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The Land of the Lion

 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 still thought it was fun to try to figure it out. 

I find linguistics, or the study of languages, so interesting. It's so cool how many of the south and south-east Asian languages are based on Sanskrit, which is why they have so much in common. 

Languages are so pretty I want to cry. I think I'll write more about this (and why Babel altered my brain chemistry). Let's see. 

This post is not my best but I hope there will be better ones in the future. Thank you for sticking around.

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