On the Morphological Paradigms of Romani

The purpose of this paper is two-fold: One is to introduce the Romani language, a less-known endangered language of European Gypsies, and to examine the morphological paradigms of this language. The paper examines, in particular, the general pattern of morphological paradigms of so-called measure adjectives in this language and argues that the superficial uniform conjugational paradigm is only apparent and not real. Instead, it will be shown that the seemingly uniform morphological paradigm of Romani measure adjectives can in fact be accounted for by taking into consideration the fact that the conjugational suffixes are not primary, lexical, or basic but rather secondary, non-lexical, and derived. We will prove this claim by examining the conjugational paradigm in detail and attest the claim by paying attention to systematic absence of some expected forms under consideration.