Sri Lankan Towns Without A
At parties I end up talking to kids. This being Sri Lanka it’s entirely natural to have three generations at a party, each entirely being themselves. As it should be. Often when I go out I feel like I’m talking to myself, or as a PR exercise. Kids are some of the few people that genuinely surprise me. Kids are often wrong, but not for lack of reasoning. If anything they reason more, albeit with less information. I know a bunch of stuff by now, but I don’t think that hard anymore. Little Seba was asking me how many Sri Lankan towns I could name that don’t have the letter ‘a’ in them. It’s amazing, but I could only think of Colombo, Negombo and, like Pottuvil. Being that I don’t know much about Sri Lankan geography we looked at a map and there’s still only like 10 or 15. It’s odd. I included the whole list we could think of after the jump. What’s interesting is that almost all of the names without ‘a’ in them are Tamil.
Colombo
Negombo
Kilinochchi
Delft
Pottuvil
Point Pedro
Pungitivu
Puttur
Pooneryn
Puloli
Puthukudiyi….uh
Uppuveli
Mutur
Nedunkeni
The Sinhala names are all ‘allas’ or ‘duwas’ or something or rather. Strange.
It’s just your lack of knowledge in sinhala and tamil languages. That’s all there is to it.
It’s a linguistic phenomenon, not really about me. The default sound for a Sinhala consonant (without a vowel modifier) is ‘a’, ba, ma, tha, etc. I guess the Tamil default is different, if they have a default. Not that familiar with Tamil.
dompe, kotte, negombo, fort, kites, point pedro,