Re: KABOOTREE or CABOOTREE meaning ?
by তন্ময় ভট (guest)
12/7/2007, 5:58 PM
I guess you do not have the information. So, I cannot tell you if the following is what you want to know.
kabutar in Farsi means a pigeon, and is the common word for pigeon in the Hindi belt in North India. kabutari (long -u-, -a- is a schwa, or even omitted) is feminine of that. It might have been used as the name for a person keeping pegions, but I do not know that. In its derogatory uses, it is used to refer to women who would fly away, not stay. It is used as a female name in the villages of Madhya Pradesh-Uttar Pradesh-Rajasthan-Punjab region (i.e. the north-western part of India).
I do not know that rural female names like this actually do refer to the common words that they sound like, and that they are spelt as. For much of the history, the villages of India have been illiterate, and it is completely possible that a pretty unfamiliar old word in a court setting gets misheard as a common word out here, and that may ultimately be the origin of the name. I have no reason to believe in any particular case that something like that has happened.