PASSING NOTES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21994, 1 July 1933, Page 6

PASSING NOTES

Not for the first time in history, but for the first time in recent times, a small race of a million people is about to rise to international status as a world problem. Fnjm Budapest comes the report that the Central European Powers are about to petition the League of Nations on the subject of the Gipsies. Having found a national home for the Jews, Europe seeks “ to colonise the wandering Gipsies on an uninhabited island,” and thus remove their picturesque caravans once and for all from the world’s highways. Just as reasonable would it be to establish a reservation for the wandering breezes! What modern hand can break the curse that has doomed the Gipsies to their nomadic restlessness? What crime was committed in olden time which has demanded this age-Jong expiation? The imagination of mediaeval Europe revelled in conjectures in its endeavour to find a crime befitting the punishment. Gipsies, it was said, refused hospitality to the Holy Family in its toilsome road towards Egypt. Gipsies, again, forged the nails that fastened Christ to the Cross. Gipsies stole one of the four nails, which accounted for the hitherto unexplained transition from four nails to three in the 12th and 13th century crucifixes. Gipsies were regarded as the lineal descendants of Ishmael and the heirs of his dread inheritance. Others gave them Esau as their ancestor—Esau whom Jacob cheated of his birthright: 0 canny sons of Jacob, to fret and tolling tied, We grudge you not the birthright for which your father lied; We own the right of roaming, and the world Is wide.

| Whence came the Gipsies? The very •' names they have received at various ; times are a record of their suggested i origins. They have been called Egyn- • dans, Bohemians, Romanies, Zingari, ' Tsigany, Gitanos, Zigeuner, Saracens, Tartars. They have been traced to Malta, to Corfu, to Rumania, to Wallachia, to Egypt, to India. Their language is oriental. Like shells brought | from Bombay or Geylon, their _ speech 1 resounds to the listening ear with the j echoing rustle of the ocean on Indian ■ beaches. But how could that land of j eternal immobility send forth this nomadic i tribe? To the question of their origin I the Sphinx makes no answer. How did they spread? The mediaeval chroniclers crossed themselves with dread as they recounted the mystery. From the steppes of Asia they crossed to Western Europe on no roads. i They crossed the English Channel by no ships. Yet now they roam the highways of every country in Europe. They are found in the glens of Scotland and beneath the cactus of Andalusia, on the country roads of England and in the forests of Germany and Russia. Both the whence and the how of their wanderings were to early writers as mysterious as the sources of the Hilo from which they might have come. They, fell upon Europe overnight like a swarm of locusts. One day they were in their tens, on the morrow they w'ere in their thousands, traversing the roads in their bizarre and tattered caravans like remnants of the routed hosts of Sennacherib. They cling to their wandering life with intense passion. Houses have been prepared for them. But they shrink from the buildings of men because “ they are full of ghosts.” Their women dance the dance of Herodias, yet they are unalterably faithful to their own dark race. Their names are designed for the bcguilement of men: Esmeralda, Fenella, Mignon, Prcciosa, Meridiana, Agriffina, Orlanda, Morelia, Claribel—names of flowers, and stars. Yet in the infernal diaries of the world’s Don Juans there appears not the name of a single Gipsy maiden. Do the Gipsies wear the garment of invisibility? They must. For, says n European authority, “ they even roam the country roads of New Zealand and Australia.” ■. ' } , .

Of all the puerilities to which the human race is subject, the Nazist theory of Nordic and Aryan exclusiyeness is surely the chief. What proportion of the Germans are Nordic? And are there any Aryans in Germany at all? The demagogue Hitler has in these obscure domains stepped in where ethnologists have trodden but timidly. In our schoolday time of credulous simplicity, the amiable philologist Max Muller, who knew more about Sanskrit and its cognate languages than any other man in Europe —who had come from Germany to a professorial chair at Oxford—invented for us the Aryan Theory. By a comparative examination of the European family of languages he drew up a vocabulary of a parent Aryan race, and on this basis of conjecture he established our primitive home in the plateaus of Central Asia—of course not far from Mount Ararat. He described this primitive settlement with an assurance as dogmatic as a reporter of to-day would describe a military camp at Waitati. We were told what the Aryans ate, drank, wore, hunted, the houses in which they lived and the beds in which they slept. We saw the contingents hiving off to now hunting grounds—Celts, Teutons, Slavs, Italians, Greeks, Iranians, Indians —all of which now, he said, belong to the great Indo-European racial family. And thus the Bengal Sepoy was the blood-brother of the English Tommy. In their craving for the newest knowledge, school text books incorporated the theory. In their thirst for romance novels also included it. Yet it has long since passed into the realm of legend. On its ruins rose a new structure—which placed the ancestral home of the Indo-European somewhere in the great European plain. A much shorter journey was it, of course, for Celts and Italians and Teutons to slip down to their present habitat than to traverse the dreary road from far off Asia. This theory has in its turn become a romantic legend, like the Empire of Prester John or the Kingdom of Micomicon.

