Note 35 — Chapter III

Sir William Jones, in one of his anniversary discourses, says, “It seems agreed that the singular people called Egyptians, and by corruption Gypsies, passed the Mediterranean immediately from Egypt: and their motely language, of which Mr. Grellman exhibits a copious vocabulary, contains so many Sanscrit words, that their Indian origin can hardly be doubted. The authenticity of that vocabulary seems established by a multitude of Gypsy words; as angár, charcoal; cásth, wood; pár, a bank; bhû, earth; and a hundred more, for which the collector of them could find no parallel in the vulgar dialect of Hindostan, though we know them to be pure Sanscrit, scarcely changed in a single letter. A very ingenious friend, to whom this remarkable fact was imparted, suggested to me that those very words might have been taken from old Egyptian, and that the Gypsies were Troglodytes from the rocks near Thebes, where a race of banditti still resemble them in their habits and features; but, as we have no other evidence of so strong an affinity between the popular dialects of old Egypt and India, it seems more probable that the Gypsies, whom the Italians call Zingaros and Zinganos, were no other than Zinganians, as M. D’Anville also writes the word, who might, in some piratical expedition, have landed on the coast of Arabia or Africa, whence they might have rambled to Egypt, and at length might have migrated or been driven into Europe.” Asiatic Researches, vol. iii. p. 8. E. Trans.