Early Romani

It is not directly attested, but rather reconstructed on the basis of shared features of existing Romani varieties.

Nonetheless, Yaron Matras also considers it possible that Early Romani had already shifted the place of articulation to a uvular, i.e. had acquired the modern Kalderash pronunciation [ʁ].

In the foreign lexical component, words could be stressed on any syllable in accordance with the pronunciation in the source language (fóros 'town'), but when native suffixes were added, the stems received final stress like native stems (forós-ke 'for the town').

[9] The consonant /s/ appears to have exhibited an optional alternation with /h/ in certain morphemes in Early Romani, a variation pattern inherited from late Middle Indo-Aryan.

[11] The morphology exhibited a split between two strata - native (including both inherited words and loans from before the immigration into the Byzantine Empire) and foreign (predominantly loans from Byzantine Greek and some from Slavic; later borrowings from other languages also join this group in descendant dialects).

Layer I suffixes are portmanteau morphs that simultaneously express case (nominative, oblique or vocative) and number, have different variants according to the gender of the word and exhibit some unpredictable lexical variation that makes it possible to speak of declension classes.

[12] The most common endings can be summarised as follows:[13] Native feminine stems had a tendency to exhibit /j/ in front of the vowel of the suffix outside of the nominative singular: -j-a, -j-en etc.

The following is a complete list of Early Romani declension classes largely[14] as reconstructed by Viktor Elšík (with terminology adapted for this article):[15] singular (exceptional) (-a) * - The stems formed with the suffixes -ipen and -ibe(n) dropped the -e- before endings: oblique -ipn-as, -ibn-as, nominative plural -ipn-a, -ibn-a.

The forms were as follows:[19] The genitive took the inflectional endings of adjectives and agreed with the modified noun: -ker-o, -ker-e, etc (an example of Suffixaufnahme).

Some inherited prepositions were andar 'out of', andre 'in(to)', angle 'in front of', astjal 'for, because of', dži 'until', karig 'towards', (ka)tar 'from', ke 'at, to', mamuj 'against', maškar 'between', pal 'behind', paš 'next to, by', perdal 'across, through', te 'at, to', tel 'under', truja(l) 'past, around', upral/opral 'from the top of', upre/opre 'above, on, over', and vaš 'for'.

[30] The personal pronouns were:[31] The possessive forms inflected and agreed with the modified noun like adjectives: tir-o, tir-i, tir-e, etc.

In the 3rd person, there were two sets of nominative forms - the emphatic and the non-emphatic pronouns, the latter being commonly used anaphorically and encliticised.

[35] The forms were as follows (sources differ on whether the consonants in parentheses were present):[36][37] In addition, the following more archaic and simpler demonstrative forms must have still had some limited (less emphatic) use in Early Romani, since they are preserved in various dialects[38] and even retain the default function in Epiros Romani to this day:[39]

Finally, there may have been a preposed particle vare-, which had been borrowed from Romanian - unusually for Early Romani - and was added to interrogative pronouns: vare-so 'something'.

[47] Early Romani had a definite article, which was also used, as in Greek, with proper nouns and to express generic reference in various constructions (e.g. content or origin, lit.

According to Yaron Matras' account,[48] the Early Romani forms were: The numeral jekh 'one' could be used to express indefiniteness, but its use was not obligatory.

[51] Thus: Of the tens, 30 and probably 40 and 50 were borrowed into Early Romani from Greek,[52] while the others were formed with native roots, mostly with the morpheme -var meaning 'times', i.e. 'X times 10':[53] Combinations of tens between 30 and 90 and single digits were formed not with -u- but with thaj 'and' (the usual Romani conjunction with that meaning): trianda-thaj-jekh for 31, if a conjunction was used at all.

The combinations with biš (20) also used -thaj- according to Peter Bakker,[54] while Viktor Elšík and Yaron Matras consider -u- to be a possibility as well.

[55] The native cardinal numerals, namely the ones for 1-6, 10, 20 and 100, inflected in modifier position like adjectives ending in a consonant: e.g. deš-e 'ten (oblique)'.

[58] The Early Romani verb inflected in tense (including aspect) and mood and agreed with the subject (and possibly the object) in person, number and sometimes gender.

[61] Irregular alternations between the past and the present stem were found in dža- : gel- 'go', kal- : klist 'raise', mer- : mul- 'die', per- : pel- 'fall', rov- : run- 'cry', sov- : sut- 'sleep'.

[62] The copula varied between using the stem s-/h- and the extended s/h-in- in the present tense, according to some scholars,[63] whereas others believe that the short forms are the original ones.

The agreement markers used with the present and with the past stem were different: ker-av '(that) I make', but kerd-j-om 'I made'.

Such a system is preserved today in a single dialect, Epiros Romani, but is also similar to the ones found in Domari and the Dardic languages.

The Past could be used to express a completed action in the future as well: dži kaj kerdjám 'until we have done it', so its meaning has been described as perfective and aspectual rather than temporal.

The non-inflected gerund consisted of the present stem and the suffix -i and was aspectually neutral: pučh-i 'having asked'.

[74][75] For ability, an impersonal verb was used: an inherited word ašti and the Persian šaj 'it is possible' appear to have co-existed.

[87] Among coordinating conjunctions, there were thaj 'and'[90] and vaj 'or', but it is impossible to reconstruct with certainty the word for 'but' due to later borrowings at least in all dialects that have dispersed outside of the former Byzantine territory.

[93] The object was generally placed after the verb (VO), unless it was moved to the front of the clause for contrastive purposes, whereas the subject could either precede or follow the verb (SV or VS), with SV expressing emphasis on the subject or its prominence and VS signalling continuity.

[96] A typical Balkan Sprachbund syntactic feature of Early Romani was the contrast between two complementisers meaning 'that': a factual one kaj džala 'that he goes' and a non-factual one te džal 'that he go', 'to go'.