Reconstruction of Proto-Romani demonstratives

Abstract:Romani demonstratives (“this,” “that”) show great diversity across dialects. The number of demonstrative pronouns in some living dialects is quite impressive (e.g. at least 17 in Russian Romani), and in terms of type of deixis they represent (in some dialects) a four-term system: “this [visible],” “that [imaginary],” “this [of two or more, visible],” “that [of two or more, imaginary],” which has been convincingly shown by Y. Matras, who has also proposed a reconstruction of their proto-forms. His reconstruction is now generally accepted, although it violates, in many respects, the comparative historical procedure. The present article gives an overview of the systems of demonstrative pronouns across Romani dialects and proposes a new reconstruction, which yields two sets of Proto-Romani demonstratives, inflected and uninflected, and suggests that all modern systems are reducible to a single Proto-Romani state, the number of innovations in individual dialects being relatively small.