Punjab place names

[N. Ganesan]

While settlement name endings with -Ur are highly important from
Punjab toponymy, I wonder whether "Urnai" as the place where Sarasvati
river meets another river has something to do with ta. UruNi, "a place
where the village gets water from/ public drinking water tank in a
village or town".

B. C. Law, Mountains and Rivers of India, 1968, p. 195,
"In the SiddhAnta-ziromaNi (Golaadhyaaya, bhuvanakoSa), the SarasvatI
is correctly described as a river, which is visible in one place and
invisisble in another. It disappears for a time in the sand near the
village of Chalaur and reappears at Bhavanipur. At BAlchchApar it
again disppears, but appears again at Bara Kera; at *Urnai* near
Pehoa, it is joined by the MarkaNDa, .."

Francois Gautier, a supporter for the Indigenous Aryan hypothesis,
writes  in his article "Sonia Gandhi and the great Aryan myth" in The
Indian  Express newspaper on Sep. 27, 1999:
"For a long time, the Sarasvati river was indeed considered a myth,
until the American satellite Landstat was able to photograph and map
the bed of this magnificient river, which was nearly 14 km wide
and took its source in the Himalayas. Archaeologist Paul-Henri
Francfort, who studied the Sarasvati region at the beginning of the
Nineties, found out the Sarasvati had "disappeared", because around
2200 B.C., an immense drought reduced the whole region to aridity and
famine. "Thus", he writes, "most inhabitants moved away from the
Saraswati to settle on the banks of the Indus and Sutlej rivers." "

Are Urnai on Sarasvati riverbed and Dravidian uuru.ni related?

Regards,
N. Ganesan



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