Their language is in its origin and internal structure a genuine daughter of the distinguished Sanscrit, but it has become for many centuries like a beggar and thief; it has lost much of its beauty, its elegance, and its resemblance to its mother and sisters; instead of which it has appropriated something to itself from every country in which these people have tarried in their wanderings, and its dress appears covered with the tatters of all nations, so that it is only here and there that the genuine gold threads are still visible. The race have lost a great portion of their own words, more especially those, that express ideas which they could not preserve in their paltry miserable life in foreign countries. They have lost the Indian expression for parrot, elephant, and lion, also for the tiger and buffalo snake, but sugar--_gûlo_, silk--_pahr_, and grapes--_drakh_, they call by their Indian, and wine--_mohl_, by its Persian name. Nay, they have also lost the Indian words for many current terms: they no longer call the sparrow by its Indian name: no fish, and hardly any plants; but undoubtedly they retain those of many large and small animals, amongst others _dschu_, the louse. But in all countries, new representations, images, and ideas offered themselves, and too lazy and careless to form words of their own, they took those of every foreign language and adapted them to the necessities of their own tongue. The result was, that even the gipsies who were in bands, being without firm union, were split in pieces among the various people, so that what they still possessed did not remain common to all, and there arose in every country a peculiar gipsy idiom, in which old recollections were mixed up with the language of the country, in an original way. Finally the _rom_ appropriated to himself almost everywhere, besides the common language of the country that of the rogues, the thieves' dialect, to which he imparted, in friendly exchange, words from his own language. In Germany he understood gibberish, or _Jenisch_; in Bohemia, _Hantyrka_; in French, _Argôt_; in England, Slang; and in Spain, _Germania_. It is instructive to observe how their hereditary language became corrupted; for the decadence of one language, through the overpowering influence of another, proceeds according to fixed laws. First, foreign words penetrate in a mass, because foreign cultivation has an imposing effect; next the formation of sentences is taken from the foreign language, because the mind of the people accustoms itself to think after the method of the foreigners; and thirdly, they forget their own inflections; then the language becomes a heap of ruins, a weather-beaten organism, like a corroded mass of rock which crumbles away into sand or gravel. The gipsy language has gone through the first and second stages of decadence, and the third also in Spain.