Gipsy origins

en:First arrival of gypsies outside the city of Berne, described as "getoufte heiden" (baptized heathens). Detail of p. 749.

Notice their clothes, their hats.

The absence of a written history has meant that the origin and early history of the Gipsy(Romani)people was long an enigma. Indian origin was suggested on linguistic grounds as early as 200 years ago.

Linguistic and genetic evidence indicates the Romanies originated from the Indian subcontinent, emigrating from India towards the northwest no earlier than the 11th century. Contemporary populations sometimes suggested as sharing a close relationship to the Romani are the Dom people of Central Asia and the Banjara of India.

The cause of the Romani diaspora is unknown. However, the most probable conclusion is that the Romanies were part of the military in Northern India. When there were repeated raids by Mahmud of Ghazni and these soldiers were defeated, they were moved west with their families into the Byzantine Empire. This occurred between AD 1000 and 1030.

This departure date is assumed because, linguistically speaking, the Romani language is a New Indo-Aryan language (NIA)--it has only two genders (masculine and feminine). Until around the year 1000, the Indo-Aryan languages, named Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA), had three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter). By the turn of the 2nd millennium, they changed into the NIA phase, losing the neuter gender. Most of the neuter nouns became masculine while a few became feminine. For instance, the neuter अग्नि (agni) in the Prakrit became the feminine आग (āg) in Hindi and jag in Romani. The parallels in grammatical gender evolution between Romani and other NIA languages is proposed to prove that the change occurred in the Indian subcontinent.

It is therefore not considered possible that the ancestors of the Romani people left India prior to AD 1000[citation needed]. They then stayed in the Byzantine Empire for several hundred years. However, the Muslim expansion, mainly made by the Seljuk Turks, into the Byzantine Empire recommenced the movement of the Romani people.

Until the mid- to late eighteenth century, theories of the origin of the Romani were mostly speculative. In 1782, Johann Christian Christoph Rüdiger published his research that pointed out the relationship between the Romani language and Hindustani. Subsequent work supported the hypothesis that Romani shared a common origin with the Indo-Aryan languages of Northern India, with Romani grouping most closely with Sinhalese in a recent study.

The majority of historians accepted this as evidence of an Indian origin for the Romanies. Some scholars maintained that the Romanies acquired the language through contact with Indian merchants.