The stories were originally written down by Robert Macalister in his 1914 book¹ that describes the grammar of Domari as spoken by his consultant in Palestine. Some of these stories were personal anecdotes, others were folklore: he did not mark which stories were which but it is often possible to deduce this from the content.

Then, in 2000, Yaron Matras visited Jerusalem and did the research that formed his 2012 description of the language². He read the stories Macalister had transcribed to consultants in Arabic, and asked them to translate them back into Domari almost a century after they had been recorded. This means we have two versions of these stories: one written by Macalister and one recorded by Matras, which we can view side by side to see how the langauge varies across time and between speakers.

This interface was made using Kwaras³, a tool that is specifically designed for making texts in under-resourced languages accessible to the public. Once you click on a story, you should be able to see three columns of text: Domari as collected by Matras; Domari as collected by Macalister, and English. There will also be some columns of metatdata, which contains information about where each sentence is from.

Click on the column heading “citation” and make sure the first line includes the timestamp 0:00.00 – this will put the story in order, so you should be able to read it going from the top to the bottom of the page, in any of the languages. If you click on a particular line, you can play audio of the ‘new’ Domari speaker saying that line, so you can hear how it is pronounced.

If you click “columns”, you can adjust the display: I recommend unchecking “speaker” (which is empty) and “length” to give yourself more space, as this information probably won’t be useful to you. You can also uncheck one or more of the content columns if, for example, you are mainly interested in the ‘new’ Domari and its English translation, or are mainly interested in comparing the sentences collected by Matras with the ones collected by Macalister. There is also a search bar, so you can look up entries in any of the languages to find examples.

At the bottom of the list is a master collection, with every story we have in this format so far. This could be useful if, for example, you have a particular word which you would like to hear aloud or see in context but you aren’t sure where to find it.

Yes! We are working on aligning more stories and putting them in this format. Watch this space!