Names of Sri Lanka
Encyclopedia
Sri Lanka
is an island country that has been known by many names. The existence of the island has been known to the Indic
, Chinese
, Arabic, and Western civilisations
for many millennia and the various names ascribed to the island over time reflect this.
Sri
Lanka
, meaning "resplendent land" in Sanskrit
, in 1972, before which it was known by a variety of names. in which the island was simply called Lanka. Other names using a form of Sri include Shri Lanka, preferred by the former Sri Lankan president
Ranasinghe Premadasa
but never gaining wider appeal.
In the Ramayana, it was also known as Lankadweepa, with dweepa meaning "island". From the Ramayana comes the Javanese name Alengko for Ravana
's kingdom. Another traditional Sinhala name for Sri Lanka was Lakdiva, with diva also meaning "island". A further traditional name is Lakbima. Lak in both cases is derived again from Lanka.
Of the same etymology
, Sri Lanka is known locally in Tamil
as İlankai. The appellation Lanka, however, was unknown to the Greeks
, from whom most Western
names would be derived, and is not seen in any Western names until 1972.
name Ceylon and a host of other related names all most likely trace their roots back to
the Sanskrit Sinha ("lion
"). With the Sanskrit Sinha as its root, Sinhala can be interpreted to mean "the blood
of a lion". As lions are not native to Sri Lanka, Sinhala is most often taken to mean a lion-like man - a hero
- presumably Vijaya's grandfather. The Pāli
form of the Sanskrit Sinhala is Sihalam '.
historian Ammianus Marcellinus
called the inhabitants of the island Serandives and the sixth-century Greek sailor Cosmas Indicopleustes
("Cosmas India-Voyager") called the island Sielen Diva ("island of Sielen"), with both -dives and Diva merely forms of dwîpa, meaning "island". From Sielen derived many of the other European forms: the Latin Selan, Portuguese
Ceilão, Spanish
Ceilán, French
Selon, Dutch
Zeilan, Ceilan and Seylon, and of course the English
Ceylon. Further variants include Seylan, Zeylan and Ceylan. Today, Ceylon and its equivalents in other languages are still occasionally used.
This origin is shared with many other names, such as Serendiva, Serendivus, Sirlediba, Sihala, Sinhale, Seylan, Sinhaladveepa, Sinhaladweepa, Sinhaladvipa, Sinhaladwipa,Simhaladveepa, Simhaladweepa, Simhaladvipa, Simhaladwipa, Sinhaladipa, Simhaladeepa, etc. Many of these names appear to reflect nothing more than the numerous orthographic
variations in the way these names have been transliterated into Western languages, including changing the n to m, changing the a at the end of Sinhala to an e, writing the vowel in the penultimate syllable
as an i or an ee, changing the v to a w, omitting vowels completely, and so on.
The tenth-century historian Abu Rihan Muhammad bin Ahmad, or Alberuni, called the island Singal-Dip, also derived from sinhala and a form of the word meaning "island". However, in Arabic
, Sri Lanka ultimately came to be known as Serendib or Sarandib, which led to the Persian
Serendip (as used in the Persian fairy tale
The Three Princes of Serendip
, whose heroes were always making discoveries
of things they were not seeking, from which Horace Walpole in 1754 would ultimately coin the English word serendipity
). An Arabic form of more recent vintage than Sarandib, Sailan, later came to be via predecessor words in Arabic Tilaan and Cylone, also sharing the same root as Ceylon.
geographer
Ptolemy
called the inhabitants Salai and the island Salike ("country of the Salai"), most widely believed to derive from the Pāli Sihalam.
Some argue that another Indian
name for the island - Salabha ("rich island") - is its source. Others argue that it came via the Egyptian
Siela Keh ("land of Siela"), even more similar to Cosmas
' Sielen and still of the same ultimate origin. Some scholars also hold that it was merely a corruption, probably by the Greek
sailors who traveled to Sri Lanka, of Simhalaka.
