The real meaning of Tatiana: Missing link found?
Tatiana is such a beautiful name. The only meaning I can find is "fairy princess" which seems a little odd and unauthentic. I am also finding that the true meaning is unknown. I think I may have found the missing link, revealing that Tatiana could mean "Gift of God"Here is what I am finding:
"Tatiana is the feminine form of the Roman name Tatianus, a derivative of the Roman name Tatius... Tatius is Roman family name of unknown meaning, possibly of Sabine origin."Could there be a link between Tatius (Possibly Sabine - which spoke an Indo-European language, and was located in ancient Rome) and Tadeo (Italian version of Thaddeus)? It doesn't seem to be too far of a stretch. If Tatius is a Roman family name spoken in Indo-European language, and if you combine "TAD"eo with Thadd"EUS", would you not find a link between the two?If and when you see the possible correlation, you will notice that Thaddeus is from the Greek name Θεοδωρος (Theodoros), which meant "gift of god" from Greek θεος (theos) "god" and δωρον (doron) "gift". Just a thought. I much prefer the meaning "Gift of God" to "Fairy Princess" especially since I can't find any sources that show how Tatiana even slightly means "Fairy Princess".Opinions?
vote up0vote down

Replies

I think your argument, in essence, goes like this: "Notice that word or name A in language X is similar to word or name B in language Y. Could they be related?"If you ask me the answer to this is: Maybe, but impossible to decide looking only at the words or names themselves. You need more evidence. Such a similarity is not even enough to say "probably" instead of "maybe".I love to browse through the "Online Etymological Dictionary" from time to time, to be found at:
http://www.etymonline.com/You can find many wonderful examples there of both kinds: Words that surprisingly are nearly identical in languages that are quite far apart (because they were somehow preserved during language evolution), and words that look and sound quite different but are clearly related nevertheless.By the way, if you are at it, maybe also have a look at the Indo-European language family. That's an *awfully* large and diverse language group!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages
vote up3vote down
I think the "fairy princess" meaning comes from confusing Tatiana with Titania, which Shakespeare used for a fairy queen in the play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Supposedly Titania came from the word "titan," so it's not really related to Tatiana at all.
vote up2vote down
Thank you! That makes perfect sense. I have always been confused when people say that, but it was just naivety. Hopefully, the connection I've made with Tatiana meaning "Gift of God" will be accepted as a viable meaning.
vote up0vote down
I love this, i have been hearing this name alot lately from the Holy spirit. So this makes alot of sense to me. Thank you.
vote up1vote down
Sound similarity of isolated words is pretty slim evidence to go on ... Since, most words we are considering are pretty small (you are considering only two consonants in your thinking here, for example), and the languages we are dealing with has limited number of sounds (may be twenty consonants), so you can't form too many such words in either language: in this case, may be some 400, and root reduplication could be a possible situation in your example. Since the number of meanings which such small words have to express is pretty large (no language has a 20 syllable word expressing "help!!!" for example), they are almost guaranteed to use up most of these combinations, so random coincidences abound all over the place. I am not saying that your example is wrong, only that the evidence is flimsy.When people's speech changes as ancestral speech communities diverge, one typically finds that identically perceived sounds in different words (what are called "phonemes") tend to stay identical when they are in the same phonetic context: thus we easily see that English who which and what all start with the "same" sound wh- If we postulate that another language also derived from the same speech community (in some distant past) that English came from, and two of these words start with kv- in that language, we should at first expect that the third will also start with the same kv-. Of course, sometimes the correspondence rule will be more complicated like who- and wha- go to some sound, whereas whi- goes to something else; but *most* words should fall into some kind of pattern. The absence of a discernible pattern is pretty good reason not to attribute a common origin to the languages.
vote up3vote down