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ArchivesRe: ayan or ayaan - for boy
in reply to a message by new mother
Similar names often have more than one origin. In this case, as I pointed out in http://www.behindthename.com/bb/arcview.php?id=404489&board=gen, there are a lot of Sanskrit words, with different pronounications, which may be written in the roman script as ayan. See also another post at http://www.behindthename.com/bb/arcview.php?id=313092&board=gen. In my posts, I usually write A for a vowel in Sanskrit that was pronounce as the a in English car, whereas I write a when I mean the vowel that starts the English word about.
In summary of those posts, the name I have heard is aYan, and a name from mythology with not too nice connotations is AYAn. As words, you also have aYAn and Ayan in Sanskrit (in each case, I have dropped a final -a which is not pronounced in many Indian languages today).
You have to realize that there is no standardized roman spellings for Sanskrit words: there are standardized spellings in scripts of Brahmi origin, but there are more than one way of transliterating them. Moreover, for everyday use, most people prefer to use a spelling that better suggests the original pronounciation to the community they are in, than try to transliterate the spelling of the name. And, to complicate matters, one usually does not try to reproduce the Sanskrit pronounciation, rather an attempt is made to convey the pronounciation of a cognate word in the speaker's native tongue. Thus, for example, I have seen Sanskrit araNi spelt Auroni when the parents were Bengali living in the US, and Sanskrit aravinda spelt as both Arvind and Aurobindo, depending on whether the person was from Delhi or Kolkata. Similarly a spelling that works in France may not work well in the US and vice-versa. So, you can always spell any of the names we are talking of as ayan, even if you chose, for example, the one which, in Sanskrit, is aYAna.
In summary of those posts, the name I have heard is aYan, and a name from mythology with not too nice connotations is AYAn. As words, you also have aYAn and Ayan in Sanskrit (in each case, I have dropped a final -a which is not pronounced in many Indian languages today).
You have to realize that there is no standardized roman spellings for Sanskrit words: there are standardized spellings in scripts of Brahmi origin, but there are more than one way of transliterating them. Moreover, for everyday use, most people prefer to use a spelling that better suggests the original pronounciation to the community they are in, than try to transliterate the spelling of the name. And, to complicate matters, one usually does not try to reproduce the Sanskrit pronounciation, rather an attempt is made to convey the pronounciation of a cognate word in the speaker's native tongue. Thus, for example, I have seen Sanskrit araNi spelt Auroni when the parents were Bengali living in the US, and Sanskrit aravinda spelt as both Arvind and Aurobindo, depending on whether the person was from Delhi or Kolkata. Similarly a spelling that works in France may not work well in the US and vice-versa. So, you can always spell any of the names we are talking of as ayan, even if you chose, for example, the one which, in Sanskrit, is aYAna.
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thank you for your message.
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