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ArchivesRe: Help with a Name
in reply to a message by solveig
... but the current explanation doesn't work. Beautiful is indeed "schön" (with o-umlaut) in High German, but in Yiddish this becomes "schen" (pronounced like SHAYN), not "schon" (which is a different word in High German meaning "already, yet, right now"—the Yiddish form of this one is "shoyn"). I don't know enough Hebrew to exclude a Hebrew root, but the normal Hebrew word for beautiful is "yafa" in the feminine form.
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The variants given for Shoni look more like feminized versions of Shane, rather than directly Yiddish or Hebrew. Of course Shona, like Shane, is a derivative of Hebrew יוֹחָנָן (Yochanan), but that doesn't mean beautiful.
The "Yiddish" may be a red herring. Someone with no knowledge of Yiddish, and a vague grasp of standard German may have heard a phrase such as "das schöne mädchen" and that it meant "the beautiful girl", and come up with Shoni as an Anglicization. Or the name could be made up and the "beautiful" meaning is just a folk etymology base on the German, and there are the historic names Sconea and Sconiberga, so someone may have taken it from OHG without referring to modern German. It looks to me like a version of Shona though.
The "Yiddish" may be a red herring. Someone with no knowledge of Yiddish, and a vague grasp of standard German may have heard a phrase such as "das schöne mädchen" and that it meant "the beautiful girl", and come up with Shoni as an Anglicization. Or the name could be made up and the "beautiful" meaning is just a folk etymology base on the German, and there are the historic names Sconea and Sconiberga, so someone may have taken it from OHG without referring to modern German. It looks to me like a version of Shona though.
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