Kinara and Cinn Mhara (Kinvara)

I was walking along the seafront in Clontarf in Dublin, Ireland a few years ago and I saw a Pakistani restaurant situated in a lovely spot near the Bull Wall in Clontarf. The name of the restaurant was Kinara. I did a little research on the name and once again was surprised to find how close Urdu is to Gaelic (the Irish language). Apparently, "Kinara" means "At the water's edge", "bank" or "shore".

It reminded me of a town in Galway on the west coast of Ireland called Kinvara, which means "head of the sea". Kinvara is the anglicization of the original Gaelic name for the place "Cinn Mhara". "Cinn" or "ceann" is the Gaelic word for "head", and "Mhara" in Gaelic means "sea" in English. So you see how close the Urdu and Gaelic languages are here again.

Kinvara, Co. Galway

Platts dictionary of Urdu, classical Hindi and English, published 1884, accessible online.

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