# חנן וועלוויל



## bear908

Hello,

Attached is picture of my great-grandfather's grave for whom I was named. I always thought my Hebrew name was "Chonah" but now I see it on his tombstone as "Chonan"

Also, the second name - "Velvel" what does that mean?

Do these names have any meaning? I was always told they weren't true Hebrew names - Yiddish maybe?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks


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## Flaminius

Well come to the forums, *bear908*!



> I always thought my Hebrew name was "Chonah" but now I see it on his tombstone as "Chonan"


Assuming you are a girl, there is no wonder because "Chonah" (which I'd transliterate _Channa_) is the feminine form and "Chonan" (which I'd transliterate _Chanan_) is the masculine form.  The meaning is "grace" or "God has been graceful [to me]."

Velvel
No, it's Velvil, for which the first vowel is marked by "ayn" and the second by "yud".  It must be a family name.  The notation is Yiddish.


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## JLanguage

bear908 said:


> Also, the second name - "Velvel" what does that mean?
> 
> "וועלוויל" appears to be a less common form of וועלוועל, which means _wolf_ in Yiddish. ( זאב _ze'ev_ in Hebrew).



The first name חנן (_chonan_ in Yiddish and Ashkenazic Hebrew, _chonan_ in Modern Israeli Hebrew) is a Biblical Hebrew name meaning "gracious" or "gracious one". It is still used today in Israel and among religious Jews outside of Israel as a first name, but I don't know how popular it in Israel today.

Glad I could help,
Jonathan


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## Ander

JLanguage said:


> The first name חנן (_chonan_ in Yiddish and Ashkenazic Hebrew, _chonan_ in Modern Israeli Hebrew) is a Biblical Hebrew name meaning "gracious" or "gracious one". It is still used today in Israel and among religious Jews outside of Israel as a first name, but I don't know how popular it in Israel today.
> 
> Glad I could help,
> Jonathan



חנן is nothing else than the חנן  of יוחנן which is John in English. The "h" and "n" of John being reminiscent of חנ


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## Ander

I was wondering why the "w" of Welwel or Welwil is transcribed in Yiddish with two vav's.

Isn't it because the "w" is a kind of "double v"? 

That's the way we call that letter in French.


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## berndf

The Waw is doubled to indicate it is used as a consonant. Waw, Yud, Aleph and `ain are used as vowel signs (Waw=o or u, Aleph=a, Yud=i and `ain=e). Consonantal Aleph and `ain do not exist as phonemes in Yiddish but Waw=[v] and Yud=[j] do. To avoid confusion they are doubled when used as consonants.


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## berndf

bear908 said:


> Also, the second name - "Velvel" what does that mean?


The second name is certainly Yiddish. I cannot help you with the etymology. But if you want to do some research, bear in mind that other Latin transcriptions are "Velvil" and "Welwil". The latter transcription is mainly used in Poland and Germany as the letter "w" is pronounced [v] in Polish and German.

_Edit: See also #9 below._


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## ilbisaac

Yeah, the first name is a traditional Jewish name. חנן means "compassionate," as in the Biblical figure (also a traditional Jewish name among religious people) Elchanan (in Yiddish, pronounced "elKHUNen" to rhyme with bell-FUN-in), meaning "God the compassionate."

Velvil is probably a variant of Velvl_ וועלוול_, a Yiddish name. Often, like in English when people incorporate Yiddish words (like Yidn pronounced Yidden or Shlofn pronounced Shlofen), vowels are added before the last consonant because it's easier to pronounce that way. But in reality, the name is pronounced not like VELvel or VELvull but more like VELV- with a LLL sound at the end. Difficult to demonstrate online! However, if the name is Velvil, you might just want to pronounce it as it's written. It can be treated as a dialect issue, which any family member should value as a piece of inheritance.


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## berndf

The Yiddish spelling on the tomb-stone contained the Yud. But you are right וועלוויל is most certainly a variant of וועלוול. I must have been blind yesterday. The etymology is totally obvious: /vɛlv(ə)l/ is allophonic of /vɛlf(ə)l/</vœlf(ə)l/ = _little wolf_. Yiddish unrounds rounded front vowels hence /œ/>/ɛ/. So the origin is, as for the majority of Yiddish words, German.


