The following few posts are (likely) going to be titbits about things I've learned and experienced through my recent trip to Singapore. Well, not really 'recent'; it was a few months ago. I just haven't had the time to edit these. Maybe we can call these The Singapore Diaries . Or Tales from the Land of the Lion . Ever since reading Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence , I've been trying to make sense of the connection between languages. Our taxi driver told us that Singapore was originally Singapura in Malay. 'Singa' meant 'lion', and 'pura' meant 'city'. That got me thinking, because the suffix '-pur' is commonly used in the names of different locations in Bangladesh. 'Singa' was pretty close to 'sinha', which is close to 'shingho', the Bengali word for lion. Singapore . Sinhapor . Shingopur . I guess it's not that big of a discovery, and turns out, I could've just searched it up. But I stil...