Grandleon, name origin?

[Generality]

This has been bugging me for a little while now, and surprisingly it doesn't seem to have been thoroughly debated by the community yet.

The Grandleon is the original Japanese name for the Masamune. So, where the heck did that name come from? What does it mean?

[Glennleo]

Ugh... I just remembering hearing this, or reading it somewhere.

I'll try to look it up in posts if I have time, but by then I'm sure someone will have posted it anyways.
It was pretty interesting to say the least.

[Chrono'99]

It could simply mean "grand lion" or "great lion". There are a lot of Persian allusions in Zeal, and the lion is an important symbol of Persia/Iran that used to be featured on some of their flags.

[V_Translanka]

I always forget, which is the older sibling? Masa/Grand or Mune/Leon? Which one of them said they wanted to be the wind? I wonder if that could have any relevance to their actual names...or if their's any correlation between theirs and Doreen's original name, Dream...Hmm....

[Chrono'99]

Masa is the big brother. It's convenient since Masa=Grand.

[Gamer8585]

Yeah, I've been wondering the same thing for a while. Why the name Granleon? At first I thought it was the name of a famous/legendary sword, like the Masamune, but that thought lead to a dead end. So I guess Chrono'99's theory of it being a play on the phrase Grand Lion is probably correct. In addition to the Persian symbolism which he mentioned the slight alteration of words also has other presidents in Chrono Trigger, the clearest examples being Mao's (Magus') 3 great generals: Vinnagar (Ozzie), Mayonay (Flea), and Soysaw (Slash).

[curufeanor]

Although the sword is gurandorion, the creatures themselves are guran and rion.  My theory is that the "do" is really "to" with a voicing phenomenon (called rendaku) applied, although rendaku usually isn't applied to this "to".  "to" means "and", so the sword name would be "guran and rion" if my theory were true.

The J word for lion (feline creature) is raion.  The borrow-word for grand actually comes from Italian "grande" (according to my dictionary), and the Japanese turned it into gurande.  But they use gurando in compound words like gurandoopera ("grand opera") or gurandosuramu ("grand slam").   Neither guran nor rion seems to have any Japanese meaning, but that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't just an alternate Japanification of "grand lion".