N00B NAME CHALLENGE: the reveal!

[qatarperegrine]

Before we reveal the answer to all these riddles, Justin and I thought we'd share some of the name hints that didn't quite make the cut (most of which were rejected when we decided to allow Googling):

• The first historically notable bearer of this name was an empress.
  
• Were proper names allowed, playing it would be worth 12 points in Scrabble.
  
• It is paired with Logos to form one of the emanations of God in Valentinian Gnosticism.
  
• It only has one more letter than syllable.
  
• According to Wikipedia, a small tribe of this name lives in the Amazon; one of its unusual cultural practices is that men celebrate the birth of their offspring by cutting their legs with rodent teeth. Justin does not intend to follow this tradition.
  
• It has been in the top 1000 girls' names in the US 71 of the last 100 years -- though not in either of the years we were born.
  
• The top Google hit of this name is of an actress. (However, making universal statements about top Google hits seems dangerous in this age of personalized search results!)
  
• It is the name of this cat.
  
• It is the name of one of President Bartlet's daughters.

The n00b's name is actually Zoë. :-)

Comments

[qatar.livejournal.com]

It's definitely because of the hiatus; in Greek, there's no ambiguity because both vowels HAVE to be pronounced, whereas English that letter combination would more logically be thought to rhyme with "Joe."

However, I'm pretty sure that anyone who thinks that Zoe rhymes with Joe probably also doesn't know what a diaeresis is. They'd just think it rhymes with Joe AND is the name of a heavy metal band. :-)

We're not going to use the diaeresis officially, for the logistical reasons you have in mind, but I think it looks kind of nifty so I have been using it inconsistently in less formal contexts. Somehow it's hard to feel consistency is terribly important when you live somewhere where a single name might get transliterated into English three dozen different ways.

[jcreed.livejournal.com]

Oh Zoe-as-rhymes-with-Joe makes a lot more sense. I was kind of imagining it diaresislessly as "Zoi".

[chrisamaphone]

yeah, i like the way it looks too. it's kind of interesting how resistant english seems to be to diacritics, given all the ambiguities. it's kind of like historically we introduced them as training wheels for funny words like cooperation, but now that everyone knows how to pronounce it, we don't really use them anymore.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

It also happens in Portuguese, and in French.

In a couple of years, the trema will be abolished in Portuguese words, except those marked as imports.

Many (most?) French people don't write accents in Internet chats, or when capitalizing.

[(Anonymous)]

There's a High School in Eureka that's called "Zoe (as in rhymes-with-Joe) Barnum. Presumably named after someone who pronounced her name that way.I love the name, pronounced correctly. LeChaim ( or some other possible transliteration)