By Rolf Theil

Both languages have retained a large vocabulary of Indo-Aryan, Iranian (Persian and Ossetian), Armenian and Greek origin. Norwegian-Romani has borrowed some Slavic and German loanwords that are not found in Romanes, such as hispa (living room, small house) from Slavic, and buro (farmer, non-Tater) from German. Romanés has borrowed many Romanian words that are not found in Norwegian-Romani, such as bolta (shop), pruna (plum) and ketana (soldier).

The grammar of the two languages also developed differently. Norwegian-Romani has adopted a Norwegian-Swedish syntax, in terms of both conjugation and sentence structure. Romanés, on the other hand, has retained large parts of an Indo-Aryan grammatical system, with elements from several Balkan languages.

An additional factor is that the two languages are used differently. Romanés is the primary language of the Norwegian Roma/Gypsies, and many of the elders speak better Romanés  than they do Norwegian. The Norwegian Tater, on the other hand, mostly speak different Norwegian dialects on a daily basis, and not everyone knows Romani.

There is currently great interest among the Tater/Romani people in reviving  Romani.

Spoken language has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, while humans started writing only 5,000 years ago. Still today, only a few of the world's more than 7,000 languages are written down, and Romani is one of the languages that are still primarily spoken.

When a language is adopted as a written language, notions often arise that certain spellings are "correct," while others are "incorrect" or "wrong." Since Romani is not a written language, there are also no ways to write it that are “more correct” than others, although some spellings undoubtedly work better than others.

The exhibition is called Latjo drom. Instead of Latjo, we could have written Lakjo, and instead of drom, we could have written dromm. The two spellings have nothing to do with the way the words are pronounced. But spelling does have to do with the fact that there are many  opinions among the Romani-speaking people about the way the sounds in their language should be written.

In these language articles, Romani is written in accordance with the spelling system Rolf Theil created for his book of 2014, Vandriane rakkrar/Taterne forteller/Taterane fortel. The book is the result of a  a collaboration between Rolf Theil and Taternes Landsforening (TL) (The National Association of the Tater people). According to this system, it should be written Latjo Dromm.

The direct translation of latjo drom is "good road", but its meaning is most often "have a good trip".

The Tater/Romani people are featured in Norwegian with different names from those that they use about themselves: fant, splint and fark, and several of the other names, reveal a lack of knowledge about the people’s identity and origin. Tater/the Romani people are the official names of this group. Tater is a name many in the group use; others prefer to be called Romani people. Travellers is also a name that is commonly used.  There are also names in Romani such as Tavring and Vandri.

TATER
The Romani people came to the Nordic region early in the sixteenth  century, and they were called tattare/tatere. The Swedish priest and historian Olaus Petri (1493-1552) states in A Swedish Chronicle that "the people who travel from one country to another are called ‘Tatare’."

Here, we see a potential confusion with the Eastern European Tatars, who speak a language akin to Turkish and who have nothing to do with the Tater/Romani people. In Norse, the Tatars were called tattarar.

FANT
Fant (“tramp”) has an interesting history. Ivar Aasen writes in the Norsk Ordbog med dansk Forklaring (Norwegian Dictionary with Danish Explanations) (1873) that the word can be interpreted in three ways:

Aasen adds this in a parenthesis:

“In recent Writings, the Word is also used for Tater or Gypsy; but this is wrong, as "Fant" does not denote a kind of People”.

The word already existed in Norse in the form fantr, which meant "servant" and "migrant person". Fant came into Norwegian via Low German from Italian. The word fante in Italian means "servant, jack" and also "infantryman". This Italian word is in turn derived from Latin infans, "small child".

SPLINT
Splint means the same as fant, but the origin of the word is unknown. Some linguists connect it to the other word splint (splinter), which means "piece torn off by crushing, blasting or the like", which is a loanword from Low German, but the connection is very tenuous.

FARK
In the dictionaries, fark is listed with different meanings, such as: "tramp, Tater, fant" and "thug." "Tramp, Tater, fant" is the oldest and the original meaning. The word may be a diminutive derivation of farre ,"fant". Fark means "small farre". Farre is an old Norwegian word. In Norse, it was farri, which also meant "fant" at the time. Farri was derived from the verb fara, which means to travel or go.

When the Tater/Romani people speak Romani, they use completely different designations for themselves. The most common are Romano, Romanisæl, vandring (wandering) and tavvring.

ROMANO (PLURAL ROMANOAR)
Romano and the name of the language, Romani, are essentially masculine and feminine forms of the same adjective, and the language is also called Romani tjibb, where tjibb means "language". The adjective Romani is derived from the noun romm, which is also a name for the Romani language. We recognise romm as the name the Roma/Gypsies use for themselves.

The origin of the word romm (in Romani) and rom (in Romanés) is disputed. The most common hypothesis is that it originates from ḍoma in Sanskrit: that is, "person belonging to a low caste".

In his book Danger - Educated Gypsy (2010), the English Tater Ian Hancock, a linguist at the University of Texas at Austin, points out certain weaknesses in this hypothesis. He suggests an  alternative hypothesis. This hypothesis  claims that  the word rom may be explained by the fact that Romani-speaking people came to Europe at a time when Asia Minor was part of the eastern Roman Empire. In Greek, the inhabitants of the eastern Roman Empire were called romaivi and romiti.

ROMANISÆL (PLURAL ROMANISÆLAR)
Sæl in Romanisæl is an ancient Romani word čel, which means "people".

VANDRING (PLURAL VANDRIAR)
Vandring derives from  the Norwegian/Swedish verb vandre/vandra (wander/walk).

TAVVRING (PLURAL TAVVRINGAR)
In his book The Romani Language in Norway (1944), Norwegian linguist Ragnvald Iversen suggested  that tavvring is derived from the noun tav (thread). This does not seem very likely, but no other explanation has been presented.