In 1968 Adaline Glasheen observed that Joyce added a dozen words of Shelta, the cryptolect of the Irish travelers, to Finnegans Wake, just when the work was in its final stages.(1) She concluded that these had been noted from R. A. S. Macalister’s The Secret Languages of Ireland, which appeared just two years before FW.(2) Another sixteen Shelta words in FW were picked out by Ian MacArthur some seven years later.(3) Shelta figures sporadically among the source languages in Roland McHugh’s Annotations but there is no discussion of traveler language in Brendan O Hehir’s Gaelic lexicon to FW.(4) In 1983, another some four score words (not all true Shelta) were added by Brian Cleeve to Macalister’s list (with some duplication).(5) There are some popular presentations of Shelta available on the World Wide Web and the question of classification has been addressed by Ian F. Hancock, a specialist in pidgins, creoles, and Anglo-Romani.(6) This, then, is the current state of affairs.

As in-group speech, Shelta (also called Sheldru, Gaman, Pavee, or the Cant) is characterized by a syntax and morphology mostly reflecting English. Its vocabulary is heavily drawn from Irish yet altered to the point of near-non-recognition. Although the language seems to have taken form about 1700 and neologisms today are unlikely to have Irish roots, chief among the earlier means to word disguise were de-aspiration and de-nasalization (undoing the Irish mutation system), arbitrary substitution of consonants or consonant groups, apocope, addition of arbitrary prefixes or suffixes, metathesis and the reversal of syllables or entire words, and the use of archaisms, loans from other languages, and metaphor (Macalister, 165; Hancock 1984, 388).

In light of the principle of lexical encryption and attendant devices, and Joyce’s comparable practices in the Wake, one must then ask why the topic of Joyce and Shelta has been so little studied. Or has everything already been said?

None of the supplementary Shelta vocabulary collected by Cleeve is to be found in FW, and it then seems a sound working assumption to concur with Glasheen that Joyce’s sole source was Macalister, whatever he may have known of traveler language in Ireland or have learned from his family, with its roots in Sligo, where there was a strong traveler presence. Given Joyce’s interest in coincidence in all its varied forms, e.g., shared birth dates and names, and his creation of this phenomenon in the assembly of character from multiple biographical strands–all the Blooms that have been identified–or in setting Ulysses on a personally significant date in his life, one can only wonder what his reaction was when he opened Macalister and learned that one of his working methods for the Wake had such antecedents in a community that set itself at a studied distance from mainstream Ireland just as did the writer in self-chosen exile.

Joyce doubtless had standards for the encryption of meaning and allusion in the Wake. We should not assume, as earlier commentators on Joyce and Shelta seem to have done, that for the writer Shelta stood in relation to English as, say, Faroese to the Norwegian that Joyce knew. Instead, there was both a distance from English, as a consequence of the Irish lexical core, and a masking of this lexis prior to any use to which Joyce might put the word. Joyce did not exclude Shelta words that were reversed and otherwise modified, as the following list shows: geg (249.36) ‘beg’ < Ir. guidhe ‘pray’; talop (241.15) ‘belly’ < bolg ‘bag’; skok (279.F27) ‘water’ < uisge ‘water’; kuldrum (345.12) ‘sleep’ < codladh ‘sleep’; nup (390.22) ‘urinate’ < mún ‘urine’. Yet he seems not to have accorded them any preferential status.

There is a concentration of Shelta in FW between 323.26 and 347.05, where a total of a dozen words has been recognized. These pages are part of the account of how Buckley shot the Russian general, which we know Joyce to have drafted quite early in his composition of FW. The late discovered Shelta words would then have been used to enhance a passage with which Joyce would have been extremely familiar. None of the words is key to any extended passage in FW. Nor is any a nuclear word in the sense that rump, never stated as a simplex in the episode (but early signaled in Stephen’s musings in The Portrait, p. 9), is echoed in the numerous -ump/-umb words, a kind of phono-semantic set, throughout the telling of the anecdote: tump as “tunf,” “thump,” “stumblebum,” “hump to dump”, “tumbleheaver,” “cumbulent embullence,” “umbozzle,” and more.(7)

Nonetheless, it is here that Joyce makes his most explicit reference to Irish travelers, in the exclamation “Tincurs tammit!” (338.25). As throughout the Wake, there is a degree of tension between what might be assumed as the author’s values and those of his characters, paralleling, but not always reflecting, the word as raw material and the wordplay on it. Thus, the phrase is superficially condemnatory, with suggestions of curs, curse and damn it. Shelta laburt ‘curse’ (< Ir. mallacht) occurs on the next page (339.6) as belaburt = belabored. But the itinerant tinsmiths also effect “tin-cures”, repairing household vessels using ad hoc, disposable channeling (tinker’s dams) to move the molten alloy in the repair process: tinkers dam it.(8) Associated with the above “curse” is the phrase “gam cant” (339.6-7), both ‘bad popular language’ and a dittoism for travelers’ language (Gammon + Cant). Here, too, is “urdlesh” (338.21), the name Sheldru recast by its own rules, followed by “Shelltoss” (both Shelta and cannon fire). We imagine the gunners of the British army bent over their ball and cannon (still largely muzzle-loaded, to which several puns allude) like Irish tinkers over other people’s pots and pans. We might say that this is as explicit as the Wake gets.

