Our countryman Swinborne, in describing the Gypsies in Calabria, is the first to remark that their peculiar language bears great affinity to the oriental tongues; and that many of their customs resemble those of the heathens. But European ignorance of the habits and speech of Asiatics may be accounted for, whilst the rich productions of India continued to be brought to Egyptian ports, and to be conveyed thence by the Lombard merchants, to be distributed over Europe
The _Cingari_, _Zigeuners_, or _Gypsies_, had been in Germany nearly a century, before the Portuguese discovered the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope. The stimulus which this discovery gave to improvements in the art of navigation, soon opened immediate intercourse with the eastern world. Vast are the establishments, which have been subsequently effected, in that quarter of the globe by naval powers, and extraordinary have been, of late years, the exertions for the acquisition of oriental languages; yet so numerous are they in those widely extended regions, that European knowledge of Asiatic etymology, is yet but in a state of infancy.
The case of the Gypsies is singular; for it may fairly be questioned, whether it has a parallel in the history of the world. Dispersed over the face of the earth, without any organization of their different hordes; and all concert between them entirely precluded by separations of hundreds of miles from each other, in different parts of the globe, and by their incapacity for literary communication; they have, however, whilst speaking the languages of the respective countries they inhabit, preserved in _all places one_ peculiar to themselves, and have transmitted it through a lapse of centuries to their descendants, almost unimpaired.
Increased acquaintance with oriental customs and tongues, has, at length, discovered the near coincidence they have with the language of the Gypsies, and has developed an origin of this people, of which those of the present age were, till now, entirely ignorant. It will appear extraordinary, that these people should have been able, by oral means alone, and under all disadvantages, to retain their language, and yet not to have handed down with it, any tradition that might lead to a discovery of who they were, or whence they came. But the knowledge recently acquired, of their very abject condition in the country from which they emigrated, offers a reason why the first comers might be anxious to conceal their pedigree, the meanness of which would have but ill accorded with the titles of rank assumed by some of their leaders.