weaken, the “hygienic” ones took their place—or so it might seem when observant Gypsies bleached their dwellings or used paper towels to turn on taps or open bathroom doors. The Jews, considered dirty in a variety of contexts, could also arouse the suspicion or admiration of their neighbors because of their preoccupation with bodily cleanliness. And even on the Indian subcontinent, where all ethnosocial groups surrounded themselves with elaborate pollution taboos, the Parsis were remarkable for the strictness of their constraints on menstruating women and the intensity of their concern for personal hygiene. 14 Next to purity and pollution, and closely related to them as a sign of difference, is language. “Barbarian” originally meant a “babbler” or “stutterer,” and the Slavic word for “foreigner” (later “German”) is nemec , “the mute one.” Most “Mercurian” peoples are barbarians and “Germans” wherever they go, sometimes by dint of considerable effort. If they do not speak a language that is foreign to the surrounding majority (as a result of recent immigration or long- term language maintenance), they create one. Some European Gypsies, for example, speak Romani, an inflected, morphologically productive Indic language probably related to the Dom languages of the Middle East and possibly derived from the idiom of an Indian caste of metalworkers, peddlers, and entertainers. (Romani is, however, unusual in that it cannot be traced to any particular regional variety and seems to have experienced an extraordinary degree of morphosyntactic borrowing—some say “fusion”—leading a minority of scholars to deny its coherence and independence.) 15 Many others speak peculiar “Para-Romani” languages that combine a Romani lexicon with the grammar (phonology, morphology, and syntax) of coterritorial majority languages. There are Romani versions of English, Spanish, Basque, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian, among others, all of them unintelligible to host communities and variously described as former Romani dialects transformed by means of “massive grammatical replacement”; creole languages derived from pidgins (simplified contact languages) used by original Roma immigrants to communicate with local outlaws; “mixed dialects” created by speakers who had lost full-fledged inflected Romani but still had access to it (older kinsmen, new immigrants) as an “alienation” resource; “mixed languages” (local grammar, immigrant vocabulary) born of the intertwining of two parent languages, as in the case of frontier languages spoken by the offspring of immigrant fathers and native mothers; and finally ethnolects or cryptolects consciously created by the native speakers of standard languages with the help of