Stage directions for Butt also include the word “minkerstary” (338.35) Minklers’ Thari (more properly minker taral) was another term for the traveler language (mink(l)er = tinker, Shelta tari ‘talk, language’ < Ir. raid ‘he said’), but is also open to a reading as “tinkers’ story”. Clustered around the semantics and phonics of tinker are: tin and solder, and the tin soldiers of the misguided Crimean War; tincture of mercury perhaps in reference to the gonorrheal Russian officer (192.3, 349.2, 352.23); the tinntabulation of cannon fire, tammit! = tamp it, the cannon charge.(9) Perhaps even a pairing of horse-drawn caravans, and gun carriages and caissons. Since there was a substantial population of Roma in the Black Sea area, Joyce’s linguistic calipers here seem to have been taking the measure from Ireland to the Crimea, from Irish and Scottish Shelta to Eastern European Romani.(10) Recalling Shelta word deformation, it is also in this extended passage that Joyce compares Buckley’s musket shot to other cataclysmic events such as Lord Rutherford’s splitting of the atom in terms suggestive of both the word separation (etarscarad) of medieval Irish etymologists and Shelta lexical encryption: “the abnihilisation of the etym” (353.22).

Much earlier in the Wake, in the context of a disquisition on love/sex as a constant of the human condition, language as a universal but with rare and marginal(ized) specifics is noted: “it is told in sounds in utter that, in signs so adds to, in universal, in polygluttural, in each auxiliary neutral idiom, sordomutics, florilingua, sheltafocal, flayflutter, a con's cubane, a pro's tutute, strassarab, ereperse and anythongue athall” (117.12-16). “Sheltafocal” incorporates the Irish word for ‘word’ focal and could pass for a play on multivocal. It is found in the company of Irish Sign Language (“sordomutics”), Bloom’s language of the flowers (“florilingua”), the language of fans (? “flayflutter”), among the pros and cons of the Cuban Spanish of a convict’s concubine and of prostitutes’ come-ons in the second personal singular and in tutus, the slanguage of Basarabian street arabs, Persian and eruptive Erse in Eire, and whatever else we can tease out.

Joyce’s world is essentially urban and, whatever the range in social class, horse-drawn caravans on its periphery do not figure largely. But,like the blind stripling tapping his way through Ulysses, the disabled, the disadvantaged, the aberrant, aloof, and contrarian are there when we look for them. On balance it seems that Joyce exploited the Shelta vocabulary found in Macalister only to round out the European linguistic map that underlies the Wake. In total, his other loans from Macalister (names for Ogam alphabets, Bog Latin, a supposed masons’ jargon called Bearlagair na Saer) bulk larger than Shelta. All of these may fall under the heading “a darktongues, kunning” (223.28), which also reflects a note in Macalister (cf. “in his glass darkly speech”, 355.9).(11) Yet “sheltafocal” as one of the dark tongues may be appropriate in consideration of Private Buckley’s perhaps unrecognized sexual interest in the general at stool.

Expanding somewhat our field of inquiry, we may note that it is just in the context of the tinkers that Joyce gives his fullest roster of the British and Russian field commanders engaged in the Crimean War (along with references to legendary and historical invaders and defenders of Ireland, e.g., Brian Borumha, O’Donohough, Olaf (Anlaf) cuarán, Sigtrygg (Sitrik) silkiskegg. Raglan and Cardigan have been noted in Glasheen’s Third Census,(12) but not their pairing in “garmentguy” (339.21) The conflict produced another clothing term, balaclava. On the Russian side, Menshikov has been recognized in manchocuffs (French manche sleeve, English cuff; see below), but we also have Gorchakov in “grozarktik”, otherwise German grossartig and Totleben in “toadleben”. “Homard kayenne” (Fr. lobster in red -pepper sauce) may hide the Ottoman leader Omar Pasha, as well as the poet Omar Khayyam. Their listing along with the travelers may have been prompted by the military tinkering of the British officers, leading among other fiascos to the fatal Charge of the Light Brigade, which was largely the result of miscommunications–dark speech, dark tongues, Sheltafocal.

In fact, the names Raglan (the sleeve type) and Cardigan (the sweater) seem to have prompted Joyce to a host of clothing and textile-related references. To the above may be added French blouson, coifs, busbies, jackets, raincoats, camiknickers, men’s confectionneurs, Polish ubranie ‘suit of clothes’ and Polikoff, the name of a Dublin tailor, all with regard to the uniform of the Russian general and all under the sign of the red, white and blue flag of Imperial Russia, the “tree-coloured camiflag” (339.9-30). This pairing of soldiering and tailoring could then have recalled the nursery rhyme, “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor’, opening the way for the inclusion of tinkers in the passage. But the text could have taken shape in multiple other fashions as well.

Joyce may have experienced a bit of pique to discover that some of his preferred cryptolexical techniques had been so thoroughly exploited earlier on or, conversely, in yet another significant correspondence, he may have felt further confirmed in his choice of working method.. Macalister’s listing of Shelta vocabulary, gleaned a full sixty years before the publication of the Wake, cannot have thrown the master off his stride. By 1937 the Wake was already a massive production and Shelta, like so much other linguistic data, would simply have fed the “Notebooks”, to be reconfigured, recreated in the Wake and incorporated in the account of “How Burghley shuck the rackushant Germanon” (338.2-3), “Backlegs shirked the racing kenneldar” (341.28-29), “How Buccleuch shocked the rosing girnirilles” (346.19-20)--“till butagain budly shoots thon, rising germinal” (354.34-35).