Shelta Thari
An esoteric language spoken by the tinkers of Great Britain, and possibly a descendant of an "inner" language employed by the ancient Celtic Druids or bards. It was in 1876 that the first hint of the existence of Shelta Thari reached the ears of that prince of practical philologists, Charles Godfrey Leland. It seems strange that 66 George Borrow had never stumbled upon the language, and that fact may be taken as a strong proof of the jealousy with which the nomadic classes guarded it. Leland relates how he and Professor E. H. Palmer were wandering on the beach at Aberystwyth when they met a tramp, who heard them indulging in a conversation in Romany. Leland questioned the man as to how he gained a living, and he replied, "Shelkin gallopas." The words were foreign even to the master of dialect, and he inquired their import. Why," said the man, "it means selling ferns. That is tinker's language or minklers' thari. I thought as you knew Romany, you might understand it. The right name for the tinkers' language is Shelta." "It was," says Leland, "with the feelings of Columbus the night before he discovered America that I heard the word Shelta, and I asked the fern-dealer if he could talk it." The man replied "A little," and on the spot the philologist collected a number of words and phrases from the fern-seller which gave him sufficient insight into the language to prove to him that it was absolutely different from Romany. The Celtic origin of the dialect soon began to commend itself to Leland, and he attempted to obtain from the man some verse or jingle in it, possibly for the purpose of observing its syntactical arrangement. But all he was able to drag from his informant were some rhymes of no philological value, and he found he had soon pumped the tramp dry. It was in America that Leland nearly terrified a tinker out of his wits by speaking to him in the lost dialect. The man, questioned as to whether he could speak Shelta, admitted the soft impeachment. He proved to be an Irishman, Owen Macdonald by name, and he furnished Leland with an invaluable list of several hundred words. But Leland could not be sure upon which of the Celtic languages the dialect was based. Owen Macdonald declared to him that it was a fourth language, which had nothing in common with old Irish, Welsh, or Gælic, and hazarded the information that it was the idiom of the "Ould Picts," but this appears to be rather too conjectural for the consumption of the philologist. Shelta is not a jargon, for it can be spoken grammatically without using English, as in the British form of Romany. Pictish in all probability was not a Celtic language, nor even an Aryan one, however intimately it may have been affected by Celtic speech in the later stages of its existence. Leland's discovery was greeted in some quarters with inextinguishable laughter. The Saturday Review jocosely suggested that he had been "sold," and that old Irish had been palmed off on him for a mysterious lingo. He put this view of the matter before his tinker friend, who replied with grave solemnity, "And what'd I be afther makin' two languages av thim for, if there was but wan av thim ? Since Leland's day much has been done to reclaim this mysterious tongue, chiefly through the investigations of Mr. John Sampson and Professor Kuno Meyer. The basis of these investigations rested on the fact that the tinker caste of Great Britain and Ireland was a separate class-so separate indeed as almost to form a race by itself. For hundreds of years, possibly, this fraternity existed with nearly all its ancient characteristics, and on the general disuse of Celtic speech had conserved it as a secret dialect. The peculiar thing concerning Shelta is the extent of territory over which it is spoken. That it is known rather extensively in London itself was discovered by Leland, who heard it spoken by two small boys in the Euston Road. They were not Gypsies, and Leland found out that one of them spoke the language with great fluency. Since Leland's discoveries Shelta has been to some extent mapped out into dialects, one of the most important of which is that of Ulster. It would be difficult to explain in the course of such an article as this exactly how long the Ulster dialect of this strange and " Shelta Thari ancient tongue differs from that in use in other parts of Great Britain and Ireland. But that it does so is certain. Nearly eighteen years ago Mr. John Sampson, of Liverpool, a worthy successor to Borrow and Leland, and a linguist of repute, collected a number of sayings and proverbs from two old Irish tinkers-John Barlow and Phil Murray-which he distinctly states are in the Ulster dialect of Shelta. Some of these may be quoted to provide the reader with specimens of the language:-Krish gyukera have muni Sheldru-Old beggars have good Shelta. Stimera dhi-ilsha, stimera aga dhi-ilsha-If you're a piper, have your own pipe. Mislo granhes thaber-The traveller knows the road. Thom Blorne mjesh Nip gloch-Every Protestant isn't an Orangeman. Nus a dhabjon dhuilsha-The blessing of God on you. Misli, gami gra dhi-il-Be off, and bad luck to you.
There seems to be considerable reason to believe that the tinker (or more properly "tinkler") class of Great Britain sprang from the remnants of its ancient Celtic inhabitants, and differed as completely from the Gypsy, or Romany, race as one people can well differ from another. This is almost conclusively proved by the criterion of speech, for Shelta is a Celtic tongue and that Romany is a dialect of Northern Hindustan is not open to doubt.
Those who now speak Romany habitually almost invariably make use of Shelta as well, but that only proves that the two nomadic races, having occupied the same territory for hundreds of years, had gained a knowledge of each other's languages. Who, then, were the original progenitors of the tinkers? Whoever they were, they were a Celticspeaking race, and probably a nomadic one. Shelta has been referred to as the language of the ancient bards of Ireland, the esoteric tongue of an Irish priesthood. Leland puts forward the hypothesis that the Shelta-speaking tinker is a descendant of a prehistoric guild of bronze-workers. This, he thinks, accounts in part for his secretiveness as regards his language. In Italy to this very day the tinker class is identified with the itinerant bronze workers. The tinker fraternity of Great Britain and Ireland existed with perhaps nearly all its ancient characteristics until the advent of railroads. But long before this it had probably amalgamated to a great extent with the Gypsy population, and the two languages had become common to the two peoples. This is the only explanation that can be given for the appearance of Shelta, a Celtic language, in the non- Celtic portions of Great Britain. That it originated in Ireland appears to be highly probable, for in no other part of these islands during the later Celtic period was there a state of civilisation sufficiently advanced to permit of the existence of a close corporation of metal-workers possessing a secret language. Moreover, the affinities of Shelta appear to be with old Irish more than with any other Celtic dialect. There is one other theory that presents itself in connection with the origin of Shelta, and that is, that it is the modern descendant of the language of the "Ould Picts" tioned by Owen Macdonald, Leland's tinker friend. It has by no means been proved that Pictish was a non-Aryan language, and, despite the labours of Professor Rhys, we are as far off as ever from any definite knowledge concerning the idiom spoken by that mysterious people. But there are great difficulties in the way of accepting the hypothesis of the Pictish origin of Shelta, the chief among them being its obvious Irish origin. There were, it is known, Picts in the North of Ireland, but they were almost certainly a small and barbarous colony, and a very unlikely community to form a metal-working confraternity, possessing the luxury of a private dialect. It still remains for the Celtic student to classify Shelta. It may prove to be "Pictish," strongly influenced by the Gaelic of Ireland and Scotland. A comparison with Basque and the dialect of the Iberian mentribes of Morocco might bring affinities to light, and thus establish the theory of its non-Aryan origin; but itsl strong kinship with Erse seems undoubted. (See Journal of the Gypsy Love Society, New Series.)