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[Facts] Russian name Batania
I recently came across the female Russian name Batania. Anyone know what it means? ould it be related to Bethnania?
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Would you mind providing a little bit more information about where and how you stumbled upon this name? For example, were you able to see in which city or region in Russia the bearer of the name lived in? I tried finding information about the name based on the information that you had already provided, but I am having a hard time finding a decent amount of bearers, let alone etymological information about the name. As such, the tiniest crumb of extra information that you can provide might help.From what I can tell so far, the proper Russian spelling of the name is probably Батаня (Batanya), rather than Батания (Bataniya), which would have been the most logical guess. I am basing this on the fact that Батаня (Batanya) is the only spelling that actually yielded some results on VKontakte (ВКонтакте), the Russian equivalent of Facebook. It showed three women in total: one was 66 years old and from Chirchiq (in Uzbekistan), another was 56 years old and from Zhdanovka (not sure where that is: it could be in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia or Ukraine, as there are several places with that name across these countries) and the third one had no information publicly listed. If this is anything to go by, then this name is not only extremely rare but also possibly not of Russian origin in the first place (i.e. it may be Kazakh or Uzbek, or even Arabic or Persian, since Arabic and Persian names are quite common in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan).I also tried the spellings Ватания (Vataniya) and Ватаня (Vatanya), by the way - but these yielded even less useful search results on Google.Interestingly, when running some of these spellings through Google Translator, I was asked if I didn't mean батяня (batyanya) instead. This is apparently the Russian equivalent of the English word "pop, dad", which itself is probably a more elaborate form (or even a double diminutive) of Russian батя (batya) meaning "dad".

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The Batania I came across was a Russian-Jewish woman born into a middle class family before the Revolution.Thank you for the information you gave me even if you couldn't find the origin of the name.
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I think it could possibly be Yiddish, since Yiddish names used to be very common among Russian Jews. Perhaps it could be related to Bithiah.
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I found a page about a place in Syria called Bathaniyya that allegedly comes from Arabic "bathna" meaning "land without stones", but there is probably a smoother translation than that.https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/BathaniyyaIt seems to correspond to Bashan, which is Latinised as Batanea.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BatanaeaThis place also seems to have some significance in Abrahamic religions.Although to me, the connection between Batania and Batanea doesn't seem any stronger than the connection between Batania and Bethania.As an aside, perhaps you stumbled upon a place name? It seems to be a homonym for Батања, the Serbian word for the Hungarian town of Battonya, which has a Serbian minority. The Romanian exonym is Bătania. On the Hungarian wikipedia page for it, opinions seem divided about where its name comes from.https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battonya#Nev.C3.A9nek_eredete
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