Linguifusion!

Happened to look up references to the Sphinx, the sand-worn sculpture in the Egyptian desert, with the body of a lion and a face that seems human. Paul Theroux says in one of his books that native Egyptians point it out to tourists calling it ‘Safinkees’. That could be their way of pronouncing Sphinx, just as Hindi speakers refer to English as ‘Angrezi’.
A theory goes that the Greeks found it and named it in their own way, but that the locals called the fearful thing Abu-el-Houl, meaning Father of Terror. Well that is one Abu whose tribe you wouldn’t want to increase, unless you subscribe to terror and its methods, of which the world now is not in particularly short supply – go ye east, west, north, or south.
It is said that the sculpture just as famous as the pyramids represents the Sun as God, since the royals of Egypt not only worshipped the Sun but claimed direct descent from the star that lights our days. The lion of course is King of all the beasts.
What then about the human face? And what is the origin of the Greek name Sphinx?
We go again to Theroux, and he says that the creature is Ra Herakhti, or the Sun, and it bears the face of one Khafre, who ruled Egypt when the sculpture was made and erected facing east,
the direction of dawn. Since the face was made to bear a close likeness to the living Pharaoh’s visage by a team of sculptors working under a skillful master – the people called it the ‘Living Image’ of their ruler, and in their language Living Image was rendered as Sesheb Ankh.
This was perhaps too much for the Greeks to pronounce, and they got the approximation Sphinx suitable to their own tongue.
Residents of Chennai in India may recall that there used to be a bus stop near Triplicane called just ‘BB’. Not for the sultry siren Brigitte Bardot, or the very staid British Broadcasting, but for ‘Barber’s Bridge’. And, indeed, there was a bridge there.
But what was the association with ‘barber’? A strange tale unfolds. The bridge apparently was named Hamilton’s Bridge. Local folk in course of time, aided by the cursory shouts of busy bus conductors, came to call it “Ambattan Bridge” which in Tamizh came to be translated as Ambattan Varavathi. Reversing the process, Ambattan Varavathi became in English Barber’s Bridge. And so came about the abbreviation BB!
As cultures and languages come into contact, stranger things can happen, and pretty fast.