up into a number of dialects,[1] shading off into each other and forming together a clue to the course and even the epoch of their wanderings.[2]
Restatement of Chief Problems (racial and linguistic).
18. Having already spoken (inconclusively) upon their rites and religion, it may be well to gather up some of the problems so plentifully suggested by the above often divergent and conflicting views. There are certainly two groups, the Danubian and the Indian: we do not know how or why they fused, although we can deny any claim to a very remote date for this amalgamation. Whether the old name Siginnoi suggested a title for this motley horde of mixed races or really proves an identity with a classical people we cannot say. The present seat of the bulk of the race might certainly lead us to the latter view; but Strabo is the last author who speaks of them, and they do not appear in Byzantine writers who give us many names of Asiatic tribes.[3] The kinship of this people with Grierson's Pisaca-speaking tribes of Dardistan is an interesting possibility: was there an extension of these races into the Steppes leading without barriers from the Caspian to the Danube? Or must we date the Indian speech from the Jat immigration of cent. v. and still more of cent. ix.? Again, what is the connexion between this people and the
- ↑ Fourteen, if we accept Colocci's estimate, Storia d'un popolo errante, Turin 1889.
- ↑ Gaster notes the curious fact that one of the most remote and westerly, the Welsh, has through its isolation kept some of the most archaic forms.
- ↑ His account is of interest (xi. 520): they are a Caspian people bordering on the Dervices, who kill and eat the old men over 70 (endocannibalism, and cf. charges levelled, it would seem unfairly, against gipsies in Europe); they adopt Persian customs and use little shaggy ponies ((
Greek characters)) in cars driven four abreast; the best woman driver (the sex being brought up to the art from early years) can choose her own husband; some of them value doli- cephalism and projecting foreheads, which sometimes overhang their chin ((Greek characters)).
