[Facts] Re: Meaning of Binisha for baby girl
in reply to a message by Ora (hufflepuffer)
In Eastern India, the labiodental (v- like sound) of Western Indian turns into the bilabial b-. I have seen both the vinishA and binishA spellings. Since vi- is a common prefix, with semantic scope ranging from opposition or separation, including negation, to specialization and hence superlative, and nishA is a common word meaning night, the combination sounds Sanskrit, even though no meaning can be discerned. It could mean possibly "nightless" but it is far more likely that it is a made up word patterned after the English Vanessa using Sanskrit/Western Indian phonotactics. With vinishA in existence, binishA follows as the name moves east. All this is rather a baseless conjecture, though.