He also called it Palai-Simundu, which is believed to either mean simply "Old Simundu", using the Greek word for "old", or alternatively to derive from the Sanskrit pali-simanta (meaning "head of the sacred law"), as Sri Lanka had by that time become an important center of Buddhism
.
were a separate people living in Sri Lanka before the arrival of the Indian
s, the Dravidians or specifically the Tamils
of South India
. Those who make this distinction are more likely to use these names to describe Sri Lanka.
Sivuhelaya may also be a name of similar origin, although it is very obscure.
n conqueror Vijaya named the island Tâmraparnî ("copper-colored leaf"), a name which was adopted into Pāli as Tambaparni. The accounts of Alexander the Great's officers and others like fourth-century BCE Greek geographer
Megasthenes
, based on information they obtained from Greek and Sri Lankan travellers, called Sri Lanka Taprobanê, generally regarded as a transliteration of Tâmraparnî. In the sixteenth century Trapobana (Sri Lanka) is mentioned in the first strophe
of the Portuguese national
epic poem Os Lusíadas
by Luís de Camões
("going beyond Trapobana"). Taprobana might also be a hidden reference to Tribhuvana, the great Hindu Triad. This could mean that Luís de Camões was also saying that the Portuguese were going beyond the Earth, the Atmosphere and the Sky, in their epic quest. Later, the seventeenth-century English poet
John Milton
borrowed this for his epic English-language poem Paradise Lost
and Miguel de Cervantes
mentions a fantastic Trapobana in Don Quixote.
An alternative etymology for the Greek Taprobanê is from the Sanskrit Tambrapani ("great pond" or "pond covered with red lotus"), most likely in association with the great tanks for which Sri Lanka is famed. A third is that it derived its name from a river
; the name of the river is Tāmaraparnī or Tamiravarani or Taamravarni, which is North of Sri Lanka and is a combination of the Sanskrit taamra ("coppery") and varna ("color").
İlanare, the Arabic Tenerism ("isle of delight"), and the Chinese
Pa-Outchow ("isle of gems"). The island has also earned at least two nicknames. First, it came to be known as the "Island of Teaching" due to the large number of Greeks and Chinese who travelled to the island to learn of Buddhism. Second, due to its shape and location in the Indian Ocean
off the southeastern coast
of India, some also refer to the island as "India's teardrop
". It is also known as the "pearl of the Indian Ocean".
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is a country off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Known until 1972 as Ceylon , Sri Lanka is an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, and lies in the vicinity of India and the...
is an island country that has been known by many names. The existence of the island has been known to the Indic
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, Chinese
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
, Arabic, and Western civilisations
Western culture
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
for many millennia and the various names ascribed to the island over time reflect this.
Sri Lanka and related names
The island was renamedGeographical renaming
Geographical renaming is the changing of the name of a geographical feature or area. This can range from the uncontroversial change of a street name to a highly disputed change to the name of a country. Some names are changed locally but the new names are not recognised by other countries,...
Sri
Sri
Sri , also transliterated as Shri or Shree or shre is a word of Sanskrit origin, used in the Indian subcontinent as polite form of address equivalent to the English "Mr." in written and spoken language, or as a title of veneration for deities .-Etymology:Sri has the root meaning of radiance, or...
Lanka
Lanka
Sri Lanka is the name given in Hindu mythology to the island fortress capital of the legendary king Ravana in the great Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata...
, meaning "resplendent land" in Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
, in 1972, before which it was known by a variety of names. in which the island was simply called Lanka. Other names using a form of Sri include Shri Lanka, preferred by the former Sri Lankan president
President of Sri Lanka
The President of Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is the elected head of state and the head of government. The President is a dominant political figure in Sri Lanka. The office was created in 1978 but has grown so powerful there have been calls to restrict or even eliminate its power...
Ranasinghe Premadasa
Ranasinghe Premadasa
Ranasinghe Premadasa was the 3rd President of Sri Lanka from January 2, 1989 to May 1, 1993. Before that, he served as the Prime Minister in the government headed by J. R. Jayewardene from February 6, 1978 to January 1, 1989...
but never gaining wider appeal.
In the Ramayana, it was also known as Lankadweepa, with dweepa meaning "island". From the Ramayana comes the Javanese name Alengko for Ravana
Ravana
' is the primary antagonist character of the Hindu legend, the Ramayana; who is the great king of Lanka. In the classic text, he is mainly depicted negatively, kidnapping Rama's wife Sita, to claim vengeance on Rama and his brother Lakshmana for having cut off the nose of his sister...
