From: ROCxolan@t-online.de   
      
   David Milligan wrote:   
   >         Four or five years ago there was a news report from Iran about   
   > something or other, and one of the women's name was Xena. So does that mean   
   > "Xena" is a mid-Eastern name and not Greek?   
      
   Impossible to tell without knowing the woman's native language and the   
   way the woman spells her name in it. Renderings of foreign names (from   
   languages that don't use the Latin alphabet) in Latin letters tend to be   
   far too imprecise to tell anything useful. It could be anything.   
      
   Only scientific transliterations (which render character by character   
   precisely) or transcriptions (which account for the sound system of the   
   language in question) are really useful, but those normally make use of   
   accents and other diacritic signs to render distinctions that the 26   
   letters of the English alphabet aren't enough for, but journalists   
   usually drop accents and such, losing vital information. And without   
   knowing the language and the system used to transliterate or transcribe   
   it (if there is even a consistent system used), you're helpless. What   
   kind of sound does the "X" stand for in this case, for example? Or the   
   vowels? Any dropped diacritics? Any long vowels? Where's the stress?   
      
   If the woman's name is Persian, it could be an entirely different name   
   that just happened to be spelled as "Xena" by the journalist. Or was it   
   even spelled out? Perhaps you only heard "ZEE-nah" and assumed it is   
   "Xena"? There are simply too many possibilities how this similarity,   
   which can be entirely fortuitious, might have come about.   
      
   In the standard dialect of Ancient Greek (Attic, the dialect of Athens)   
   "Xena" doesn't really work (at least not with the meaning "foreign   
   woman"); it would have been "Xene". However, in other dialects, such as   
   Doric, it works. (And don't forget that "ZEE-nah" is an Anglicised   
   pronunciation that is very different from the Greek!) As far as I know,   
   the name was simply invented by Tapert, Raimi or Schulian.   
      
   It seems, though, that "Xena" is a variant of "Xenia", which is a common   
   name (also of Greek origin) among Orthodox Christians in Eastern Europe.   
      
   --   
      
   Florian   
   GGGHD, MWFA, HCNB   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)