The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Peripatetic Peoples

One word that has absolutely nothing to do with Roman, romance or Romania is Romany. The people who have for centuries travelled around Europe in caravans have had an awful lot of names, and all of them are insanely inaccurate. The most common name given to them by suspicious house-dwellers is gypsy, a name that derives from the utterly false idea that they are from Egypt.

Gypsy and Egyptian used to be completely interchangeable words. Shakespeare, in Antony and Cleopatra, refers to Cleopatra’s ‘gypsy lust’ in the very first speech. So where did this idea come from?

The Romany ended up being called Egyptians because of a single event in 1418, when a band of them arrived in Augsburg claiming to be from ‘Little Egypt’. What exactly they meant by this is unclear, but they wanted money and safe conduct, which was given to them by the authorities and then denied them by the people. The Egyptian idea caught on, and a legend grew up that the Roma were cursed to wander the Earth because when Joseph, Mary and Jesus were obliged to escape the wrath of Herod by fleeing to Egypt, a local tribe had denied them food and shelter. The gypsies, it was reasoned, were the descendants of this tribe, condemned to suffer the same fate for all eternity.

In fact, the Roma are not from Egypt but from India. We know this because their language is more closely related to Sanskrit and Hindi than to anything else. The word Roma comes from Rom, their word for man, which derives ultimately from domba, a Sanskrit term for a kind of musician.

That hasn’t stopped the legends of their origin spreading, though. The Egyptian mistake has been perpetuated in Hungary, where they were known as Pharaoh-Nepek, or Pharaoh’s people. But different countries have different legends and names, all of which are untrue. In Scandinavia they were thought to be from Tartary and were called the Tatars, in Italy it was Walachia and Walachians.

The Spanish believed that the Romany were Flemish Belgians. Why they thought this is something of a mystery. Most of the other European mistakes were at least based on the idea that the Roma had come from somewhere eastern and exotic. Indeed, one theory runs that the Spanish were only joking. Whatever the reasoning, the Spanish started to call both the Roma and their style of music Flemish, or Flamenco.

The French thought that they must come from Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) and called them Bohemians. Then, in 1851, a penniless Parisian writer called Henri Murger came to write about life in the city’s Latin Quarter. He decided that the scorn that most of his fellow artists felt for convention made them social Bohemians. So he called his novel Scènes de la vie de bohème. The word caught on. Thackeray used it in Vanity Fair, and Puccini took Murger’s book and turned it into an opera called La Bohème. And that’s why unconventional and insolvent artists are known to this day as Bohemians.