|
Grex > Language > #91: it's a girl - question on how to spell her name |  |
|
| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 80 responses total. |
rcurl
|
|
response 50 of 80:
| 
Jan 12 21:04 UTC 1998 |
Item Winter 1997 agora 50 has been linked to Language 91.
|
davel
|
|
response 51 of 80:
|
Jan 12 22:30 UTC 1998 |
Re 38: keesan, "Matthew" is the English form of the Greek form of an old
Jewish name. More or less.
|
keesan
|
|
response 52 of 80:
|
Jan 12 22:46 UTC 1998 |
Is there a new Yiddish version of Matthew that sounds like Matys?
|
senna
|
|
response 53 of 80:
|
Jan 12 23:15 UTC 1998 |
In America, there's the added problem of figuring out whether some names have
been changed at Ellis Island or not. My mother's family is fairly certain
that theirs was, since in Lebanon nobody seems to have heard of a Machraz
surname. But that's what they have.
|
keesan
|
|
response 54 of 80:
|
Jan 12 23:52 UTC 1998 |
Mahraz, Mahrez?
Americans do not pronounce the h in this position.
|
headdoc
|
|
response 55 of 80:
|
Jan 13 00:43 UTC 1998 |
In response to #52. Our grandson is named Matthew in English. WEhen we had
him "named" in a Hebrew Ceremony, the Rabbi gave us the name "Matenayu" as
his Hebrew name. I don't know if that's the only Hebrew equivalent of
Matthew, but its the one he suggested for us. So we took it. And we like
it.
|
senna
|
|
response 56 of 80:
|
Jan 13 05:55 UTC 1998 |
That's the american spelling. depending on whom you talk to, we pronounce
it either MACK-riz or MACK-RAZ. We have no clue what it's from.
|
void
|
|
response 57 of 80:
|
Jan 13 06:20 UTC 1998 |
i do know of someone who has the last name menke, which was
shortened from menkewicz. and while it looks polish, the people whose
name i'm asking about arrived here from lithuania.
|
keesan
|
|
response 58 of 80:
|
Jan 13 14:20 UTC 1998 |
The sound written cz here, and pronounced like English ch in church, would
be written c with a little v on top of it in Lithuanian. The cz spelling
makes it a Polish name. There are probably at least as many Poles in
Lithuania as there are in Ann Arbor, considering political boundaries have
changed a lot over the centuries. Hungarian also uses cz. My grandfather
arrived here from Poland with a German-spelled last name (Rothenburg), because
the Polish Jews had moved east from Germany, and my other grandfather came
from Latvia with a name that might also be German. (The Jews in Germany were
assigned last names in medieval times.) Nemetz is the German spelling of the
Czech name Nemec, which is the word for German, and means 'non-speaker' (or
dumb, in the original meaning). I found also Nemith and Nemith, which I am
guessing might be Hungarian but don't know. Anyway, there has always been
lots of migration in central and eastern Europe.
Menkewicz might have been a German name adapted to Polish. Names are often
left in the spellings of their original languages and then they have their
pronunciation botched. It is not just an American phenomenon.
|
other
|
|
response 59 of 80:
|
Jan 13 16:47 UTC 1998 |
i don't think there *is* any new yiddish. it is a dying language.
|
keesan
|
|
response 60 of 80:
|
Jan 15 18:42 UTC 1998 |
It used to be that half of babies (in the sixties?) were named Jennifer,
Jessica, Joshua, Jonathan, Jeremy, Genevieve, Jocelyn, Jacob, etc. Then there
was a spate of Laura, Lara, Laurie, Lori, Lura, and Kirstin, Kerstin, Kristin.
What are babies being named nowadays? Are there similar faddish or popular
names in other countries?
|
senna
|
|
response 61 of 80:
|
Jan 15 22:21 UTC 1998 |
I know that I know a lot of Lauras and a lot of liz's.
|
omni
|
|
response 62 of 80:
|
Jan 16 05:19 UTC 1998 |
my favorite female name is Nancy. Favorite male name is Paul or Mike.
|
alchemis
|
|
response 63 of 80:
|
Jan 16 17:44 UTC 1998 |
If you really want to know what the "trendy" or popular names are, pick up
a fairly recent (in the last year or two) baby name book. We've got one that
has popular names in a bunch of countries worldwide (who really needs to know
the #1 name in Italy?).
