Talk:Zira

I'm sceptical that people would name their children "hatred". (Then again, "because" is also odd.) Nicholas Awde's recent Swahili/English Dictionary has kuchukia as the verb "hate" and no entry for the noun. Arthur Madan's English/Swahili Dictionary, about a century older, has chukia as the verb "hate" and machukio as the noun "hatred". I'm inclined to just remove the Swahili bit, and maybe some other bits, if I can't find evidence supporting them. It was all added by an IP with a somewhat spotty edit history. - -sche (discuss) 19:41, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

The closest thing in Eliah Kapezi's Shona-English name dictionary is "Zera", glossed as "age, generation". - -sche (discuss) 19:46, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

John Morris, in the New Nation, asserts "Zira" as a Swahili word for "to hate", but puts it among a long list of words from unrelated languages (Anglo-Saxon, Cornish, Persian, Arabic, Fijian, Egyptian...) which have similar-sounding and similar-meaning terms, which he says proves that Sarah was mean to Hagar. (I'm sceptical.) OTOH, Jae-Ick Park's Minimality effects in Swahili, published in Akinbiyi Akinlabi's Theoretical Approaches to African Linguistics, does list zira and zia as Swahili words (of solid proto-Bantu derivation, no less) for "hate". - -sche (discuss) 19:54, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

For the record, these were the etymologies the entry mentioned, which all seem unlikely:

Hebrew זִירָה (zirá, “arena, messenger”)
Swahili zira (“hate”)
Shona nzira (“path”)
Persian زیرا (zirâ, “because”)

- -sche (discuss) 00:15, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Regarding my scepticism at the idea of someone naming a child "Hatred", I learned today that one of the princesses in Princeless (who otherwise tend to have "real" names) is Angoisse. - -sche (discuss) 04:20, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

One has to wonder if someone has been reading their Mallory and wanted to pay tribute to King Anguish of Ireland, whose name is folk-etymologised from a Celtic origin. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 19:04, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

What a fascinating name! Thanks for that tidbit. As an aside, I got curious and checked a records database which found 11 people named Hatred, all in the US, including a Blackfoot woman "Hatred" born in 1862, in Montana in the 1900 census (with relatives like "Everybody Talks" and "Medicine"); a boy "Hatred Francis" born to Alfrin Francis and Emma Laperle in Masachusetts in 1882; a negro man "Perry, Hatred" born in 1890 in the West Indies, in Michigan in the 1930 census (with scan, confirming it's not a scanno); a woman "Hatred Leyman" in a 1929 Pennsylvania record; a "Hatred Hilott" born in 1955 residing in California (related to Chance Hilott); and a "Hatred Williams" in Alabama in the 1990s. I can't find the name in books (there is a lot of chaff), and though they presumably exist in various durably-archived records, I don't care to add a given name sense to Hatred without book cites. There were also a few dozen people named "Because", another name/meaning I doubted above (and which I also don't care to add, in the absence of book cites), and over a thousand (but probably containing many duplicates) named "Anguish", which I may actually try to cite and add. I guess if a population is large enough, "weird"/"unlikely" names are gonna be found in it... - -sche (discuss) 20:20, 13 February 2020 (UTC)