Robin,

I don't know much about this from the linguistic point of view. I  
think it may be an area in which the boundaries must be quite fuzzy,  
e.g. between language, dialect, cant and idiolect.  I particularly  
suspect that words collected as linguistic or dialect vocabulary may  
sometimes be idiolect, restricted to a particular family, clan or  
group. Rom language is always liable to be interpreted as thieves'  
cant by those who don't understand it.  A lot depends on the extent to  
which gypsies or travellers form a "people", which is a highly  
contentious subject, but certainly the fewer of them there are around  
the more difficult an ethnical identity becomes, and the historical  
basis of a pseudo-nationalist identity seems to be insecure.

My own interest is in the formation of quite deep obscurity in song  
(all song is more or less obscure) as it is passed from generation to  
generation whether across linguistic boundaries or not (and a lot of  
it is), and the happy deployment of the ethnically  
"inappropriate"  (perhaps 'lily-white breast' in a Rom context for  
instance) in songs which remain entirely social in function -- I mean  
they are sung for "us", not for any external factor such as an audience.

So anyway without knowing anything about it really, I'd suggest you're  
trouble with "bing" might be attributable to (a) The uncertainties I  
suggest above  (b) The circulation of dialect terms among collectors  
and scholars (is there a thesis on this anywhere I wonder?)  (c) The  
fact that gypsies move around. There are songs thought of as  
"Scottish" which have been recorded in Kent (sung e.g. by Phoebe  
Smith)  not to mention country-&-western numbers surfacing in  
Aberdeenshire. (d) Terms found in songs are not necessarily current in  
speech. McColl and Seeger quickly established this by asking a singer  
what a word "meant" to find that she had no idea, as I recall.

Davie Stewart is a great singer. Have you heard his "Bogie's Bonny  
Belle"?

Hope this work of yours reaches a published finality one day.

Peter



On 18 Feb 2010, at 18:09, Robin Hamilton wrote:

Health Warning:  This will be long, with a narrow focus, and perhaps  
should be backchannel to Peter, but in case anyone else is interested,  
here it is.

Read no further if already bored -- You Have Been Warned!

R.

*************************

Peter,

Well, the anwer to your, "I expect you know the book _Travellers'  
Songs from England and Scotland_ by Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeker  
(1977)," is "Not yet," neither that nor their later _Till Doomsday In  
The Afternoon_ (1986), but one or the other or both of these may  
contain the answer to the question I was trying to resolve when I  
segued into "Can you rocker Romanie?"

I'd been given a heads-up by someone who seems to operate on even more  
of a need-to-know basis than I do (I'm currently working on a study of  
cant in English writing from 1500 on) to the following effect:  
"Kennedy & MacColl both give brief glossaries [of 20th C. Travellers'  
cant ]."  (See what I mean by operating on a need-to-know basis?  Jon  
is even more succinct ["viscious" might be a more apt term] when it  
comes to providing only the essential information and no more, and  
leaving it up to in this case me to work out what to do with it.)

Anyway, I flagged _Till Doomsday In The Afternoon_ for later reference  
(I assumed that was the one Jon was referring to) when I get to the  
local (ODU) library, and grabbed a copy of Kennedy's _Folksongs of   
Britain and Ireland_, thinking glumly that folksong was about the last  
place I'd find anything relevant to what I was dealing with.

To explain this apparent paradox, I'm pretty narrowly concerned with  
texts in thieves' cant, originally called "peddler's french", later  
"St. Giles Greek", and by the nineteenth century "flash", before it  
essentially vanishes from any sort of living speech and is only found  
in the pages of dictionaries or historical novels.  The earliest  
record of this is found in the pages of Thomas Harman's _A Caveat for  
Common Cursitors_ (1567) and up till recently, I'd have said that the  
last trace in any connection with living speech was among the  
larrikins in Australia in the late 19thC.

Whatever, I glumly and dutifully looked at what would seem to be the  
relevant bit of Kennedy, the section at the end on Traveler's Songs,  
with separate Welsh, English, and Scottish glossaries, and the first  
two were about what I'd have expected, basically an Anglo-Romani lexis  
to a greater or lesser degree, but then there was the third glossary,  
"Scots and Scottish Cant Glossary", and my jaw dropped.  Mostly it was  
standard rural Scots, along with slightly more than I'd have expected  
of Anglo-Romany, but among the words in the list were some that simply  
shouldn't be there -- "bene", "beneship", "bing -- (c) come, go,  
put" ... There were others, "clye", "kenchin", "mort", "ken",  
"toggery" [but that's an interesting different case], "vile", but  
"bing" ...

Nobody but bloody *nobody said "bing" in real life after at least  
1660!!!  I won't here go into how and why it achieved widespread  
currency -- it starts in Harman, is picked up by Samuel Rowlands,  
becomes a trademark cant term in the poems of Thomas Dekker, and has  
an afterlife in Retro Cant, but even in literary Retro Cant texts, it  
was already passe by 1725.  And here I'm expected to believe it's  
alive and well and used among Scottish Travellers? Pull the other one,  
jimmy.