We did, however, settle on Jacob Martin (if it's a boy) and Kimberly Diane
(if it's a girl). So, those are our favorites of the month. <grin> All this
*IS* subject to change as the pregnancy continues...
|
keesan
|
|
response 64 of 80:
|
Jan 16 18:57 UTC 1998 |
Could the popularity of the name Diane be related to the princess? Where do
you think popular names originate? I know Michelle had something to do with
the Beatles song, and people used to be named after favorite movie stars, but
what is the origin nowadays? I notice a lot of revival type names around like
Sarah and Amanda and Anna. Are they still popular this year? My great aunt
was named Sarah, possibly for Sarah Bernhardt, in the previous century (or
was Sarah Bernhardt popular after 1885, when my aunt was born?).
Does anyone have a really unpronounceable (in English) name? A Polish friend
just wrote me of a Polish comedy movie in which a captured Polish soldier,
when asked his name, pronounces it Grzegorz Brzeczyszchykiewicz, and enjoys
the confusion. (sz = sh, cz = cz, rz = zh, y = i as in hi, ie = ye, w = v).
Even a Pole would have trouble with this one, which he was reminded of when
we were trading tongue twisters.
I thought all babies sexes were now known before birth? How old does the
fetus have to be before the sex can be determined?
|
keesan
|
|
response 65 of 80:
|
Jan 16 18:59 UTC 1998 |
Whoops, even I spelled it wrong. Brzeczyszczykiewicz. (The first e has a
diacritic under it and is pronounced en).
|
senna
|
|
response 66 of 80:
|
Jan 16 20:59 UTC 1998 |
They can be, but not everybody chooses to find out.
|
alchemis
|
|
response 67 of 80:
|
Jan 17 15:33 UTC 1998 |
Actually, we chose Diane because we liked it. I hadn't thought about Diana
at all. Dang. Back to the drawing board...
|
keesan
|
|
response 68 of 80:
|
Jan 17 17:45 UTC 1998 |
I have a friend named Deena, which may be Hebrew, close enough? My mother's
best friend in high school was Dinny, from Diane. Dana, Donna, Dinah?
|
senna
|
|
response 69 of 80:
|
Jan 17 19:14 UTC 1998 |
Nothing wrong with Diane. There are people named Diane.
|
gibson
|
|
response 70 of 80:
|
Jan 18 06:48 UTC 1998 |
What i'd like to know, why, when foriegn names are translated into
the english alphabet, aren't they spelled phonetically instead of throwing
in so many extra letters?
|
orinoco
|
|
response 71 of 80:
|
Jan 18 19:08 UTC 1998 |
Well, many foreign languages use the same characeter-set as english, but with
different meanings for some characters - like 'ch', which sounds like 'k' in
some languages, 'sh' in others, etc.
|
keesan
|
|
response 72 of 80:
|
Jan 19 04:17 UTC 1998 |
There are often sounds that English does not even have. It's the same problem
putting names into many other languages. Japanese has a special alphabet for
spelling foreign names. Czech takes over German names spelled with the German
letters u and o with an umlaut (two dots) over them. I am curious how French
and Chinese and other languages handle the problem.
|
davel
|
|
response 73 of 80:
|
Jan 19 18:29 UTC 1998 |
In addition to what orinoco & keesan said (both correct, not complaining),
for many languages there's a history behind transliteration into English, &
sometimes the pronunciation of the other language has actually changed. I've
been told that this was part of the reason for the major changes in
transliteration of Chinese names a couple of decades or so ago - "Peking"
became "Beijing", "Mao Tse Tung" became "Mao Zedong", etc. (OK, I'm probably
hashing the current forms. Sorry.) This kind of thing is, after all, the
reason for a lot of silent letters in *English* words - the "k" in "knife"
or "knight" was once pronounced, for example.
An example of what keesan mentioned: I've been told that the silent "g" in
the word "gnu" represents a glottal stop in an African language from which
we got that word. No corresponding English sound - to pronounce the "g" as
we would reading "phonetically" being no closer to the original than is
leaving the sound out entirely.
|
gibson
|
|
response 74 of 80:
|
Jan 21 04:22 UTC 1998 |
What i mean is we could make the pronunciation so much easier
for our standards.
|