Sri Lankan place name etymology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is currently subject to editing restrictions, following a dispute resolution consensus. Before making any non-minor changes or before reverting changes, please report the issue at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Sri Lanka Reconciliation#Issues. Please do not remove this message until the restrictions have been removed.

Sri Lankan place name etymology is characterized by the linguistic and ethnic diversity of the island of Sri Lanka through the ages and the position of the country in the centre of ancient and medieval sea trade routes. While typical Sri Lankan placenames of Sinhalese origin vastly dominate, toponyms which stem from Tamil, Dutch, English, and Portuguese also exist. In the past, the many composite or hybrid place names and the juxtaposition of Sinhala and Tamil placenames reflected the coexistence of people of both language groups. Today, however, toponyms and their etymologies are a source of heated political debate in the country as part of the political struggles between the majority Sinhalese and minority Sri Lankan Tamils.

Contents 1 Morphological structure of place names 1.1 Sinhalese 1.2 Tamil 1.3 Portuguese 1.4 Dutch 1.5 English 1.6 Vedda 2 Origins of some well-known place names 2.1 Big towns 2.2 Touristic places 3 Focus of research 3.1 Hybrid place names 3.2 Places with diverging names 3.3 Disputed place names 3.4 Unusual etymologies 4 Geolinguistic distribution 5 Anthropological and political relevance of place names in Sri Lanka 5.1 Historical development of the place name controversies 6 Colonial period 7 See also 8 Notes 9 References

[edit] Morphological structure of place names

The morphological structure of Sri Lankan place names by and large depends on the language. Sinhala and Tamil favour transparent compounds involving geological features combined with an animal or plant, while the European languages are more person centered and derive place names from saints or nobility or army.

[edit] Sinhalese

Place names of Sinhala origin, like Tamil origin, have a typical X+Y structure, where Y is a geographical feature such as mountain, river or village and X is a qualifier, like an animal or plant often found at that place, or otherwise associated with it. Examples for this are

• singha+pitiya "lion place"
• weli+gama "sand village"
• monara+gala "peacock rock"

Commonly used trees in village names are pol (coconut) and Kitul (palm), among others.

The X part can be complex as in

• kiri bath goda = milk rice village

The X part can also refer to social concepts like caste. Examples for this are waduwa (carpenter), batta (lower caste settlement), ambataya (barber), aruwa (potter), govi (farmer), bamuna (Brahmin) and Villiya (Rodiya).^[1]

Besides the Y parts already mentioned, other commonly used land usage forms are Kumbura (paddy fieldds), Deniya, watte (garden), pola, gama (village), and Hena (newly cultivated lands). Grasslands were termed as talava and tree groves were termed golla. Village tanks were called pokuna or katuwa. Irrigation tanks were called wewa.^[2] Canals from such lakes were called aala. Flat lands were termed botha. Ports were termed tota.^[3] Names of flower gardens belonging to Buddhist establishments end with uyana.

[edit] Tamil

Place names of Tamil origin, like Sinhala origin, also have a typical X+Y structure^{[citation needed]}. The place names are simple and descriptive; they reflect criteria normal to early societies and are related to the concepts and outlooks of people of those times. The majority of the place names can be listed under caste and occupational, landforms, land classifications, coastal features, irrigation works, fields and farms, trees, animals, names of deities, personal names, old, new, big, small, good, settlement and village.^[4]

The X-part in Tamil place names is often one of the following: The commonly used trees are Vembu, Panai (palm) and Illupai. Commonly used animals and birds are Anai (elephant), Puli (tiger), and Kuranku (monkey). Other notable classifications are deities such as Amman, Andi, Kali and Pillaiyar.^[5] The commonly used caste or ethnic titles in Tamil are Chetty, Vannan and Demala.

As for the Y-part, the commonly used landforms Mulai or Mulla (corner), Malai or Male (mountain), Aru (creek), Kuda (bay) Manal (sandy place), Kuli (depression), Tivu (island), Pallam (depression) and Ur or uruwa (village).^[5] Land classification are Tottam (garden), Kudal (bay), Puval, Kadu (forest), Munai or Mune (front), Karai (coast) and Turai or Ture (port). Irrigation and agriculture classifications are Kulam or Kulama (tank), reflecting the most common village name endings in Anuradhapura and Puttalam districts,^[5] Kinaru (well), Kani (allotment), Vayal (paddy field), Vaikkal (canal) and Eri (tank).

[edit] Portuguese

The Portuguese who came to the island in 1505 and left in 1658. They often gave names of Saints to whom the churches in the vicinity were dedicated. San Sebastian Hill and St. Joseph's Road are examples of these and Milagiriya had the church of Our Lady of Miracles (milagro in Portuguese).^{[citation needed]}

A name like "Grand Pass", a northern suburb of Colombo, is the English redering of "Grande Passo", the name of a ferry established by the Portuguese, to cross the Kelani River.

Point Pedro and Mount Pedro are also place names with the name of a Portuguese person as a component, although they might have been coined by the British.

The Portuguese language furthermore was an important step stone for the English terms used today, the British would often use Portuguese names and adapt them, rather than taking the original form. An example for this is Batticaloa, and Ceylon itself.

[edit] Dutch

The Dutch rule the maritime provinces from 1658-1796. Amongst their legacy place names of Dutch origin although not many are still significant. For example Hulftsdorp which is Dutch for 'Hulft's Village' and named after a Dutch general. Among the other place-names in Colombo which are of Dutch origin may be included Bloemendahl (Vale of Flowers) and Wolfendahl (Dale of Wolves). The Beira lake in Colombo probably takes its name from De Beer who is believed to have been an engineer in charge of the Dutch water defenses. A granite plaque inscribed with the words 'De Beer 1700' recovered from an old Dutch sluice which controlled the flow of water from the lake has altered the hitherto accepted view that the lake takes its name from the Portuguese beira meaning 'bank or edge (of a lake)'.

The Dutch also christened the islands of Jaffna in rememberance of Dutch towns, such as Hoorn, Delft, Leiden, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Middelburg and Enkhuizen, but these names (with the exception of Delft) have all but disappeared and have been replaced by their local Tamil names.

Messenger Street was called Rue de Massang by the Dutch because there were many Massang trees and even today it is called Masang Gas Vidiya and Korteboam(short trees).^{[citation needed]}

[edit] English

The British who followed the Dutch left many place names within the capital Colombo city, like streets, squares and quarters, but their influence on larger geographical features like towns is limited. Within Colombo, many of the place names have a British royal connotation, such as Queen's Street, Prince Street, Duke Street. The quarters Fort, Cinnamon Gardens, Slave Island and Mount Lavinia carry English names, next to the native ones.

Outside of Colombo, English influence can be found in the tea planting region with the towns of Hatton and Dalhousie, and several estates like Montechristo or Blinkbonnie. A more remote place is Arugam Bay on the East Coast.

[edit] Vedda

[edit] Origins of some well-known place names

[edit] Big towns

• Colombo: was originally 'Kalanthota' or 'Kolonthota' and indicated it to be the 'port' of the 'Kaleni' river. However, the Portuguese were probably struck by its similarity to the name of Colombus, and renamed the city 'Colombo'
• 'Kandy' is an abbreviation of 'Kanda Udarata', or 'hill country' which was the seat of the later Sinhala kings.
• Galle
• Trincomalee
• Batticaloa
• Jaffna

[edit] Touristic places

• Polonnaruwa
• Anuradhapura
• Sigiriya
• Mihintale
• Negombo
• Hikkaduwa
• Unawatuna
• Ambalangoda
• Bentota
• Tangalle
• Nilaweli
• Nuwara Eliya

[edit] Focus of research

The neutrality and factual accuracy of this section are disputed. Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page. (June 2008)

[edit] Hybrid place names

Many Place Names in the Northern and Eastern provinces of Sri Lanka with Tamil sounding names appear to have etymologies originating in the Sinhala language.^{[citation needed]} Yalpana Vaibhava Kaumudi^[6] has also devoted a whole chapter to place names related to the Sinhalese language.^{[citation needed][disputed]}

Sometimes these places were re-conquered and re-named when southern kings returned to these areas. This in turn involved demolition of Hindu shrines, or their absorption into Buddhist shrines and vice versa as kingdoms and their boundaries changed continually. This ebb and flow has left a rich cultural legacy in the North and East. A detailed study was presented by Dr. Karthigesu Inthirapala in 1965 ^[7] and reviewed in 2005. It should be noted that the so called "Tamil or Sinhala" people are inherently totally intermixed over the centuries. The last "Sinhala" king of Kandy had a well defined South Indian lineage. Hence all this should be regarded as a common legacy constituting a valuable patrimony of the present inhabitants of the country.

