Place names like vāī < vāpī = step well are common  and are found in more than one region of India. Its south Indian variant bāvi , bāyi, bāi, bāy is found in a big number of place names, as the second/ending part, at least in Telugu and Kannada speaking regions. For that matter, it is found even in the form of vāyi in some south Indian place names. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rani_ki_vav

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wai,_Maharashtra

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vapi

On Sun, Apr 23, 2017 at 8:04 PM, Martin Gansten <martingansten@gmail.com> wrote:

Nagaraj wrote:

I am sure, most of you must be aware of the female name ending bāī /bāyī/ bāy /bā found in many contemporary northern particularly north-western languages. 

Pingree's version is possibly bāī >vāī, such a phonetic change b<>v being quite common many Indian languages. 

The bhāī version could possibly be a hyperstandardization or scribal error. 

Yes, this was one of the first thoughts to strike me. But śrībhāyi is used consistently at the end of each of the sixteen chapters; the -i is short, and surely the variation v<>bh is not very common, at least outside Bengal? (This is not my area of expertise, so I'm open to correction.) Also, if bhāyi is to be understood as a suffix, Śrī would have to be the mother's personal name. Not impossible, of course, but perhaps unusual?

Madhav wrote:

The town "Vāī" (वाई) is found in Maharashtra, a famous place near Satara, where many Sanskrit works like Dharmakośa were published.  Vai has been a well known center for Sanskrit scholarship and the home of the Prājña Pāṭhaśālā, which continues to function till today. 

Perhaps that is why Pingree homed in on it (though he explicitly says that Yādava lived in Gujarat).* It may have been one of his over-confident emendations. But even reading vā[y]i för bhāyi and supure for suṣuve, the -nāmni will be unmetrical and the first two pādas won't hang together, so I do think his suggested reading must be abandoned.

(* I did try a web search for वाई गुजरात, but all I could find was वाई-फाई!)

Martin

--

Nagaraj Paturi

 

Hyderabad, Telangana, INDIA.

 

Former Senior Professor of Cultural Studies

 

FLAME School of Communication and FLAME School of  Liberal Education,

 

(Pune, Maharashtra, INDIA )