At that point, I had a sudden sinking feeling that it was just  
possible I was wrong, and virtually everything I knew about cant was  
based on insufficient evidence and I hadn't read enough and was really  
quite stunningly stupid and deluded.  Uh, oh, there I was looking at  
the possibility of four entire years' work down the drain in a  
twinkling. Twinkle.  Blink.

And yes, turns out there is work suggesting this aspect of cant is  
documented a bit -- a good article by someone connected with the  
STELLA project at Glasgow, and a note in a respectable book on Pigeon  
and Creole languages to the effect:

           Scottish Travellers’ Cant/Cant/The Crack MS   (Scotland)
                                                           Scots- 
English Cant/Shelta/Angloramani
           The secret language of Scottish Tink(l)ers or Travellers.

Except ...  The scholarship was certainly legit, not just Web-gossip,  
and it seemed to suggest that I'd missed something obvious, but there  
wasn't that much of it, comparatively speaking, the STELLA piece was  
close to the glossary in Kennedy, and the too-good-to-be-true three  
lines in the Pidgins and Creoles book wasn't sourced, so just what  
range of evidence was it based on?





----- Original Message ----- From: Peter Riley
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thursday, February 18, 2010 10:35 AM
Subject: Re: Can you rocker Romany?


Thanks for that very interesting item.   I expect you know the book  
Travellers' Songs from England and Scotland by Ewan McColl and Peggy  
Seeker (1977) which is full of songs taken and adapted by travellers  
from the standard British song repertoire, frequently changing tune  
and words, sometimes through evident misunderstanding, sometimes for  
no apparent reason. There seems to be a kind of phonetic play --  
Barbara Allen becomes Barbry Ellen and Burber Helen. Also truncating  
or garbling of narrative to a greater degree than is normal in the  
transmission of songs from generation to generation. and apparently  
very happy to learn and sing some quite nonsensical results.  An  
apparent unconcern for the more rationally transmissive aspects of  
both story and detailed wording.  One version of Geordie" begins "Come  
saddle to me says my lily-white breast..."  and later repeats the line  
without the "says".


Pr




On 17 Feb 2010, at 23:48, Robin Hamilton wrote:


In case anyone's remotely interested, here's the write up of what I  
was messing about with when not distracted by arguing with Jamie.  <g>

Robin

                 Can you rocker Romanie?

I can beat a bull or fight a cock,
I can a pigeon fly;
I'm up to all those knowing tricks
While I my hardware cry.

Can you rocker Romanie,
Can you patter flash,
Can you rocker Romanie,
Can you fake a bosh ?

Stow your gab and gauffery,
To every fakement I'm a fly;
I never takes no fluffery,
For I'm a regular axe-my-eye.

Charles Hindley (ed.), _The Life and Adventures a Cheapjack_ (1876),  
pp.231-232.

The latest incarnation attributing this song (or at least one quatrain  
of it) to a Romany origin is in Tim Coughlan, _Now Shoon the Romano  
Gillie: Traditional Verse in the High and Low Speech of the Gypsies of  
Britain_ (University of Wales Press, 2001):

Can you rocker Romany
Can you kil the bosh?
Can you jall the sturraben
An' can you chin the kosh?

“The first verse of a song known to most Anglo-Romany speakers in  
Britain, asks: ‘Can you speak Romany and play a fiddle, can you put up  
with jail and can you carve a cosh?’ The other stanzas pose further  
random questions, which Tim Coughlan dissects line by line to reveal a  
style - at first glance, unfocused - that works as cultural  
reinforcement.”

Well, no.

The problem is that the very part of the poem that naturally enough  
attracted Romany speakers to it is the very one which points to its  
non-Romany origin.  The hawker is demonstrating his command of more  
than one variety of non-standard speech, not just that he can rocker  
Romany but that he can patter flash – and no respectable Romany in  
nineteenth century England would deign to patter flash, which was  
strictly a London urban accomplishment.  And the last line of this  
quatrain -- "Can you fake a bosh?" meaning, “Can you play the violin?”  
– is again standard urban flash patter, not Romany at all.

Even the second line of the poem contains a concealed joke at the  
expense of the audience of the original poem that works in flash but  
not in Romany – “I can a pigeon fly.”  “Yeah, sure you can fly a  
pigeon, sunny jim – a blue pigeon!”  To fly a blue pigeon was  
nineteenth century London urban cant for stealing lead from the roofs  
of churches.

What no doubt happened was some Romanies heard the song and, attracted  
by the second stanza, decided to turn it to their own purposes.  In  
the course of time, this origin gets lost, and what persists even  
today in Romany travelling communities are various rewritten  
transformations of it:

Can you rocker Romany?
Can you pook a kosh?
Can you mor a gavmush?
With a knobbly kosh?

Cultural interpenetration, sure, but in this case the influence is  
from English cant into Romany rather than vice versa.