ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 2362 http://www.s-gabriel.org/2362 ************************************ 19 Oct 2001 From: Judith Phillips Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel! You asked us whether the name is appropriate for a woman in 6th century Greece. Here is the information we found. The name appears to be perfectly appropriate for your period. We found numerous examples dated before A.D. 600. In Greek, the name was spelled ; the closest transliteration is , where the slash represents an acute accent over the and represents eta. [1] In your period we believe the name was pronounced \FU"-bee\, where \U"\ represents the sound of u-umlaut in German or in French . The phrase , "from Corinth", is not quite correct: takes the genitive (possessive) case, so the grammatically correct form would be . More importantly, while can be used to refer to a person's place of birth, we aren't sure that a byname meaning "[person] from Corinth" would take this form. An adjectival form, such as , "Corinthian, of Corinth" or a noun, such as , "the Corinthian [woman]" is probably more appropriate than a prepositional phrase. In Greek, was spelled ; in your period, the pronunciation was probably \koh-REEN-thee-ah\. In summary, is probably the most accurate form of your name. is grammatical and appears to mean "Phoebe from Corinth"; however, we found no similar bynames in your period and do not know whether is actually plausible. I hope that this letter has been useful to you. Please feel free to contact us again if any part of it has been unclear or if you have any further questions. I was assisted in writing this letter by Pedro de Alcazar, Adelaide de Beaumont, Julie Stampnitzky, Maridonna Benvenuti, Talan Gwynek, Ursula Georges, Aryanhwy merch Catmael, and Arval Benicoeur. For the Academy, Adeliza de Saviniaco 19 October 2001 ------------------------------ References: [1] Fraser, P.M., and E. Matthews, "The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names" (WWW: Oxford University, 1998) http://www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk/