Far away places with strange sounding names
 

BY S. PATHIRAVITANA

BIOGRAPHIES come in different sorts. So do autobiographies. The auto biographer, however, does not wish to give the impression that he is talking about himself, his loves and affections, his hopes and desires, although that is the stuff of both biography and autobiography.

The quality auto biographer, though, does not sound or look ostentatious as I found in the book I just finished reading, On Horseshoe Street by Tissa Devendra. I had put off reading it at first because the title misled me into thinking it had something to do with cowboys. I find I have been deceived. Strictly speaking it does not fall into the category of autobiographies.

It's a collection of articles he has been writing to the newspapers and now in its attractive book format reads like a continuous tale about the author's progress in life. This may not have been his aim when he started writing, but then as Eliot says our beginnings never know our ends.

All in all he is an engaging writer but not engaged in anything as such. The detached manner he watches the passing scene with a smile on his face as it were is his special charm.

Wherever he has been, whether in Kandy, Badulla, Trincomalee, Anuradhapura or Nuwara Eliya in the course of his work as District Land Officer, he has something memorable to tell us about the people and life in that place.

In that lot Brumpy's Daughter gets top marks for his narrative skill. Walking Wathsala Home is another, in a different mode, and is an experience that many a boy may have had and one that would bring nostalgic memories to many a grown up male.

His interest in the origin of place names or as he calls them - Those Far Away Places with Strange sounding Names - is something I share with him.

So I read on with interest those lines warning the girls in Urugasman handiye to lock themselves up in their homes because Suddo enawa nangiye. I have heard this ditty from my childhood but never wanted to know what it was all about thinking this was another one of those meaningless nursery rhymes.

Now we are told that the suddas in that rhyme refer to the Boers who were placed in or around Uragaha, sited according to Tissa Devendra in the Bentara Walallawita Korale. He also gives us a free translation of that jingle which runs like this:

Ta ra ra boom-de-yay

From Uragas man handiyay

Randy Boers are on the way,

Lock up your sisters,

Don't let them stray!

In support of his story he also carries a reprint from a Sinhala paper published in 1895 called Kavata Kathikaya which carries, not too clearly, a century old drawing with the words of this ditty in Sinhala and showing men in uniform, some on horseback, looking as if they were guarding the people who probably were the Boer prisoners of war, standing in rows.

My interest however was in the name of this drawing, which said in English, Pig Trees Junction. Now what is a pig tree? I looked up Cloughs Sinhala-English dictionary but there was no sign of a pig tree. Clough who normally goes to great lengths in supplying gratuitously the botanical names of the meanest of our flora, had no information either, botanical or otherwise, on the Ura gaha.

It was at this point that I decided to consult Lanka Gam Num Vahara (the origin of place names of Lanka) written by Arisen Ahubudu, poet, dramatist and lyricist.

Although there are many names prefixed with Uru there was no gus following it in his book. I raised the question with him and he said it was likely that uru was at first ivuru then became uru to ease the pronunciation. Ivuru means an embankment.

How Arisen Ahubudu got interested in place names is also worth recording. As a resident in Mount Lavinia, where he was a teacher at S. Thomas' College, once in a way he used to travel by train to his ancestral home in the South.

Along the way he read the name boards of the railway stations. They were in three languages, English, Sinhala and Tamil. He soon noticed a discrepancy. The names in Sinhala were not reproduced in the same form as in the original Sinhala.

This he soon discovered was not due to some perversity of the translator but the fact that some Sinhala sounds could not be transliterated in the absence of some characters in the Tamil alphabet, a common peculiarity in alphabets.

For instance he noticed that Mount Lavinia, which was Galkissa in Sinhala was Kalkissa in Tamil. That Galle was Kaali and Weligama was, accordingly, Valikamam - totally different names altogether, more Tamil sounding than Sinhala.

Alphabets, I soon discovered, had troubles of their own. We, for instance, have no letter that resembles the f in English. Cumaratunga tried to train the people to sound the f by reminding them that it is the sound made when blowing through a pipe when trying to kindle the kitchen fire.

We had no gas or kerosene cookers then. Today we may have to use a different image to show how to pronounce f

We have another letter that bothers the beginner learning to speak English. The letter o is sometimes sounded like the o in go and sometimes like the o in God. It's not the fault of the one who pronounces but of the English language, which still writes Cholmondely but pronounces it Chumley.

At international level some names sound really funny. Did you know, for instance, that Ernest Hemingway was known in the Soviet Union as Ernest Gemingway? The Arabs, for instance, knew our Dr. N. M. Perera as Dr. N. M. Berera. I suppose we have to keep a straight face when you hear a familiar name sounded like that, all because some letters are missing in our alphabets.

K. S. Sivakumaran, who covers the literary scene for both the Daily News and the daily Island, often proudly writes Mattakalapu for Batticaloa imagining it, presumably, to be a pure Tamil word.

Writing to the Ceylon Antiquary years ago, probably in the last century, a British Civil Servant by the name of B. Horsburgh, who was a Tamil scholar, made a study of the place names in Tamil and found that meanings to some of the Tamil names could not be found in Tamil. They could be understood only by restoring the meaning in the original Sinhala.

Mattakalapu is the name he picks to demonstrate this. The word for mud in Tamil he says is cheru and for lagoons, which, he says, are plentiful in Jaffna, is kali. So he says that Cherukali should be the Tamil name. Mattakalapu, which he says is meaningless in Tamil, is only an adaptation of a Sinhala name.

They were happier times then with people like the Rev Gnana Prakasar and Mudliyar Sabaratnam supplementing what Horsburgh was saying and producing lists of more Sinhala names that were Tamilised. Tissa Devendra's chance remark on the pig tree has brought us all this way.

Another place name which he came across was Aratchi Katuva which made him wonder how funny it was to name a place headman's bones.I can well understand him.

I too thought so and looked up the Soratha Sinhala dictionary. Katuva is bones all right. But kattuva is the word that turns the Aratchis grave into his estate or domain.

Horsburghs groundwork has been taken up by two scholars, one a Tamil and the other a Sinhala. The Tamil is K.Velupillai and he produced a book on the place names in Tamil, Yal Paana Vaibhava Kanmudu.

He has classified the different influences that prevailed in the naming of place names in Jaffna - Malay, Dutch and Sinhala.

According to Ahubudu, the Sinhala scholar, there are 123 pages in that book devoted to the Sinhala influences on Tamil place names, proof that Sinhala people were living in the Northern and Eastern Provinces where they were very much alive then.