widely available Romani and non-Romani items. 16 Whatever their origin, the “Para-Romani” languages are specific to service nomads, learned in adolescence (although some may have been spoken natively at some point), and retained as markers of group identity and secret codes. According to Asta Olesen’s Sheikh Mohammadi informants, their children speak Persian until they are six or seven, when they are taught Adurgari, “which is spoken ‘when strangers should not understand what we talk about.’ ” The same seems to be true of the “secret languages” of the Fuga and Waata service nomads of southern Ethiopia. 17 When a language foreign to the host society is not available and loan elements are deemed insufficient, various forms of linguistic camouflage are used to ensure unintelligibility: reversal (of whole words or syllables), vowel changes, consonant substitution, prefixation, suffixation, paraphrasing, punning, and so on. The Inadan make themselves incomprehensible by adding the prefix om - and suffix - ak to certain Tamacheq (Tamajec, Tamashek) nouns; the Halabi (the blacksmiths, healers, and entertainers of the Nile valley) transform Arabic words by adding the suffixes - eishi or - elheid ; the Romani English (Angloromani) words for “about,” “bull,” and “tobacco smoke” are aboutas, bullas , and fogas ; and the Shelta words for the Irish do (“two”) and dorus (“door”) are od and rodus , and for the English “solder” and “supper,” grawder and grupper . 18 Shelta was spoken by Irish Travelers (reportedly as a native tongue in some cases) and consists of an Irish Gaelic lexicon, much of it disguised, embedded in an English grammatical framework. Its main function is nontransparency to outsiders, and according to the typically prejudiced (in every sense) account of the collector John Sampson, who met two “tinkers” in a Liverpool tavern in 1890, it served its purpose very well. “These men were not encumbered by any prejudices in favor of personal decency or cleanliness, and the language used by them was, in every sense, corrupt. Etymologically it might be described as a Babylonish, model-lodging-house jargon, compounded of Shelta, ‘flying Cant,’ rhyming slang, and Romani. This they spoke with astonishing fluency, and apparent profit to themselves.” 19 Various postexilic Jewish languages have been disparaged in similar ways and spoken by community members with equal fluency and even greater profit (in the sense of meeting a full range of communicative and cognitive needs as well as reinforcing the ethnic boundary). The Jews lost their original home languages relatively early, but nowhere—for as long as they remained specialized service nomads—did they adopt unaltered host languages as a means of internal communication. Wherever they went, they created, or brought with