[edit] Places with diverging names

While the names of many places are related in the languages spoken on the island, some towns have diverging names in Sinhala, Tamil or English, which do not seem related at first glance. Cases in point are Chilaw (Halāwata in Sinhala and Silāpam in Tamil),^[8]Negombo (Migamuwa in Sinhala, Nir Koɭumbu in Tamil),and Kandy (Maha Nuwara in Sinhala, Kaɳɖi in Tamil). Another example is Beruwala (Sinhala name, western province) called Nallur in Tamil.

[edit] Disputed place names

• Jaffna

[edit] Unusual etymologies

The Colombo quarter of Slave Island is called kompañña vīdiya (කොම්පඤ්ඤවීදිය) in Sinhala, where kompaña is a Portuguese loanword (companhia) refering to the Dutch East Indian Company having their head quarters there. So the Sinhalese use a Portuguese word for a Dutch entity, while English usage ignores this altogether and has different semantics, albeit it also associated with the VOC, who traded in slaves^{[citation needed]}.

[edit] Geolinguistic distribution

As already stated above, European place names are found mainly in the big towns which used to be colonial centers. On the countryside, there is close to no European toponymy and the indigenous languages are dominant.

Given the very similar processes of place name formation in Sinhala and Tamil explicated above, it is not always easy to establish the original language of a place name, because loan translations are common in both directions. For such an alleged example of loan translation, see the case of Trincomalee above. Additionally, some place names draw on Sanskrit or Pali roots, which are then adapted to Sinhala and Tamil phonology in different ways. These intricacies must be taken into account when evaluating claims that a certain area was predominantly inhabited by one group or the other at a certain point in time.

Taking a synchronic point of view, Sinhala place names are more common in the Sinhala speaking areas in the South, whereas Tamil place names are more common in the Tamil speaking areas in the North and East. On a diachronic point of view, things are more complicated, and both Sinhala settlements in the North and Tamil settlements in the South have been claimed to have been more common in the past. The motivation behind such analyses is not always scientific; political goals also play a role in claiming a certain area for a certain language group, see the next section for more discussion of this. The following statements have to be interpreted with this caveat in mind.

Sinhalese place names are found throughout the island. As discussed by Sri Lankan historians such as Paul E Peiris, Karthigesu Indrapala and others, pre-Christian stone inscriptions of Sri Lanka point to the extensive use of the Sinhala language in local administration. Much of the information for tracing the old place names comes from etymology, written texts, many stone inscriptions which are in Sinhala and dating back to pre-Christian times, as well as the more recent colonial records.

Dutch and British records show that the language of the inhabitants of Vanni in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were Tamil. In addition, only Tamil words were used for natural and human-made features in the Vanni region with no trace of Sinhalese words.^[9] According to Professor K. Kularatnam, when analyzing the regional distribution of place names in Sri Lanka, one not only comes across Tamil names in areas which are now Sinhala-speaking, and vice versa, but also composite or hybrid place names which are part Sinhalese and part Tamil in composition, as well as Sinhalese and Tamil place names juxtaposed within small areas.^[4]

Most hybrid place names are found in the traditionally Sinhalese North Western and North Central provinces, as well as the traditionally Tamil Northern and Eastern provinces.

Archaeologist Paranavithana suggests that the original name was Javapatuna, where 'Java' alludes to the presence of Javaka people. The Portuguese historian De Queyroz refers to it at 'Jafnapato'. Centuries earlier, Sigiri graffiti verses referring to the Jaffna peninsula and written circa 8 century CE, contain references to Vaeligama,^[10] and the Dutch East India Company maps also show Jaffna as Waligamo province.

Kularatnam concluded from the hybrid place names that the traditionally Sinhalese North Central and North Western Provinces, as well as the coastal tracts as far as south as Colombo, were inhabited by Tamil-speaking people in the past.^[11] In addition, there have been also at least small segments elsewhere in the island.^[11] The many composite or hybrid place names and the juxtaposition of Sinhala and Tamil place names indicated the peaceful coexistence of people of both language groups.^[11]