's kingdom. Another traditional Sinhala name for Sri Lanka was Lakdiva, with diva also meaning "island". A further traditional name is Lakbima. Lak in both cases is derived again from Lanka.
Of the same etymology
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
, Sri Lanka is known locally in Tamil
Tamil language
Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore...
as İlankai. The appellation Lanka, however, was unknown to the Greeks
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
, from whom most Western
Western culture
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
names would be derived, and is not seen in any Western names until 1972.
Sinhala and Sihalam
The EnglishEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
name Ceylon and a host of other related names all most likely trace their roots back to
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
the Sanskrit Sinha ("lion
Lion
The lion is one of the four big cats in the genus Panthera, and a member of the family Felidae. With some males exceeding 250 kg in weight, it is the second-largest living cat after the tiger...
"). With the Sanskrit Sinha as its root, Sinhala can be interpreted to mean "the blood
Blood
Blood is a specialized bodily fluid in animals that delivers necessary substances such as nutrients and oxygen to the cells and transports metabolic waste products away from those same cells....
of a lion". As lions are not native to Sri Lanka, Sinhala is most often taken to mean a lion-like man - a hero
Hero
A hero , in Greek mythology and folklore, was originally a demigod, their cult being one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion...
- presumably Vijaya's grandfather. The Pāli
Páli
- External links :* *...
form of the Sanskrit Sinhala is Sihalam '.
Ceylon and related names
Also deriving from the Sanskrit Sinhala via the Pāli Sihalam, the fourth-century RomanRoman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean....
historian Ammianus Marcellinus
Ammianus Marcellinus
Ammianus Marcellinus was a fourth-century Roman historian. He wrote the penultimate major historical account surviving from Antiquity...
called the inhabitants of the island Serandives and the sixth-century Greek sailor Cosmas Indicopleustes
Cosmas Indicopleustes
Cosmas Indicopleustes was an Alexandrian merchant and later hermit, probably of Nestorian tendencies. He was a 6th-century traveller, who made several voyages to India during the reign of emperor Justinian...
("Cosmas India-Voyager") called the island Sielen Diva ("island of Sielen"), with both -dives and Diva merely forms of dwîpa, meaning "island". From Sielen derived many of the other European forms: the Latin Selan, Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
Ceilão, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
Ceilán, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
Selon, Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
Zeilan, Ceilan and Seylon, and of course the English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
Ceylon. Further variants include Seylan, Zeylan and Ceylan. Today, Ceylon and its equivalents in other languages are still occasionally used.
This origin is shared with many other names, such as Serendiva, Serendivus, Sirlediba, Sihala, Sinhale, Seylan, Sinhaladveepa, Sinhaladweepa, Sinhaladvipa, Sinhaladwipa,Simhaladveepa, Simhaladweepa, Simhaladvipa, Simhaladwipa, Sinhaladipa, Simhaladeepa, etc. Many of these names appear to reflect nothing more than the numerous orthographic
Orthographic
Orthographic may refer to:* Orthographic projection** Orthographic projection ** Orthographic projection * Orthography...
variations in the way these names have been transliterated into Western languages, including changing the n to m, changing the a at the end of Sinhala to an e, writing the vowel in the penultimate syllable
Syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
as an i or an ee, changing the v to a w, omitting vowels completely, and so on.
The tenth-century historian Abu Rihan Muhammad bin Ahmad, or Alberuni, called the island Singal-Dip, also derived from sinhala and a form of the word meaning "island". However, in Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
, Sri Lanka ultimately came to be known as Serendib or Sarandib, which led to the Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
Serendip (as used in the Persian fairy tale
Fairy tale
A fairy tale is a type of short story that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies...
The Three Princes of Serendip
The Three Princes of Serendip
The Three Princes of Serendip is the English version of the Peregrinaggio di tre giovani figliuoli del re di Serendippo published by Michele Tramezzino in Venice in 1557. Tramezzino claimed to have heard the story from one Christophero Armeno who had translated the Persian fairy tale into Italian...
