Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 91. kötet (1990)

Tanulmányok - Larsson, Lars-Gunnar: The Origin of Mordvin M šaba, E žaba ’child’ and Cheremis šußo 147

150 LARS-GUNNAR LARSSON in the Volgaic languages, e.g. chavó 'Knabe, Sohn' (Miklosisch 1878. 270), tsao 'mustalaispoika' (Valtonen 1972), §avo, §av 'male child, boy, lad, son (of Gipsy race)' (Gjerdman-Ljungberg 1963. 353), tschawo, tschavo, tschabo, tshabo, chabo, zschabe, chabby 'Knabe, Sohn, Kind' (Wolf 1960). Johansson (1977) has the form tjavo 'boy; son, child' and also quotes the forms tchavó, tchaó and tcho from Paspati and can from Thesleff. This Gypsy word is regarded as the etymological counterpart of Skr. säva- 'the young of any animal' by, e.g., Valtonen (1972). Turner (1966. 275), who gives examples from several Middle Indie and Modern Indie languages, e.g. Pali chäpa- 'young of an animal', Prakrit chäva-; Kashmiri chav 'young of animal, young shoot of plant', Assamese säw, säwä 'young of animal or bird' and Welsh Romany cavö 'boy', regards it, however, as far from certain that Skr. säva- belongs to this group of words; "very doubtful" is his opinion about the comparison. For this investigation the etymological relation between the Sanskrit and the Romany word is in fact of no importance. Mordvin M saba, E zaba and Cheremis sußo can be a loanword from the language of the Gypsies, regardless of the relation between Romany chavó 'boy' and skr. säva- 'young of any animal'. As far as I know, nobody has treated of the question of possible linguistic contacts between Gypsies and Volgaic peoples. Yet there is hardly any reason not to. The form chavó quoted above from Miklosisch (1878) originates from Ssumy in the then existing province of Charkov. Ariste (1972) has material from Gypsies in the Baltic states, Finck (1907) describes the language of Armenian Gypsies and Sanarov (1970) treats of Siberian Gypsies. Lector Margarita Cesnokova (personal communication), who is herself a Moksa Mordvin, has also confirmed the existence of Gypsies in the Moksa Mordvin area. With regard to the phonetic shape of the words, there seems to be no difficulty in regarding the Volgaic words as loanwords from the Gypsy language. The voiced stop in mdE zaba, M saba caused problems when the word was compared to Skr. sava-. It is true that most of the Romany forms of the word tschawo that I have found in fact have a -v-, but here we have to pay attention also to a bilabial pronunciation, cf. the spellings tschawo and tschavo in Wolf (1960). Furthermore, Wolf (1960) gives several examples where the Romany word has a -6-, It could also be mentioned that although I have found just forms with -v- in dictionaries of the Gypsy dialects of Sweden, this word when taken over into Swedish has acquired the form tjabo. The borrowing of a word meaning 'child' from one language to another is not unusual. Lappish bar'dne 'child' is a Scandinavian loanword. From Romany Swedish has borrowed both tjabo denoting boy and tjej 'girl'. The Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 91. 1990.