Sri Lanka “Finding Serendipity on the Island of Serendib” VegVoyages Inaugural Trip – 2019
Sri Lanka “Finding Serendipity on the Island of Serendib” VegVoyages Inaugural Trip – 2019 Ayubowan and Vanakkam Ayubowan is the greeting used in Sinhalese, the language spoken by the majority of Sri Lankans. Vanakkam is the greeting used in Tamil, the language spoken by Sri Lankan Tamils who typically live in the Northeastern part of the country. When you greet people in Sri Lanka, you don’t say hello in the way that we do in the West. With your hands placed near your heart in prayer position you say Ayubowan or Vanakkam. How do you pronounce them? Here’s my best “sound-out”. Ayyubowan - when you say it fast it’s almost like I-boo-juan; where juan is pronounced like a man’s name, and that’s about as close as I can get on paper. So just use I-boo-juan and say it fast so maybe, just maybe, no one notices you mangled it a bit. Vanakkam - this one reminds me of willkommen in German, probably due to the alliteration in both of them. So it’s Va-Na-Kam (the va lik...
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