The Roma and the Bavarian Turkey: An Adventure in Archeolinguistics / E Roma tha e Bayerneski Gàdra: yek Phurenechibengripenesko Bàrodrom
As my regular followers no doubt know, the science of Archeolinguistics or Linguistic Archeology – studying archaic language forms and their provenance – is one of the best tools we have for filling in the blanks in Roma history, especially given that reliable historical records about us are lacking. Romani is highly amenable to this approach because the history of our multiple migrations – first from India to the Balkans, and then the Second Diaspora across Europe and the world – is literally written into our language. Furthermore, since my own native dialect is particularly archaic, remaining very close to the putative common root of all the Northwestern dialects, it provides a wealth of archeolinguistic information about the first Roma to spread into Western Europe.
This particular investigation came about entirely by chance because, on last year's Thanksgiving Day, someone on a linguistics forum to which I belong asked, “how do you say 'turkey' [the bird] in your language?”, to which I responded with the word gàdra, which is “turkey” in my dialect. And that in turn set me wondering about its etymology since it's an obscure word that does not, as far as I know, appear in any other Romani dialect, although some of the Kàle dialects have the obviously-related word-form gaudra. John Sampson, who conducted an extensive study on Welsh Kàle in the early 20th century before that dialect was anglicised into extinction, reported that the etymology of gaudra was “obscure”.
I noticed that a word-form kaudara was given by another contributor as an unusual, dialectal form in German (the normal German word is Truthahn). A native German speaking friend also mentioned to me the clearly related term Kauderwelsch, equivalent to the English gobbledegook, both words implying nonsense by similarity to the noise a turkey makes.
After some more enquiries, a fellow linguist who specialises in Germanic languages informed me that kaudara is specific to a small region of Bavaria, close to the modern border with Czechia, and furthermore that the evolution of the word was godara > gaudara > kaudara, the oldest version being late medieval. This was the real light-bulb moment for me.
Given that the à in my Romani dialect represents a sound much like the Norwegian/Danish å, along with the fact that Northwestern Romani dialects are extremely prone to vowel reduction and even outright aphaeresis, accounting for the loss of the second vowel, it is certain that the word-form gàdra that I know derives from the oldest version of the Bavarian dialect word godara, and that the Kàle version gaudra derives from the intermediate form gaudara. (As a further note on pronunciation, my gàdra is stressed on the à and the Kàle form on the u, following the general principle in Northwestern Romani dialects that loan nouns are stressed on the penultimate syllable in the nominative case; loss of the second syllable in the German root word provides consistency both with Romani stress placement rules and the original German pronunciation).
So there we have it: my ancestors (on my mother's mother's side, from where our dialect comes) must have crossed from Bohemia (now part of Czechia) into Bavaria at a relatively early date (late 14th or early 15th century) in order to acquire the most archaic version of the word, while the ancestors of the Kàle followed the same route at a somewhat later date (which would be consistent with the eventual arrival of the Welsh Kàle into the British Isles in the early 18th century, which is known).
Footnote: If you are wondering how a word for "turkey" existed before the Americas were colonised, turkeys being a New World species, the explanation is that in the great majority of European languages (including English), the words used now for "turkey" were previously used for guinea-fowl, a bird that was known since medieval times in Europe and looks very like a turkey. They were originally imported into Europe by Asian merchants, hence the word turkey in English, dinde (d'Inde) in French, индейка in Russian and so on.