Learn Romani: Das-duma Rromanes

heard.

Lesson one

The present tense

Read the following table aloud and look carefully at the endings. The personal pronouns (words in brackets before the verb) do not need to be used but often are employed for emphasis or clarity, for example, Mangav xabe ‘I want (some) food’ is a simple statement of fact as compared to Me mangav xabe! ‘I want food!’ or ‘It’s me who wants food!’ with a greater emphasis. The verb conjugations (i.e. verb endings) are in italics in the table to clarify them and show who is doing the action. Romani has no infinitive like ‘to want’ in English, therefore the verb stem or root of a Romani verb will either be conjugated to one of its forms in the present tense, for example, mangav ‘I want’, or given as the verb stem mang- to which the appropriate conjugation must be added as shown below:

mang- (the verb stem or root)

You will notice the ending < en > has two meanings and usually the sense will be clear from the situation but, if not, use the personal pronoun tume or won.

There is also a long form of the verb i.e. mangáva, mangésa, mangéla, etc. This can be ignored for now as there is no change in meaning using the shorter form given in this lesson.

Test whether you have understood

If beshav means ‘I sit, I am sitting’ and comes from the verb stem besh-, what is the English for:

If ‘he drinks’ is piyel, what is the Romani for:

Check your answers on the last page of this lesson and, if you made any mistakes, look carefully at the table above again.

The definite article: the word ‘the’

There are only two genders in Romani: masculine and feminine. Nouns denoting inanimate objects (like table and chair) will either be masculine and take < o > or feminine and take < e >. For example:

Most nouns ending in a stressed < o > like balo ‘male pig’ use < o > and most words ending in a stressed < i > like bali ‘sow’ use < e >. For other nouns ending in consonants you will have to consult the word lists in each lesson and eventually a dictionary.

Learn these words with < o > or < e > in front of them. Learn ‘letter’ as o lil ‘the letter’ and e yag as ‘the fire’.

Test

Test whether you have understood and again, check your answers on the last page of this lesson. If manrro is ‘bread’ and bali is ‘sow’, what is the Romani for:

The indefinite article: the words ‘a’ and ‘an’

The English words ‘a’ and ‘an’ (indefinite articles) have no equivalent in Romani. For example, lil ‘letter’ or ‘a letter’ and grast ‘horse’ or ‘a horse’. You will see that sometimes < o > and < e > are used where ‘the’ is not used in English. This happens in front of and with people’s names:

Here are a few more examples of statements in Romani:

Questions are usually asked by raising the voice, as in English, or by turning part of the sentence round: O shávo avel? (with the voice rising) or Avel o shávo? ‘Is the Romani boy coming?’

In Romani, the present tense translates the following English forms: I come, I am coming, I do come and, as in English, the present tense can be used to express the future as in ‘I am coming tomorrow’ or ‘When I come tomorrow, I’ll see you.’

Word lists

These word lists give the words, including verbs, used in each lesson and may sometimes include words not used in the lesson when relevant. For example, if the word ‘today’ is used in the lesson the words for ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ may also be given so that the student can make a basic list of important related words which can be learned together and interchanged in the sentences given in the lesson or used with native speakers for practice.

Words ending in < o > are always masculine and words ending in < a > and < i > can be considered feminine, however, if they are masculine this will be indicated by (m.) following the word in the list. Words ending in consonants like skamin ‘chair’ will also have the gender indicated in the word list as (m.) or (f.). Words which are plural like love ‘money’ also use < le > for the plural and the gender will be indicated as (m. pl.) masculine or (f. pl.) feminine.

Spoken exercises

These should be done aloud, preferably with a partner or in a group.

1.  Make up as many sentences as possible, choosing one item from each column. Think of the meaning as you say them:

2.  Answer the questions, firstly using ya ‘yes’ and then na ‘no’. Cover the right-hand side and use it only to check your answers:

3.  Make up answers to these questions. Suggested answers are on the right-hand side:

Written exercises

Translate into English:

Translate into Romani:

Check your answers at the end of the lesson.

Reading exercise

Read the poem aloud. In the text you will find words and grammatical formations not yet introduced in the lesson but these are explained in the notes and you will eventually come to them as the lessons progress. Do not attempt to learn them all at this point as the exercises are there simply to help you learn how to pronounce Romani.

A Canadian-Kalderash poem from Waso Russel Demitro, 1963

Sas-pe, Dévla

Tha shai te avel-pe

Yêkh piramno thai piramni

Yêkh ambrolin po drôm

Kon telal la, Dévla, kai beshel

Yêkh kamado thai kamadi

Kon kamel-pe thai chi mai lel-pe

Mek lel shtrángo te amblavel-pe.*

* Notes: sas-pe ‘there was once, once upon a time’, Dévla ‘God’ (vocative case, used only in direct address with Del as the noun), tha, thai ‘and, also’, shai te avel-pe ‘there might be again’, yêkh there is no indefinite article in Romani as in English ‘a man is coming’ or ‘I see a horse’. The word yêkh or êkh means the numeral ‘one’, for example, ‘only one person knows’. Yêkh or êkh is sometimes used in Romani to express ‘a’ or ‘an’ in English and yêkh most often appears in Kalderash-Romani in songs, folk tales and poems. Piramno ‘male lover who is courting a female’, piramni ‘female lover who is courted by a male’, ambrolin ‘pear tree’ (from (o) ambrol ‘pear’), telal la ‘under, underneath it’, kamel-pe ‘he desires for himself’ (pe or pês is a reflexive pronoun and means ‘himself’ or ‘herself’), shtrángo ‘rope, hangman’s noose’ (‘rope’ in general is shelo in Kalderash therefore amblavel-pe ‘he hangs himself’).

Translation

There was once, God,

And there may be again,

A lover and his sweetheart

A pear tree by the roadside

Who, God, is sitting under it

A lover and his lass

He who desires for himself

And does not take unto himself

Let him take a rope and hang himself.

A riddle

Kon avel ánde sóba thai chi pushel?

Who comes into the room without asking permission?

Thematic and athematic

It is very important to explain these terms at this point in order to simplify the Romani grammatical rules which will be presented throughout the following lessons. Rather than use ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ to define which parts of speech follow the original grammar (thematic grammar) and which words do not (described as athematic grammar in this course) it will be better to introduce these two linguistic terms from the beginning.

Vlax Romani grammar may be treated in two categories: thematic and athematic. These have two different historical origins, and different surface morphology (word formation). Thematic grammatical rules apply to words in the original stock, i.e. words of Indian origin, as well as to words acquired from all other languages the ancestors of the Roma met on the journey westwards before reaching Europe. These include items (words) from Persian, Kurdish, Ossetian, Armenian, Georgian and Byzantine Greek among others. Athematic grammatical rules apply to words acquired from other languages after crossing into Europe, including later Greek, South Slavic, Romanian, East Slavic, Hungarian, German, English and so on. It is their athematic lexicons (groups or lists of loan words which differ from one Romani dialect to another) which present the principal barrier to mutual intelligibility among speakers of the different Romani dialects.

Thematic items are almost always stressed on their final syllable, and athematic items are almost always stressed on other syllables, thus shukar, thematic (with stress on the < ar >) and múndro, athematic (with stress on the first vowel or syllable < ú >) which both mean ‘beautiful’.*

* Hancock, Ian. A Handbook of Vlax Romani. New York: Slavica Publishers, Inc., 1995, p.54. The words in italics in parentheses (brackets) have been inserted for clarity by the