“There is no agreement among scholars regarding the origin of the ethnonym Sinti (also called Sinte). A popular etymology among the Sinti is that their self-appellation is based on the Pakistani province of ‘Sindh’.
Such explanation indicate that the Sinti were already before the migration to Europe distinct from the Roma, a fact which supports the Sinti in underlining their separate iden- tity. Nevertheless, there is no doubt about that the ethnonym Sinti cannot be of Indic origin, since the word ‘Sinti’ is inflected as Eu- ropean loanwords (see the below table).
It however remains unclear from which contact language was the word Sinti borrowed and what was its original meaning. Based on historical sources, Matras (1999) assumes that the ethnonym Sinti turned up at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries and was used as a name of a particular Romani group among the German Roma.
The original endonym of the group was Kale, a Romani group name which is widespread also in other Western and Norther European coun- tries. The new group name Sinti seems to completely replace the older name Kale in the beginning of the 20th century.”