Rabastan - name meaning

[hp_lexicon]

No: HPFGUIDX 85662

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "justcarol67" 
<justcarol67 at y...> wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know of any other place where he's named? Is he 
actually
> called Rastaban somewhere in the series? Maybe it would be 
mentioned
> in relation to the Longbottoms and the Cruciatus curse?
> 
> Steve, can you help us out, please?

The name is Rabastan, as many of you have pointed out. I fixed the 
typo on the Azkaban page. 

As for the name meaning, there is no obvious right answer, although 
there are some weird ideas floating around. I don't believe for one 
second that it's a "combination of the Icelandic "rabba" meaning "to 
babble" and the old English "stan" meaning "stone" (possibly 
referring to a church where the priests talk too much) or 
from "rabba-son" meaning son of Rab, Rabba or Raban (hraban=raven)." 
That's from a website that lists ridiculous theories for finding 
hidden messages in names. This is one of the less bizarre theories. 
That page also includes that silly "Running Weasel" contrivance 
among others. 

The site I find most credible on matters like this is the Akashic 
Record. They list Rabastan as:

'Probable corruption of Rastaban, a star whose name means "head of 
the snake".' 

That sounds right to me. First of all, so many of the people in the 
Black family have names from stars. Second, that particular star 
seems to fit a scummy Death Eater, just like Sirius fits Sirius, the 
dog animagus. Third, Rowling loves to tweak things a little to make 
them her own. She did this a lot with spells in earlier books--
Wingardium Leviosa is a good example. Latin doesn't use the 
letter 'w' and the word 'wing' is unabashedly AngloSaxon. So she 
tacked on a fake Latin ending to make it sound good. Why alter 
Rastaban? I don't know, but I can imagine that she just liked the 
sound of it better as Rabastan so she just arbitrarily changed it.

Is this for certain? Nope. But it makes the most sense to me. If I 
get a chance to chat with Rowling, I'll try to remember to ask her. 
I have to ask about Elfrida "Cragg" too.

Steve Vander Ark
The Harry Potter Lexicon