thods of study followed by philologists render them especially open
to this charge. They wish to establish every form as symmetrical and
mathematical, where nature has been freakish and bizarre. Some years ago
when I published certain poems in the broken English spoken by Germans,
an American philologist, named Haldemann, demonstrated to his own
satisfaction that the language which I had put into Hans Breitmann's
mouth was inaccurate, because I had not reduced it to an uniform dialect,
making the same word the same in spelling and pronunciation on all
occasions, when the most accurate observation had convinced me, as it
must any one, that those who have only partially learned a language
continually vary their methods of uttering its words.

That some words have come from one source and been aided by another, is
continually apparent in English Gipsy, as for instance in the word for
reins, "guiders," which, until the Rommany reached England, was voidas.
In this instance the resemblance in sound between the words undoubtedly
conduced to an union. Gibberish may have come from the Gipsy, and at the
same time owe something to _gabble_, _jabber_, and the old Norse or
Icelandic _gifra_. _Lush_ may owe something to Mr Lushington, something
to the earlier English _lush_, or rosy, and something to the Gipsy and
Sanskrit. It is not at all unlikely that the word _codger_ owes, through
_cadger_, a part of its being to _kid_, a basket, as Mr Halliwell
suggests (Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, 1852), and yet come
quite as directly from _gorger_ or _gorgio_. "The cheese" probably has
the Gipsy-Hidustani _chiz_ for a father, and the French _chose_ for a
mother, while both originally sprung thousands of years ago in the great
parting of the Aryan nations, to be united after so long a separation in
a distant island in the far northern seas.

The etymologist who hesitates to adopt this principle of joint sources of
derivation, will find abundant instances of something very like it in
many English Gipsy words themselves, which, as belonging to a language in
extreme decay, have been formed directly from different, but somewhat
similarly sounding, words, in the parent German or Eastern Rommany. Thus,
_schukker_, pretty; _bi-shukker_, slow; _tschukko_, dry, and
_tschororanes_, secretly, have in England all united in _shukar_, which
expresses all of their meanings.

CHAPTER VII. PROVERBS AND CHANCE PHRASES.

An Old