[edit] Anthropological and political relevance of place names in Sri Lanka

See also: Origins of the Sri Lankan civil war and Sri Lankan civil war

Place names are a source of controversy in Sri Lankan politics. According Jonathan Spencer, a social anthropologist from the School of Social and Political Studies of the University of Edinburgh,^[12] the Sri Lankan Civil War is an outcome of how modern ethnic identities have been made and re-made since the colonial period, with the political struggle between minority Sri Lankan Tamils and the Sinhala-dominant government accompanied by rhetorical wars over archeological sites and place name etymologies, and the political use of the national past. Spencer further noted that in the currently Tamil-dominant Northern Province there are place names with Sinhalese etymologies, which is used by the Sinhala dominant government to claim the territory, whereas Tamils using Tamil place names in rationally Sinhala areas point to their antiquity in the island.^[13][14] There is a movement in Sri Lanka that seeks to Sinhalize all placenames throughout the country.^[15]

[edit] Historical development of the place name controversies

The neutrality of this section is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page.(May 2008) Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved.

This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (May 2008)

This article or section may contain an unpublished synthesis of published material that conveys ideas not attributable to the original sources. Please help Wikipedia by adding sources whose main topic is "Sri Lankan place name etymology". See the talk page for details.(May 2008)

In the 1920s, two historical descriptions of Jaffna were published, "Ancient Jaffna" by C. Rasanayagam, and "A Critical History of Jaffna"By Swamy Gnanaprakasar ^[16]. The publication of these studied coincided with the agitation for separate ethnic representation in the legislature, and the rise of Tamil Nationalism^{[17][page # needed]}. A main claim of these books was that the North and East were hereditary possessions of the Tamils. Upon the establishment of the University of Ceylon under the Indian historian H. C. Ray, and the archeologist S. Paranavithana, these claims by Tamils were re-examined by Sinhalese academics.^[disputed] An issue of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1961 ^[18], examined the findings of Rasanaygam et al. and gave different interpretations.

[edit] Colonial period

Possible copyright infringement

If you have just labeled this page as a possible copyright infringement, please add the following to the bottom of Wikipedia:Copyright_problems/2008_June_10/Articles * {{subst:article-cv|:Sri Lankan place name etymology}} from [http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~lkawgw/road.html]. ~~~~

The previous content of this page appears to infringe on the copyright of the text from the source(s) below and is now listed on Wikipedia:Copyright problems: http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~lkawgw/road.html Do not edit this page until an administrator has resolved this issue. To write a new article without infringing material, follow this link to a temporary subpage. State that you have done so on this article's discussion page. Note that simply modifying copyrighted text is not sufficient to avoid copyright infringement—if the original copyright violation cannot be clearly identified and the article reverted to a prior version, it is best to write the article from scratch. An administrator will move the new article into place once the issue is resolved. If you hold the copyright to this text and permit its use under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: Explain this on this article's discussion page, then either display a notice to this effect at the site of original publication or send an e-mail from an address associated with the original publication to permissions-en at wikimedia dot org or a postal letter to the Wikimedia Foundation. These messages must explicitly permit use under the GFDL. Note: Articles on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view and must be verifiable in published third-party sources; copyright issues aside, your text may not be appropriate for inclusion in Wikipedia. If this text is in the public domain, or is already under a license suitable for Wikipedia: Explain this on this article's discussion page, with reference to evidence. Unless the copyright status of the text on this page is clarified, it will be deleted one week after the time of its listing.

Posting copyrighted material without the express permission of the copyright holder is a violation of applicable law and of Wikipedia policy. If you have questions about copyright, see Copyright FAQ. Those who repeatedly post copyrighted material will be blocked from further editing. Temporarily, the original posting is still accessible for viewing in the page history. You are welcome to submit original contributions.

Maintenance use only: {{subst:Nothanks-web|pg=Sri Lankan place name etymology|url=http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~lkawgw/road.html}} ~~~~

The copyvio part has been deleted

[edit] See also

• Languages of Sri Lanka

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Gnanaprakasar, Swamy (2003). A Critical History of Jaffna (Tamil edition from 1928). New Delhi: Asian Educational Services. ISBN 81-206-1686-3. 
• Kularatnam, K (1966-04-23). "Tamil Place Names in Ceylon outside the Northern and Eastern Provinces". Proceedings of the first International Conference Seminar of Tamil Studies, vol. 1: 483–493, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: International Tamil Conference. 
• Spencer, Jonathan (1990). Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict. Routledge. ISBN 04-150-4461-8. 
• Pfaffenberg, Brian (1994). The Sri Lankan Tamils. Westview Press. ISBN 0-8133-8845-7.