From Diyabariya to Duberria: Lanka’s Forgotten Footprint in Global Science

For centuries, Sri Lanka's biological knowledge travelled the world - anonymously.

- BY IFHAM NIZAM

Embedded deep within the pages of European natural history books, Sinhala words were copied, distorted and repurposed, eventually fossilising into Latinised scientific names of snakes, bats and crops found thousands of kilometres away.Africa's reptiles, Europe's taxonomic catalogues and global field guides still carry those echoes, largely unnoticed and uncredited.

Now, a Sri Lankan herpetologist is tracing those forgotten linguistic footprints back to their source.

Through painstaking archival research into 17thand 18th-century zoological texts, herpetologist and taxonomic researcher Sanjaya Bandara has uncovered compelling evidence that several globally recognised scientific names - long assumed to be derived from Greek or Latin - are in fact rooted in Sinhala vernacular terms used by villagers, farmers and hunters in precolonial Sri Lanka.

"Scientific names are not just labels. They are stories," Bandara told The Island. "And in many cases, those stories begin right here in Sri Lanka."

At the heart of Bandara's work is etymology - the study of word origins - a field that plays a crucial role in zoology and taxonomy.

While classical languages dominate scientific nomenclature, his findings reveal that Sinhala words were quietly embedded in the foundations of modern biological classification as early as the 1700s.