Origins and History
Linguists have been documenting Shelta since at least the 1870s, with the first works published in 1880 and 1882 by Charles Leland. Celtic language expert Kuno Meyer and Romani expert John Sampson both assert that Shelta existed as far back as the 13th century.
In the earliest but undocumented period linguists surmise that the Traveller community was Irish speaking until a period of widespread bilingualism in Irish and Hiberno-English (or Scots in Scotland) set in, leading to creolisation (possibly with a trilingual stage). The resulting language is referred to as Old Shelta and it is suspected that this stage of the language displayed distinctive features, such as non-English syntactic and morphological features, no longer found in Shelta.
Within the diaspora, various sub-branches of Shelta exist. English Shelta is increasingly suffering from anglicization whereas American Irish-Traveller's Cant, originally also synonymous with Shelta, has by now been almost fully anglicized.
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“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
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