, whose heroes were always making discoveries
Discovery (observation)
Discovery is the act of detecting something new, or something "old" that had been unknown. With reference to science and academic disciplines, discovery is the observation of new phenomena, new actions, or new events and providing new reasoning to explain the knowledge gathered through such...
of things they were not seeking, from which Horace Walpole in 1754 would ultimately coin the English word serendipity
Serendipity
Serendipity means a "happy accident" or "pleasant surprise"; specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it. The word has been voted as one of the ten English words hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company. However, due to its...
). An Arabic form of more recent vintage than Sarandib, Sailan, later came to be via predecessor words in Arabic Tilaan and Cylone, also sharing the same root as Ceylon.
Salike
The second-century GreekByzantine Empire
The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania to its inhabitants and neighbours, the Empire was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State...
geographer
Geographer
A geographer is a scholar whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society.Although geographers are historically known as people who make maps, map making is actually the field of study of cartography, a subset of geography...
Ptolemy
Ptolemy
Claudius Ptolemy , was a Roman citizen of Egypt who wrote in Greek. He was a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, and poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. He lived in Egypt under Roman rule, and is believed to have been born in the town of Ptolemais Hermiou in the...
called the inhabitants Salai and the island Salike ("country of the Salai"), most widely believed to derive from the Pāli Sihalam.
Some argue that another Indian
Indo-Aryan languages
The Indo-Aryan languages constitutes a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family...
name for the island - Salabha ("rich island") - is its source. Others argue that it came via the Egyptian
Egyptian language
Egyptian is the oldest known indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 17th century AD in the...
Siela Keh ("land of Siela"), even more similar to Cosmas
Cosmas Indicopleustes
Cosmas Indicopleustes was an Alexandrian merchant and later hermit, probably of Nestorian tendencies. He was a 6th-century traveller, who made several voyages to India during the reign of emperor Justinian...
' Sielen and still of the same ultimate origin. Some scholars also hold that it was merely a corruption, probably by the Greek
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
sailors who traveled to Sri Lanka, of Simhalaka.
Simoundou and related names
Ptolemy also called the island Simoundou or Simundu (probably meant to read Silundu), also believed to derive ultimately from the Sanskrit sinhala. From Ptolemy we learn that, relative to Taprobanê, Simoundou was an ancient name for Sri Lanka (from Ptolemy's perspective, and thus even more so now).He also called it Palai-Simundu, which is believed to either mean simply "Old Simundu", using the Greek word for "old", or alternatively to derive from the Sanskrit pali-simanta (meaning "head of the sacred law"), as Sri Lanka had by that time become an important center of Buddhism
Buddhism
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
.
Heladiva and related names
The names Heladiva and Heladveepa have two possible origins, a point of hot debate between certain Sri Lankans. Some argue that these are nothing more than an additional type of name sharing the same origin as those related to Ceylon mentioned above, simply having been shortened by dropping the Sin or Sim. Others argue that the HelaElu
The Elu language is the name given to the ancient form of the Sinhala variant of the Middle Indo-Aryan languages...
were a separate people living in Sri Lanka before the arrival of the Indian
History of India
The history of India begins with evidence of human activity of Homo sapiens as long as 75,000 years ago, or with earlier hominids including Homo erectus from about 500,000 years ago. The Indus Valley Civilization, which spread and flourished in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent from...
s, the Dravidians or specifically the Tamils
Tamil people
Tamil people , also called Tamils or Tamilians, are an ethnic group native to Tamil Nadu, India and the north-eastern region of Sri Lanka. Historic and post 15th century emigrant communities are also found across the world, notably Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritius, South Africa, Australia, Canada,...
of South India
South India
South India is the area encompassing India's states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu as well as the union territories of Lakshadweep and Pondicherry, occupying 19.31% of India's area...
. Those who make this distinction are more likely to use these names to describe Sri Lanka.
Sivuhelaya may also be a name of similar origin, although it is very obscure.
