11-01-175
175
GULGULI.
@The Gulgulis are a wandering non-Aryan tribe, who live by hunting, teaching
monkeys to dance, selling indigenous drugs, begging, and petty thieving. Sir
Herbert Risley thinks that they are a branch of the Bediy
s.
@At the Census of 1911, 853 Gulgulis were returned, 824 from Bihar and
Orissa and 29 from elsewhere.
@No information about the language of the Gulgulis
is available in Census Reports, and no such dialect was reported during the
preliminary operations of this Survey. At the Census of 1901 it was, however,
reported from the Hazaribagh District that the Gulguli
s
do not ordinarily speak a separate dialect, but that they make use of a kind
of argot when they intend to prevent others from understanding what they say.
Three short sentences in this jargon were forwarded to Sir Edward Gait, the
then Superinten- dent of the Census operations in Bengal, and he has been good
enough to place them at the disposal of this Survey. They show that this argot
is of the same kind as other secret jargons. In the first place there are some
peculiar words such as
ebig
,
fell; lugig
, died; kut
chhi,
have eaten; li
r, tempest; n
mru,
bullock; n
hkat, in the house. Some
of these are well known from other argots, compare S
s
au
,
fall; lug
,
die; d
t
,
eat; n
d, village; Gar
n
nd, house. Besides this, ordinary
words are disguised by changing their initials. Thus kh is substituted for b
in kh
h
= biy
h, wedding, and for p in khe
ch
= p
ch, five; jh for t in jhin-g
= t
n, three;
n for g in n
chh = g
chh,
tree, and so forth. I now give the sentences themselves with an inter- linear
translation.
K![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Last-night a-tempest fell; three trees fell, five bullocks |
lugig![]() |
died. |
Jh![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Yesterday-from not eaten-have, house-in food (?) not is. |
Hamar p![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
My daugh![]() |
@