Welsh Romani

Abstract

As a believer at any rate in the constancy of the law which accords the last word in a discussion to the reviewer, and since the columns of NATURE seem scarcely the place for it, I do not propose to deal further here with the novel Romani etymologies propounded by Prof. Turner. The place for this is obviously the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, of which he is a member, and where scholars who understand Romani and are familiar with what has already been written upon it, will have an opportunity of forming their own opinion. We should then, I presume, learn Prof. Turner's reasons for supposing that *suil could in any dialect of Romani be a possible word, and why a Welsh Gypsy variant of a south European Gypsy word should have a separate origin in a different Indian stem.