The story of my name!

 When I was born , my father was working for wildlife and forest conservation. So I was named Vanya, which means forest in sanskrit. Many times, people who came to our home, pronounced my name as Vaanya, which was supposed to be pronounce as Vanyaa. This always made me wonder, is there any other meaning for my name? But yesterday I accidently typed my name in google search and learnt more things about my name. Well, Vanya doesn’t only means forest… it has lot other meanings in other languages!

So here in India, there are a tonnes of girl’s names that ends with ‘nya’ or ‘ya’. For example : Dhanya, Manya, Kanya, Aanya, Aranya, Ananya, Kavya, Navya.. etc. Also, almost 80% of my friends’ name ends with ‘nya’ or ‘ya’ ! So whenever someone asks my name, many of them confuses it to some other name like Dhanya, and I have to explain my name with syllables.

This time, I searched over 50 websites about names and their meanings and finally found some meanings which seriously suits me! Literally Vanya means ‘Wild’. I think my name suits me… sometimes I’m wild about wild (no puns intended!) But according to many other sources, in sanskrit Vanya also meant savage or untamed 

Also, In Russian and some other languages , Vanya is a common name. In Russian, it means ‘Gracious’ , but it is a boy name in Russia and the pronounciation changes… so it doesn’t count. There’s a famous literary work in russian named Uncle Vanya, written by Anton chekhov.

So when I searched more meanings for my name in other languages, the story became too complicated. Some says it is a slavic origin name. And some says it is greek and latin origin name, and some says indian name… Now I was confused where my name came from. In greek and Latin it means butterfly and one who brings good news . And it also said it has hebrew origins! So according to all these, my name has sevaral versions and it has Indian, Slavic, Hebrew, Russian, Greek, Latin origins!

I somehow managed to find a sanskrit dictionary and I found some more interesting topics. In some ancient ayurveda books , Vanya means rosary pea, a beautiful red seed which is used for mesuring gold. Also the seeds are extreemly poisonus. My mother makes jewellaries by a slighly different variety of these seeds. And Vanya is also a synonym of Mudgaparni in ayurveda, which is now called as Green gram, according to a  13th-century medicinal dictionary called Raj Nighantu.

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  Rosary Pea, gulaganji in Kannada. Photo by Pinterest

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  rosary pea jewellary that my mother makes

No matter how many meanings my name has, I’ll prefer forest as the meaning( I mean, I can’t say green gram or savage. Right?) my name has now 6 meanings! I never thought the meaning of my name is this complicated.

Finally ,the meanings of my name are:

• Forest/ wild ( indian languages)
• butterfly (greek and latin)
• one who brings good news( greek and latin)
• gracious (russian, scandinavian countries)
• Rosary pea (sanskrit – in ayurveda)
• Green gram(sanskrit- in ayurveda)

After learning all these meanings I am wondering how can a name have so many meanings and how can all these are similar in some points. Ex: you might’ve observed that in almost all cultures, Vanya is a girl name( Russia is an exception). Is it because cross cultural communication? I don’t know. What do you think of this? Do your name have various meanings too? What is the meaning of your name? I’d love to know!

References :

• https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/vanya
• https://www.meaningofthename.com/vanya
• https://www.moonastro.com/babyname/baby%20name%20vanya%20meaning.aspx
• https://www.shabdkosh.com/dictionary/kannada-english/vanya/vanya-meaning-in-english

These are some of the websites I found useful while finiding the meanings behind my name.