(Note from SentirTango: If you haven´t read the first part of this article we recommend you to do so beforehand clicking here)
If Lunfardo is neither a language nor a dialect, maybe it would be appropriate to resort to its etymology to see how much it can clarify. In 1962 professor Amaro Villanueva determined the origin of the voice “lunfardo” based on the corruption of a term from the Romanesque, that is the way of speaking in Rome.
Villanueva found in the Vocabolario romanesco of Filippo Chiappini(1945) the term lombardo with the meaning of “thief”, plus a derivate verb: lombardare, with the meaning of “to steal”. As Villanueva explains, the evolution of the word, transplanted already to our language, would have been: lombardo > lumbardo > lunfardo. He was able to prove this thanks to the middle form lumbardo , that appears evidenced, as a local transition form, in the melodrama Los amores de Giacumina, published in 1886 anonymously by who was later found out to be the journalist from Entrerrios, Ramón Romero. In that play it can be read: “Entre los novio que teñiba Giacumina había un lumbardo[…].” This evidence of the use of the middle form, even though as the name given to the natives of Lombardy, allows Villanueva to advance in his hypothesis, once he has explained the passage of the o to a u (lombardo > lumbardo), as it happens in pulenta and in cumparsita, and of offering some testimonies of napolitano phonetics, where the explosive b of the tuscan tends to be converted into a fricative v, as it happens with cravone as opposed to the tuscan voice carbone(coal) or lavorante as opposed to laborante(worker).
According to Villanueva,
lombardo(“born in Lombardy”) ended up being equivalent to “thief” after a use that would have started in Italy no sooner than the XVIII century, but it was already used in medieval french under the shape
lombart (and its variation
lumbart) with the meaning of “moneylender”, “usurer”, since the first ones to exercise this profession in France where natives of Lombardy.
The fact that
lunfardo meant in its origin “thief” and with that meaning was used in Buenos Aires around 1870, led to wrong conclusions to the first ones that studied this phenomenon, since it was interpreted that it consisted of a jargon of the delinquency world. I am sorry to say what for many could be a disappointment, but lunfardo is not –and it never was- a criminal vocabulary. Biased by their professions, the first ones to study it(Benigno Lugones, Luis María Drago, Antonio Dellepiane, Luis Villamayor), all of them ciminalists and policemen, granted it wrongly this original sin.
Summing up, nor a language, nor a dialect, nor a professional jargon. We have already said what lunfardo is not. We have left now to say what it is.
Oscar Conde
