Der Gitanismo Im Spanischen Argot (2006)

Der Gitanismo im spanischen Argot. Bernhard Helzle-Drehwald. 2004. Geneva: Librairie Droz. (Kolner romanistische Arbeiten 83). xvi + 423 pp. isbn 2-600-00911-6. Part of the persisting confusion between the Romani language and the special vocabularies used by some travelling populations is due to the occasional interface between them: Romani is often a source of loanwords into the various vocabularies of (non-Romani) marginalised populations, while in some regions of Europe inflected Romani has been lost, but the communities in which it was once spoken retain a vocabulary of Romani origin, which, much like the special vocabularies of other populations, they embed into conversation in a variety of the majority language. In Romani linguistics, this latter phenomenon is referred to as 'Para-Romani' (see Matras 1998). Helzle-Drehwald's opus is devoted to such a point of interface, namely, those lexical items of Romani etymology that have made their way into non-standard Spanish 'Argot'. To begin, we must distinguish between several linguistic entities. The first is Iberian Romani-the varieties of inflected Romani spoken in the Iberian peninsula from around the sixteenth century and at least up to the eighteenth century. These declined, and eventually became extinct, but are survived by Iberian Para- Romani, often known as Calo-the insertion of Romani-based vocabulary into Spanish discourse, an in-group variety used by those identifying as Gitanos or 'Gypsies'. Next is a continuum of Spanish varieties spoken by non-Gypsies or Payos, some of them influenced to some extent by the in-group speech of the Gitanos. This, essentially, is what is meant by Gitanismo: the influence of distinctive lexical features of Gitano Spanish (Calo) on the Spanish of non- Gitanos (p. 3). Missing from the introductory remarks, however, is a definition of Argot. The author mentions that Gitanismos enter various linguistic strata in Spanish, and cites the hypothesis that attributes a central role to Flamenco as a channel for the transmission of Calo lexicon, but we are left in the dark as to the precise demarcation of Argot and so, essentially, of the entire potential corpus of the work under review. Instead, the author takes the shortcut of defining the corpus on the basis of a secondary source: the entries contained in Sanmartin Saez's (1998) Spanish argot dictionary. Reliance on a philological interpretation of secondary sources is in fact the strategy pursued by the author throughout the book. There is thus no attempt to arrive at, for instance, a narrative description of the history of Romani and its decline in the peninsula, by cross-referencing linguistic with historical sources, or at a sociolinguistic characterisation of the nature of the communicative crossroads between Gitanos and Payos (save a brief quote on p. 1 depicting the common fate of Gitanos and other marginalised groups). Following the introduction, we find an annotated list of sources on so-called Hispano-Romani, which encompasses both inflected Romani and Calo (Para- Romani) (pp. 11-36). This is followed by a section curiously entitled 'research report' (Forschungsbericht, pp. 37-60). This resembles a trimmed-down version of what a doctoral thesis would term 'review of the literature', and as such it seems to serve the purpose of showing what the candidate has read, rather than taking a didactic approach to what the author thinks the reader should learn. The main body of the work begins on p. 61 with explanatory remarks on the format of entries, followed by a collection of some 140 to 150 lexical items considered to be 'Gitanismos'. …