Footnotes

“The language of the tinkers is a dialect or jargon exclusively of Celtic origin, though, like one of their own stolen asses, it is so docked and disguised as to be scarcely recognizable. . . . A large number of Shelta words are formed by transposing the principal letters of the Gaelic word. This species of back-slang is, of course, purely phonetic, differing in this respect from the more artificial letter-reversing back-slang of costers and cabmen. . . . It is indeed strange that the existence of a tongue so ancient and widespread as Shelta should have remained entirely unsuspected until Mr. Leland, with whom the undivided honour of this discovery rests, first made it public in the pages of Macmillan’s Magazine” (Dr. John Sampson).