Tâmraparnî and related names
Other names have also been used in the West to describe the island. The IndiaIndia
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
n conqueror Vijaya named the island Tâmraparnî ("copper-colored leaf"), a name which was adopted into Pāli as Tambaparni. The accounts of Alexander the Great's officers and others like fourth-century BCE Greek geographer
Geographer
A geographer is a scholar whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society.Although geographers are historically known as people who make maps, map making is actually the field of study of cartography, a subset of geography...
Megasthenes
Megasthenes
Megasthenes was a Greek ethnographer in the Hellenistic period, author of the work Indica.He was born in Asia Minor and became an ambassador of Seleucus I of Syria possibly to Chandragupta Maurya in Pataliputra, India. However the exact date of his embassy is uncertain...
, based on information they obtained from Greek and Sri Lankan travellers, called Sri Lanka Taprobanê, generally regarded as a transliteration of Tâmraparnî. In the sixteenth century Trapobana (Sri Lanka) is mentioned in the first strophe
Strophe
A strophe forms the first part of the ode in Ancient Greek tragedy, followed by the antistrophe and epode. In its original Greek setting, "strophe, antistrophe and epode were a kind of stanza framed only for the music," as John Milton wrote in the preface to Samson Agonistes, with the strophe...
of the Portuguese national
Portuguese poetry
-History:The earliest Portuguese poetry was produced in Galicia, today a Spanish province that shares some similarities with Portuguese culture. Like the troubadour culture in the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe, Galician-Portuguese poets sang the love for a woman, that often turned into...
epic poem Os Lusíadas
Os Lusíadas
Os Lusíadas , usually translated as The Lusiads, is a Portuguese epic poem by Luís Vaz de Camões ....
by Luís de Camões
Luís de Camões
Luís Vaz de Camões is considered Portugal's and the Portuguese language's greatest poet. His mastery of verse has been compared to that of Shakespeare, Vondel, Homer, Virgil and Dante. He wrote a considerable amount of lyrical poetry and drama but is best remembered for his epic work Os Lusíadas...
("going beyond Trapobana"). Taprobana might also be a hidden reference to Tribhuvana, the great Hindu Triad. This could mean that Luís de Camões was also saying that the Portuguese were going beyond the Earth, the Atmosphere and the Sky, in their epic quest. Later, the seventeenth-century English poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
John Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
borrowed this for his epic English-language poem Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse...
and Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written...
mentions a fantastic Trapobana in Don Quixote.
An alternative etymology for the Greek Taprobanê is from the Sanskrit Tambrapani ("great pond" or "pond covered with red lotus"), most likely in association with the great tanks for which Sri Lanka is famed. A third is that it derived its name from a river
River
A river is a natural watercourse, usually freshwater, flowing towards an ocean, a lake, a sea, or another river. In a few cases, a river simply flows into the ground or dries up completely before reaching another body of water. Small rivers may also be called by several other names, including...
; the name of the river is Tāmaraparnī or Tamiravarani or Taamravarni, which is North of Sri Lanka and is a combination of the Sanskrit taamra ("coppery") and varna ("color").
Other names
Other names include the TamilTamil language
Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore...
İlanare, the Arabic Tenerism ("isle of delight"), and the Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
Pa-Outchow ("isle of gems"). The island has also earned at least two nicknames. First, it came to be known as the "Island of Teaching" due to the large number of Greeks and Chinese who travelled to the island to learn of Buddhism. Second, due to its shape and location in the Indian Ocean
Indian Ocean
The Indian Ocean is the third largest of the world's oceanic divisions, covering approximately 20% of the water on the Earth's surface. It is bounded on the north by the Indian Subcontinent and Arabian Peninsula ; on the west by eastern Africa; on the east by Indochina, the Sunda Islands, and...
off the southeastern coast
Coast
A coastline or seashore is the area where land meets the sea or ocean. A precise line that can be called a coastline cannot be determined due to the dynamic nature of tides. The term "coastal zone" can be used instead, which is a spatial zone where interaction of the sea and land processes occurs...
of India, some also refer to the island as "India's teardrop
Tears
Tears are secretions that clean and lubricate the eyes. Lacrimation or lachrymation is the production or shedding of tears....
". It is also known as the "pearl of the Indian Ocean".