Early Romani

Early Romani, sometimes referred to as Late Proto-Romani, is the latest common predecessor of all varieties of the Romani language. It was spoken before the Roma people dispersed throughout Europe. It is not directly attested, but rather reconstructed on the basis of shared features of existing Romani varieties. Early Romani is thought to have been spoken in the Byzantine Empire from the 9th to 10th and the 13th to 14th centuries.

Phonology

Vowels

The vowels were as follows:

	Front	Central	Back
Close
Mid
Open

Consonants

The consonants were as follows:
The sound conventionally designated ř had originated from Indo-Aryan retroflex stops and appears to have still been a retroflex in Early Romani, judging from a retroflex reflex preserved in at least one dialect and from the diversity of reflexes in different dialects, which include geminated apical trills. Nonetheless, Yaron Matras also considers it possible that Early Romani had already shifted the place of articulation to a uvular, i.e. had acquired the modern Kalderash pronunciation . On the other hand, the possibility has also been entertained that there may still have been not just one, but several retroflexes in Early Romani, including a nasal and a lateral.
Dentals may have been allophonically palatalised before /i/.
The following Latin letters are used in this article to designate sounds in ways different from the IPA symbols:

letter	c	č	čh	kh	ph	ř	š	ž
phoneme in IPA	/ts/	/tʃ/	//	//	//	//	/ʃ/	//

Stress

Stress was on the final syllable in the native lexical stratum, except that certain suffixes were not counted as part of the word for the purposes of stress placement, so the stress was placed before them instead. These were the Layer II case markers, the vocative markers, the present/future marker -a and the remoteness marker -asi. The mediopassive suffix did not receive stress either, e.g. díkh-jol 'is seen'. The special behaviour of these suffixes was due the fact that they had originally been independent words. In addition, original compound verbs ending in -d- 'to give' had stress on the original first compound member. In the foreign lexical component, words could be stressed on any syllable in accordance with the pronunciation in the source language, but when native suffixes were added, the stems received final stress like native stems.

Notable morphonological processes

The consonant /s/ appears to have exhibited an optional alternation with /h/ in certain morphemes in Early Romani, a variation pattern inherited from late Middle Indo-Aryan. These must have included the 2nd singular ending -es when followed by the suffix -a, and, due to analogy, the 1st plural ending -as in front of -a, the instrumental plural case ending after vowels and the copula having variants beginning in h- alongside the older s-. Many dialects have extended this pattern to many more forms and have generalised the /h/ variants, whereas others have only retained the conservative forms with /s/ without any trace of the alternation.
The vowel /i/ was desyllabified to a semivowel /j/ before a vowel-initial suffixes: sg. buti 'work' - pl. butja.

Grammar

The morphology exhibited a split between two strata - native and foreign. Words of the two strata were often formed and declined somewhat differently.

Nominal morphology

Early Romani nominals had two genders, masculine and feminine, two numbers - singular and plural, and eight cases - nominative, accusative, vocative, dative, ablative, locative, instrumental and genitive. The nominal phrases also expressed definiteness by means of a definite article.
Partly like other Modern Indo-Aryan languages, the grammatical morphemes in Romani noun declension are classified into three layers - Layer I, Layer II and Layer III. Layer I suffixes are portmanteau morphs that simultaneously express case and number, have different variants according to the gender of the word and exhibit some unpredictable lexical variation that makes it possible to speak of declension classes. Layer II suffixes express only case and have largely the same form.

Layer I

The most common endings can be summarised as follows:

		nominative singular	nominative plural	oblique singular	oblique plural	vocative singular	vocative plural
native	masculine	-o	-e	-es	-en	-éja	-ále
native	masculine	-∅	-a	-es	-en	-a	-ále
native	feminine	-i/-∅	-a	-a	-en	-e	-ále
foreign	masculine	-Vs	-i	-Vs	-en	-Vna, -V	-ále
foreign	feminine	-a	-a?	-a	-en	-o?	-ále

Native feminine stems had a tendency to exhibit /j/ in front of the vowel of the suffix outside of the nominative singular: -j-a, -j-en etc. This was always the case if the nominative singular ended in -i.
The following is a complete list of Early Romani declension classes largely as reconstructed by Viktor Elšík :
* - The stems formed with the suffixes -ipen and -ibe dropped the -e- before endings: oblique -ipn-as, -ibn-as, nominative plural -ipn-a, -ibn-a.
** - In foreign-stratum masculine words in -o, -u, -i, the variants of the nominative without -s found in some dialects might be due to a late reinterpretation of the -s as an oblique ending by analogy with native stratum words. However, the forms without -s might be original in words that were of neuter gender in Greek such as kókalo 'bone', since these, too, were adapted as masculine words in Romani. Present-day dialects have either only the forms with -s or only the forms without -s, but if the latter interpretation is correct, then both rules would be the result of a later generalisation. Note, moreover, that originally neuter Greek words like kókalo also seem to have retained a Greek plural in -a: kókala 'bones'.
*** - However, the oblique form of the abstract nouns formed with the suffix -im-o ended in -im-as. They retained a Greek plural in -im-ata.

Layer II

The Layer II suffixes are added to the appropriate Layer I oblique case form. After the plural oblique Layer I suffix ending in /n/, the initial voiceless consonant of the suffixes became voiced and the sibilant turned into an affricate. The forms were as follows:

case	main form	form after /n/
dative	-ke	-ge
locative	-te	-de
ablative	-tar	-dar
instrumental	-sa	-ca
genitive	-ker-	-ger-

The genitive took the inflectional endings of adjectives and agreed with the modified noun: -ker-o, -ker-e, etc. The genitive suffix may also have had an optional short variant -k-/-g- besides -ker-/-ger-, as seen in several modern dialects, with or without a difference in function. If there was a difference, the long form may have been more emphatic and preferred when genitives were placed after the noun or nominalised.

Layer III

Layer III words in Early Romani were prepositions. Some inherited prepositions were andar 'out of', andre 'in', angle 'in front of', astjal 'for, because of', dži 'until', karig 'towards', tar 'from', ke 'at, to', mamuj 'against', maškar 'between', pal 'behind', paš 'next to, by', perdal 'across, through', te 'at, to', tel 'under', truja 'past, around', upral/opral 'from the top of', upre/opre 'above, on, over', and vaš 'for'. The pairs andre-andar, angle-anglal, ke/te-katar/tar formed locative-ablative pairs, but there were no special directive prepositions - the locative ones were used to express direction as well. Certain prepositions ending in vowels dropped them before the definite article: e.g. ke- + -o > ko''.

Case use

The bare oblique case was used:
1. as an accusative case with animate nouns, whereas inanimate nouns used the nominative.
2. It was also used to express possession: man si kher 'I have a house'.
3. Further, it expressed the indirect object of the verb 'to give', i.e. functioned as a dative case.
The instrumental was used also as a comitative case, meaning 'together with' as well as 'by means of'.
Adjuncts to almost all prepositions required the noun to be in the locative case, at least if animate, but may have taken the nominative case if inanimate, as commonly found in modern dialects. However, bi 'without' took the genitive and vaš 'for' took the dative.