In fact, the whole theory that the European Aryan-speaking nations are all Aryans is the baseless fragment of a mere linguistic dream. It all came from the assurance with which a mere philologist meddled with questions of ethnology which did not concern him. Argument from language proves no question of racial origin. Australian aborigines and American negroes speak the same tongue as the Australian squatter or the American cotton planter. The tall, blue-eyed, fair-haired Swede of Northern Europe speaks a language allied to the speech of the short, swarthy, black-eyed Mediterranean Spaniard. If one of these is “Aryan,” the other is not. Europe to-day speaks a collection of allied languages to which has been given the name of Aryan. Beyond this wo cannot go. In prc-historic times a conquering race invaded Europe, imposing on the primitive non-Aryan Europeans its own speech. Who were these Aryan conquerors? Teutons or Colts, Lithuanians or Slavs, Italians or Greeks? German scholars stoutly declare they were Germans. French scholars fiercely retort they were Celts; for are not traces of Celtic domination littered over Europe from East to West—enshrining the name of Gaul in the Galicia of Asia Minor, in the Galicia northward of Hungary, in the Gael of Scotland, and in the Wales of Britain? Did not the | Gauls attack Republican Rome? Arc : not relics of their empire found in the soil of Austria? If the Teutons were the original language-imposing Aryans, Bavaria and Wurtemburg and most of South Germany are as non-Aryan as tiic Poles and the Bolshevists. Hitler and Mussolini, Ramsay MacDonald and Stalin speak an Aryan language. But j which of them is of Aryan blood even ' scholars can’t tell us. Nor can Adolph j Hitler.

Of Fashion it may be said, “ Plus ca change, plus e’est la meme chose.” Which means that some things are for ever changing, yet are the most enduring things under the sun. Said the New York Times the other day:

Demountable lips, demountable eyelashes, demountable noses, demountable finger nails, ear tacks, muscle oil, artificial eye sparkle and tiny pictures and letters for finger nail decoration, were the talk of the fourday convention and exhibition of the

International Beauty Shop Owners, which opened at the Hotel Pennsyl-

vania. With a piquant sting of appropriateness the Churchman proceeded to give the beauty specialists a lesson in the Scriptures, quoting to them a fashion note from the Book of Isaiah over 2400 years ago.

Because the daughters of Zion are | haughty, and walk with stretched- ! forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet. . . . In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon, the chains, the bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets, and the ornaments of their legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, and the ear- 1 rings, the rings, and nose jewels, the j changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles and the wimples, and the , crisping pins, the glasses, and the fine linens, and the hoods and the veils. j Yet when you como to think of it, i ancient Israel was not at the time in j the throes of an economic depression, when fashion and its changes gave work ; to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, j No doubt whatever that many of these , ancient tricks of feminine fashion will j come in time to greet our modern eyes and cars. When women’s feet go tinkling as they go, many a man will know in advance, and in good time, what is coining to him.

Dear “ Civis,” —It is ray habit to address you once a quarter, and my next instalment is due with the daffodils. However, we have a short time to stay, as Herrick reminds us, and I should not like to go down into Sheol without one protest against the loose and degenerate; I refer to the use in leading articles and elsewhere of the term “ relation" to signify a kinsman or a kinswoman. One might as well' speak of one’s child as one’s parturition, or of one’s neighbour as one’s proximity. The Authors’ and Printers’ Handbook _ blandly directs one to write “ relation,” and to abstain from “ relative.” '• I am prepared to gainsay the Author’s and Printers’ Dictionary, and any other self-cpn-stituted authority ae Athanasius withstood the Ecumenical Council. Of the two terms, “ relative ” is infinitely preferable. Better an adjective to express anything so concrete as one’s mother-in-law than a vague and diaphanous abstract noun. Mr Compton Mackenzie has written, among others, two novels, entitled respectively _ Poor Relations ” and “Rich Relatives.” I am not very rich myself, but I repudiate the idea that I am anybody’s relation.

Disciplicus. Yes, quite true. For ways that are dark, and for tricks that are vain, the corrupting of our language by the man in the street takes some beating. And not only the man in the street. Their Elegancies in every royal court of Europe have for ages addressed solidly concrete persons with,, the abstractions of “ Your Majesty, tf His Excellency,” “ Your Highness.” And even “ Your Enormity” might to-day be used on occasions. The word “ relative ” started as an adjective, meaning “ related,” and eventually became a noun. This turning of adjective into noun is quite common, and is quite justifiable. We can speak quite correctly of “ the long and the short of it.” Not so. justifiable, but, alas, fairly common is this concreting of the abstract. We have gone too far now to retrace our steps. As Fowler says, in his “Modern English Usage We now find ourselves with “relation” and “ relative " as two names . for the , same thing, only so far different as “ relative ” is something of a formal word, and “ relation ” the dominant term. Civis.