Ok.
Sorry to digress, but my Uncle was in town this week. He's a retired
Latin teacher (tutors rich kids now) and tennis pro as well as the
family etymologist. I mentioned your name (as best I could pronounce
it and eventually wrote it down for him) because you always give
such great etymologies.
He said it sounded Greek. Is that right? He searched his banks for a
translation and came up blank - got me thinking it was a psuedonym
but a web search with "definition" added just brought up discussions
where you defined words.
No, not a pseudonym, although one person in aue accused me of creating
an anagram to hide my identity. What you see is what you get.
So what's the skinny on your name? Uncle Joe's got me curious.
My father's side of family originally was from Greece (north west
coast part), so I got grandad's first name. Same as Spiro Agnew,if you
remember that cr**k. Spelling in English when taken from foreign
languages that don't use the Roman alphabet (Greek, Russian, Chinese
etc.) is kinda open season, so you can find a number of variations. My
name is not that unusual in the original alphabet and in the correct
region of the world, but here, with this spelling, it's as close to
unique as one is likely to get. Ethnically, I'm a mixed up 3-5th
generation Canuck, with Greek, English, German and French bits.
Probably why I like to have fresh Pakistani halal nan with my Korean
kam ja tang (pork bone spicy soup). I don't speak anything but English
fluently, but with a bit of high school French (mostly useful for
needling Jim, n'est ce pas?) and some steadily improving Mandarin
capability.
A musing- it has been said that the availability of pirate versions of
programs such as Autocad was a great benefit to the companies that
sold them- since it increased their penetration and allowed people to
learn to use them. So long as they made sure that companies of any
size paid for copies, their revenue stream was enhanced long-term. I
wonder if this is now happening with English on a massive scale due to
the wide availability of pirated ebooks on just about any subject.
Local publishers just have no way of competing against free goods, and
it gives people an incentive to struggle with English to get to use
the free stuff.
Best one I've heard yet was a Cajun whose last name in French meant
young boy. His americanized (or anglicized) name is Young. In French
it's Jeune Garcon` - he may have said "le Jeune Garcon`".
That's another possibility- to translate by meaning. And Chinese
people often have both an English and a Chinese name, that are not
necessarily similar phonetically (but they can be). When they try to
get phonetic similarly you get silly things like a competent young
female Chinese medical doctor I knew who was unfortunately named
"Fi-fi".
Here's a new one on me:
http://www.fonetiks.org and pick a language
You can hover over the vowel(s) and it plays the sound.
For anyone interested in Chinese, here is a good site:
http://www.mandarintools.com/
Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany