
* Comprehensive documentation of over 150 varieties of the language
* Phrase exemplification of all data in sound, transcription, and translation
* Browse, search, and query facilities
* Dynamic map-generating function that plots the distribution of features
* Extensive Help menu
* Link to Romani Linguistics Page with
** background information on the Romani language
** bibliographical database of Romani linguistics
** downloadable DVD presentation in 17 languages on the historical development of Romani
It took me a while to figure out how to search, but you can do it from this page; the maps of dialectal variants are here. It would be nice if they made it more obvious how to use the site, but I’m glad it exists!
ROMANI DATABASE.
January 19, 2009 by 8 Comments
Thanks for the link, Hat. I was just thinking yesterday that I wanted to learn more about Romani, after learning that “nark” comes from the Romani (and Hindi/Punjabi) word for nose.
very cool. no idea this was out there. thanks for this.
Stuart:
How many second-person-pronoun forms are there in Hindi (e.g., like ‘tu’ & ‘vous’ in French, or just ‘you’, nowadays, in English)?
As they have plenty of space over most of the maps (except in the Balkans), it would have been nice if they’d marked most of the symbols on the maps themselves instead of making you refer to a key.
However, enough bitching. It’s a nice resource.
There are three second-person pronouns in Hindi – aap (=vous), tum (=tu), and tu (most intimate and familiar, normally reserved for addressing children and deities). From my limited experience, it seems that “aap” is still the most commonly used.
I like the way they’ve listed the dialects in what the Wikipedia article describes as approximately chronological order. When using the translation function, the default dialect is the oldest, and it was fun to see how many of the words were either identical to their current Hindi equivalents or recognisably close kin – eye, ear, mouth, water, fire, two and three still sound very Indic. The more recent dialects have obviously absorbed a lot of vocabulary from the languages around them.
Thanks, Stuart. Maybe four would be the ideal number.
Stuart: There are three second-person pronouns in Hindi – aap (=vous), tum (=tu), and tu (most intimate and familiar, normally reserved for addressing children and deities). From my limited experience, it seems that “aap” is still the most commonly used.
I took a few months of Hindi years ago and “aap” was the only 2nd person singular pronoun taught, a good thing in my opinion since as adults and mere humans we were unlikely to be addressed or address others with “tu(m)”, which probably would have appeared much later in the course.