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Hello,
The name Cunégonde is on this website and leads to a different name which means brave war. I was wondering how this was found and if there are other interpretations of this name because my teacher said that whoever finds the meaning of the name Cunégonde, from Voltaire's Candide, will get out of the final. Apparently, in his 29 years of teaching, nobody has gotten it. He won't tell us afterward anyway because he thinks we will ruin it for the next class. Thank you.
The name Cunégonde is on this website and leads to a different name which means brave war. I was wondering how this was found and if there are other interpretations of this name because my teacher said that whoever finds the meaning of the name Cunégonde, from Voltaire's Candide, will get out of the final. Apparently, in his 29 years of teaching, nobody has gotten it. He won't tell us afterward anyway because he thinks we will ruin it for the next class. Thank you.
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The interpretation of "brave" and "war" given on this site is the same as that given in Hanks & Hodges's A Dictionary of First Names. The German and Dutch name dictionaries I own (Knaurs Vornamen Buch and Woordenboek van Vooornamen) have a somewhat different interpretation. They both agree with this site that the second syllable, gunde, goes back to a word that meant "strife, fight, battle". However, they state that the first syllable, kunne, meant "sex, kindred, tribe" and interpret the combined meaning as "fighter for the tribe" or "fighter for one's kin." I hasten to add that I'm sure that "sex" here means "gender", not "sexual intercourse", so you might stretch this to possibly have meant "fighter for her fellow women", but if your teacher wants you to say it means "one who fights for sex" in the intercourse sense I think he's barking up the wrong tree, though that may be what he's going for and why "nobody has gotten" what he's looking for.
This message was edited 2/8/2007, 7:43 PM
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Thanks so much for the information, I don't know what he is looking for, but I figure I will tell him all of the answers I have and hopefully he will tell me if one is right. Thank you.
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