Rotwelsch (, "beggar's foreign (language)") or Gaunersprache ( "crook's language") also Khokhmer Loshn (from Yiddish "", "tongue of the wise") is a secret language, a cant or thieves' argot, spoken by groups (primarily marginalized groups) in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Bohemia. The language is based on a mix of Low German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Romani, Latin, and Czech with a High German substrate.
Rotwelsch (, "beggar's foreign (language)") or Gaunersprache ( "crook's language") also Khokhmer Loshn (from Yiddish "", "tongue of the wise") is a secret language, a cant or thieves' argot, spoken by groups (primarily marginalized groups) in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Bohemia. The language is based on a mix of Low German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Romani, Latin, and Czech with a High German substrate.
== Name == Rotwelsch was first named by Martin Luther in his preface of Liber Vagatorum in the 16th century. Rot means "beggar" while welsch means "incomprehensible" (cf *Walhaz): thus, rotwelsch signifies the incomprehensible cant of beggars.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).