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Archivesmeaning of the name Somaiah
This is mostly for Mucaktera Dixit Somaiah who asked for the meaning of the name Somaiah:
When I was a kid, I asked my dad what my name meant - most Indian names have a meaning. He replied that Somaiah meant "Chandra" or moon god, as "Som" meant moon, and "aiah" meant master or god.
However, after doing some research on my own, I have come to a different conclusion. My family comes from an Aryan tribe, as most Indians do. Aryans drank a hallucigenic drink made from a mushroom called 'Soma' (Amanita muscaria or the Fly Agaric ). This hallucinogen gave Aryans an edge over their enemies in battle because they went beserk and fought better, as they did not feel the pain of their wounds until the effects of their drink wore off, which was usually after the battle was over. One of the Aryan kings was especially fierce after taking this drug, and is referred in the Rig Veda as a master of 'Soma'.
Eventually this king became so accomplished that he was deified permanently into the hindu pantheon of gods as Indra.
So essentially the name Somaiah refers to Indra the king who got intoxicated and got into fights, which sounds a lot like the Coorgs of today!
Interestingly Indra, the Greek Apollo and the Norsk Thor all have the same root.
When I was a kid, I asked my dad what my name meant - most Indian names have a meaning. He replied that Somaiah meant "Chandra" or moon god, as "Som" meant moon, and "aiah" meant master or god.
However, after doing some research on my own, I have come to a different conclusion. My family comes from an Aryan tribe, as most Indians do. Aryans drank a hallucigenic drink made from a mushroom called 'Soma' (Amanita muscaria or the Fly Agaric ). This hallucinogen gave Aryans an edge over their enemies in battle because they went beserk and fought better, as they did not feel the pain of their wounds until the effects of their drink wore off, which was usually after the battle was over. One of the Aryan kings was especially fierce after taking this drug, and is referred in the Rig Veda as a master of 'Soma'.
Eventually this king became so accomplished that he was deified permanently into the hindu pantheon of gods as Indra.
So essentially the name Somaiah refers to Indra the king who got intoxicated and got into fights, which sounds a lot like the Coorgs of today!
Interestingly Indra, the Greek Apollo and the Norsk Thor all have the same root.
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Replies
This is a facts board, and many of the statements in the post above are not clearly defensible as facts. Most of the following is probably off-topic, so please take any discussion related to those aspects elsewhere. (I have a signature below if you want to discuss it offline).
I do not know if the etymology of somaiah given above is correct or not, but it is correct that without further information both moon and the ancient drink are equally likely elements in the name.
Part of the problem is that the aiah is not a Sanskrit form. somArya exists as a Sanskrit name where the Arya element (same as in the root of the word Aryan) means honourable from a root meaning to go straight or rise (This root R has cognates all over and Arya itself has the cognate Ehre in German and Erin in Irish). The r in the word Arya has often been softened into non-existence in Neo-Indo-Aryan languages. A far more common word and epithet in Vedic is somArha, where arha means deserving (cognates exist in Greek).
The word soma itself is from a root meaning to press and simply means juice. There was a popular drink which was so important that it itself was deified, and was considered the drink of the gods! We do not know, however, what this drink was: we know for sure that even in the 19th century, a particular plant was called soma in Hindu religious contexts and another haoma (the cognate) in Persian. Neither of these two are likely to have been the original, and there is literary evidence that the identity of the plant changed because of difficulty in obtaining it. In any case, it is only one of the theories that it was a hallucinogenic mushroom: I personally like the theory that is some kind of ephedra, though I am not a historian.
The statements that most Indians come from Aryan tribes is less defensible. `Aryan' is properly speaking a linguistic classification: and all indications are that they originated from a group of related languages, possibly over a largish area of cultural contact centered somewhere in Central Asia, about seven thousand years back.
I do not know if the etymology of somaiah given above is correct or not, but it is correct that without further information both moon and the ancient drink are equally likely elements in the name.
Part of the problem is that the aiah is not a Sanskrit form. somArya exists as a Sanskrit name where the Arya element (same as in the root of the word Aryan) means honourable from a root meaning to go straight or rise (This root R has cognates all over and Arya itself has the cognate Ehre in German and Erin in Irish). The r in the word Arya has often been softened into non-existence in Neo-Indo-Aryan languages. A far more common word and epithet in Vedic is somArha, where arha means deserving (cognates exist in Greek).
The word soma itself is from a root meaning to press and simply means juice. There was a popular drink which was so important that it itself was deified, and was considered the drink of the gods! We do not know, however, what this drink was: we know for sure that even in the 19th century, a particular plant was called soma in Hindu religious contexts and another haoma (the cognate) in Persian. Neither of these two are likely to have been the original, and there is literary evidence that the identity of the plant changed because of difficulty in obtaining it. In any case, it is only one of the theories that it was a hallucinogenic mushroom: I personally like the theory that is some kind of ephedra, though I am not a historian.
The statements that most Indians come from Aryan tribes is less defensible. `Aryan' is properly speaking a linguistic classification: and all indications are that they originated from a group of related languages, possibly over a largish area of cultural contact centered somewhere in Central Asia, about seven thousand years back.
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