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## Ander

berndf said:


> The Waw is doubled to indicate it is used as a consonant. Waw, Yud, Aleph and `ain are used as vowel signs (Waw=o or u, Aleph=a, Yud=i and `ain=e). Consonantal Aleph and `ain do not exist as phonemes in Yiddish but Waw=[v] and Yud=[j] do. To avoid confusion they are doubled when used as consonants.



Vielen Dank Bernd.


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## bear908

Thank you all for responding and for the clarification.

One last thing - is it pronounced Ch - O - NAN (middle syllabyl emphasis)  or Ch - A - NAN (end syllabyl emphasis)?

By the way, my name is Brad and this name was chosen (as I assume there is no direct transliteration for Brad) by our family rabbi.  The Velvil was chosen to honor my great-grandfather, who was from Poland.


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## berndf

Stress on the first (the word has only two syllables; there is no _middle_ one) syllable would be Yiddish, stress on the second Hebrew.


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## vivnara

You can see the name spelt with vowells in Jeremiah 35:4. I have a friend called Hanan, whose in his 40s and not from a religious family. There's an Israeli pop singer who was famous in the 70s called Hanan Yovel.


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## David

"Attached is picture of my great-grandfather's grave for whom I was named. I always thought my Hebrew name was "Chonah" but now I see it on his tombstone as 'Chonan'."

A couple of p.s.-thoughts. The diaspora custom of naming a child "for" somebody, usu. a deceased relative, taken from Eastern European Yiddish custom, is practiced in the New World with more variation than uniformity, hence all the little Murrays and Maurices named for a Moyshe, a Yiddish pronunciation of Moshé, an ancient Egyptian name, "translated" as Moses. Ashkenazic Yiddish speakers often spelled Biblical names for boys as in the Bible, but pronounced them differently just as in English, Beauchamp is pr Beecham. Biblical associations for boys' names were considered more important than for girls, hence there are many traditional "Jewish" girls names that have nothing to do with Hebrew. The Chayas (Eve) who became Charlottes and the Khatzkls who became Kevin and Harry are only sort of named "for" somebody.The parents doing the naming might or might not have known what the orginal Hebrew form of a name, if there was one, was or whether they were naming a child Sender for Alexander the Great.

Once a male Hebraic name such as your grandfather's passed from Hebrew to Yiddish, acquired two or three different dimunitives, moves across three generations or so to the New World, and into English, and from male gender to female, any number of variations are possible. So "your" first name is only a relatively arbitrary variant of your grandfather's original name. His middle name, spelled Velvil on the tombstone, is just a phonetic spelling of a traditional name, as stated, comes from the German for Little Wolf; wolf in Hebrew is Ze'ev, and the name Velvel was popular at least partly from association with German Wilhelm (pr Vilhelm), though often "translated" as "William." Velvel is not a Hebrew word from the Bible, Yiddish spelling was not standardized until early XXth century and people are still fighting about it, so there are several common spellings "Velvel," "Velvl," "Velvel," and depending on date and region, any number of spellings might appear on a tombstone. So even someone who bears exactly an ancestor's "Jewish" name might bear a Polish or Russian or German first name.


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## origumi

David said:


> Moshé, an ancient Egyptian name


 
Not sure about the theory of Moshe as an Egyptian name. For example:

_The name "Moses" comes from a root meaning "take out," because Moses was taken out of the river (Ex. 2:10). Some modern scholars point out that the root M-S-S in Egyptian means "son of" as in the name Ramases (son of Ra), but it is worth noting that Moses' name in Hebrew is M-Sh-H, not M-S-S. According to one Jewish source, Pharaoh's daughter actually named him Minios, which means "drawn out" in Egyptian, and the name Moshe (Moses) was a Hebrew translation of that name, just as a Russian immigrant named Ivan might change his name to the English equivalent, John. _

http://www.jewfaq.org/moshe.htm



David said:


> The Chayas (Eve)


 
From Israeli Hebrew point of view Chava = Eve, Chaya is a similar name with similar meaning, yet different.


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