1113: Analyses of Romani: Linguists knew Gypsies weren't Egyptian Dec 26, 2017

Given that 'Roma' is only starting to replace 'Gypsy' in regular speech recently, it might be surprising that linguists knew that the people must have migrated from India—not Egypt as the term 'Gypsy' suggests—as far back as the 17th century. In 1782, Johann Christian Christoph Rüdiger published "On the Indic Language and Origin of the Gypsies" (originally in German), citing many a 1755 dictionary and more importantly Job Ludolf, who, in 1691, reportedly was the first person to actually compare Romani to other languages, and established that it was not Ethiopian nor Coptic (Egyptian). Earlier claims that Romani dialects descended from Coptic languages come from people like Andrew Borde, the earliest known documenter of Romani, who transcribed and transliterated merely 13 sentences, and called them Egyptian.

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