O Marcel Courthiade Ne Haievela Keker o Romanes! / Marcel Courthiade Doesn't Understand Romani In The Slightest!

(May 2020)

Non-Romani linguist Marcel Courthiade (INALCO, Sorbonne) is the originator of the factually untenable and hopelessly flawed “Strata” theory of the Romani language and, along with his partner in deception Gheorghe Sarău (Univ. Bucharest), originated the incomprehensible and fake “standard” dialect of Romani which the Ministry of Education in Romania is forcing Roma children to learn, to the exclusion of their genuine dialects spoken at home, in spite of the fact that no real Roma speak it and most find it bafflingly nonsensical (see https://chandani-natalia.blogspot.com/p/standardisacia-e-romane-chibaki.html).

 

Courthiade's “Strata” theory, which is widely accepted by non-Roma linguists who lack sufficient knowledge to notice its flaws, has already been extensively discredited. It was based on a cursory examination of just nine arbitrarily-chosen words and a great many flawed assumptions. On the basis of his exceedingly superficial knowledge of Romani, Courthiade claimed that all Romani dialects fall into one of three chronological “Strata”, stratum I being the oldest (and thus “most Indian”) and stratum III being the most recent and most Europeanized. Of course this is a fundamental misinterpretation of our dialectal differences since most of those differences actually originated in India, and in any case changes that came about from contact with European languages are not a matter of chronology but simply of which languages each dialect had contact with.

At the time of publication of his theory, Courthiade was totally unaware that a few dialects of Romani (my own included) still retain retroflex consonants, and therefore had to retrospectively insert a fourth stratum in order to “rescue” his theory. He also totally ignored the changes of the set of vowels and stress placement in different dialects – which is entirely a result of contact with different European languages.

 

One of Courthiade's central arguments was based on the -imos nominalizer ending, which he argued was characteristic of what he called “stratum III” dialects such as Kalderash, and he claimed that it was of Greek origin, not Romani (or Indian) at all, and therefore effectively a corruption. His argument was that only the -pen (or the -ben or -pe variants of it) were authentically Indian in origin as they derive from the -po/-pan nominalizer in Sanskrit.

 

This claim was so flawed that in and of itself it renders his “theory” null and void. He was apparently unaware that the -imos ending in Romani corresponds directly to the -ima/-iman nominalizer in Sanskrit (or even that the latter existed at all) or indeed that some Romani dialects themselves have -ima as a nominalizer. And that therefore, -imos is simply an alternative form of -ima and is as authentically Sanskritic as -pen. This issue, and other flaws in Courthiade's analysis, have been addressed in detail by my esteemed colleague Marian Cîrpaci (see for example https://confluente.org/marian_nutu_carpaci_1485274848.html).

 

The purpose of this brief article is to add further to the corpus of evidence that overturns Courthiade's claims, again based particularly around the -imos/-ima suffix.

 

First of all, Courthiade claims that the “Greek-sounding” plural form -imata proves Greek origin. It does not: for a masculine Greek noun in -os the plural should be -oi (Romani nominalizers are universally masculine across all dialects). Some Greek words do indeed have -ata (not -imata) in the plural, however these are neuter nouns ending in -a, such as pragma. The -imata plural ending in Romani is in fact just as Sanskritic as the -ima/-imos singular form: in Sanskrit, masculine nouns in -iman pluralize in -imantah. Denasalization is a prevalent feature in Romani, and along with the loss of the terminal fricative in the plural form, readily accounts for these forms becoming -ima/-imata in Romani.

 

There is still further evidence of the falsehood of Courthiade's claims:

 

According to Courthiade's theory, the Welsh and Spanish Kàle dialects and my own native dialect are all in the first and “oldest” stratum, my own being in the “oldest” category of all since it retains retroflexes. And it is in fact fair to say that all three dialects retain a considerable collection of archaisms due to their long period of relative isolation from other dialects (although the Spanish Kàle dialect has been effectively extinct for a considerable time due to extensive creolization with Spanish; in this analysis I have used the earliest available records of the dialect).

 

However... Welsh and Spanish Kàle have the -ima/-imos form in a number of words, in parallel with -pen/-ben, albeit only in the singular number in the Welsh version, it having been replaced with -ben in the plural. So, according to Courthiade, both Kàle dialects have to belong simultaneously to stratum I and stratum III, which is an obvious contradiction.

 

As for my own dialect, while it does not use -ima/-imos as a simple nominalizer, there is an obvious and indisputable remnant of the -ima form in the construction of agent nouns from non-noun roots (a feature that is also shared with the Welsh and Spanish Kàle dialects): for example bàshimengro, a musician. The equivalent word in other dialects of the Northwestern group is typically bashipaskro, clearly a long-genitive derivation from bashav plus -pen. However the -meskro/-mengro agent noun form found in my own dialect and in Welsh/Spanish Kàle can only have come about as a long-genitive derivation from the -ima/-imos nominalizer and its plural (-meskro from the singular, -mengro from the plural). Therefore, it is apparent that this dialect had, long in the past, the -ima/-imos nominalizer form in both singular and plural forms, and it was lost and replaced with -pen, now surviving only in the construction of agent nouns. Given the indisputable antiquity of the dialect itself (for example it is believed to be the only living dialect that retains the archaic kono superlative) and the fact that comparison with its descendant para-Romanis (which include Angloromani, Skandoromani and Erromintxela, of which the former two also retain the -meskro/-mengro forms) also indicate that it has remained relatively unchanged for centuries, one is forced to conclude that the -ima/-imos nominalizer existed in the very earliest forms of Romani and is most certainly not a Greek-based neologism as Courthiade claims.

Thus, Courthiade's “theory” is proven self-contradictory and untenable – and therefore, all derivative work based on that theory, including the so-called “standardized Romani” of Courthiade and Sarău, is flawed at the most fundamental theoretical level.

 

A further argument for why it is urgently necessary that the “ownership” of our language be returned to the only people who know it properly and in depth: the native speakers, and not gàdje “academics” who learned our language only from books!