Yente?!?! You gotta be kidding me!

give her another name besides yente….it happened by me 2 when my mother wanted 2 name my sister after my great grandmother a name no one ever heard of and my father didnt want 2 cuz the name was relly bad so we named her that name and another name and we actually call her the wierd name in a diffrent way its soo qt first when you hear it youre like okay but after its the qutest name…Good Luck 😉

I think Yenti is a beautiful Yiddishe name.

The people who ruined the name Yenta came from the short-lived secular Yiddish world (der Bund un der shund) and it is a pity we can’t reclaim it – but don’t try to do so at your daughter’s expense.

Yitta, Yetta – both exist and I wonder if they come from the same source as Yenta as letters and sounds arbitrarily dropped and were added in different parts of the Germanic speaking Jewish world.

Gentille in French could be Adina or Eidel (not an exact translation because gentille isn’t really gentle in that sense – but these are the only 2 semi-translations I can think of that are actually names – Chasuda is not really a name and that is the exact translation of how the word gentille is used in French today.) so that Adina Yitta or Eidel Yitta (depending on which is more accepted in your circles) is a good solution.

Yitty.

according to rav moshe meir weiss it is assur to name a kid something that will give other cause to tease him or her later on in life. it is assur to name a kid something which will adversely affect his life.

Goq, could you please stop hijacking threads with your vendetta against aries? This is not what we come to the CR to read, especially on Rosh Chodesh Elul.

May we each be granted a good eye to see the good in others and in ourselves (and in the name Yenta, too).

IMHO “Yenta” is a very nice name and “Character-Neutral”. But, unfortunately, some people named Yenta misbehaved in a good-natured way so that the name became synonymous with a nosy-body. Actually, today, it is a description of a certain type of behavior. We once had a landlady who lived on the Second floor of a Two story house. But on the way to her own apartment she invariably stopped by ours. It so happened that the kitchen was the first room one encountered on the way in. So, we got a visit to the kitchen and into the pots on the stove every day.

Yehudis

Actually there was never a Yenta who misbehaved – I thought that was the case until I looked into it. There was a miserable Yiddish “playwright” or “novelist” who used that name for a negative character in a play that unfortunately became popular during the days of the Yiddish theater. A menuval of a “columnist” at the Yiddish “Forward” of old picked up on it and used it as the pen name for his gossip column because he was male and had to pretend to be female. That is what ruined the name.

If those names don’t work, the only suggestion I have left is Tova Gitta. Good is close enough to the original meaning of Yente and if you want to retain the Yiddish Gitta is the closest variant sound-wise to Yenta. Eden is from the same root as Adina (I think – I cannot spell in loshon hakodesh and I could be mistaken) but as a name it doesn’t sound too great and Edna is very dated.

You can also try to pull the wool over your mother’s eyes and use an incorrect etymology for Yenta, which is to define it as the feminine for Yom-Tov, and then use the name Chagit. I have seen this – I did not make it up – but it is incorrect and contrived.

Juanita – LOL – the Yiddish feminine name that corresponds to Juanita, which derives from Yochanan, is actually Yachne!!!!

mtydhd, maybe you will have a boy and the problem will solve itself.

I wish 200 parents a year would decide to call their daughters Yenta (assuming there are 200 a year who have that name in their families or name at random) so we could show we do not care what secularists think and so that we can restore a perfectly legitimate name that was good enough for many a girl or woman who died al kiddush Hashem to bear.

Yachne has too coarse a sound to it; I don’t think we could ever restore it.

According to Alfred Kolatch’s Complete Dictionary of English and Hebrew Names (which may not be that reliable), Yenta is a form of Henrietta, which in turn is a form of Harriet, which is from the Old ENglish, meaning “mistress of the house, ruler, lord.”

So, you probably don’t like the name “Baalabusta,” but, if you check with your LOR about this info and it is correct, you could go with Malka or Adira or even Bayisya (for ‘lord of the house’, jk :))

There is an opinion that if you don’t want to use the actual name, you use one that has the same or nearly the same letters, like Akiva instead of Yaakov. Tanye?

Please be sure to tell us your decision, even if you don’t invite us to the kiddush!

I know of a girl named Yentel whose mother gave the name Naomi because she also heard that it comes from the French gentille and translated that as na’im which led to the name Naomi.

Mazel tov/b’shaah tova, Mtydhd

mtydhd; Mazel Tov! How about Pu’ah. See Rashi on Shemos,

by the names of the Meyaldos.

or Tziporah! a Yenta, chirps like a bird.

How about Yonit? Has all the consonants. You can call her Toby in Yiddish. (Yonah=Dove)

OOMIS1105; Alexander is not the only non-Jewish name adopted by Jews. Feivish, for example. It’s derived from the non-Jewish Fabius. There are plenty of others, that don’t come to mind right now. But it works in both directions. Beside the obvious names like David, Abraham and Sarah, there are plenty of other names that the non-Jewish world has adapted from Jewish-originating names. The name “Sophy/Sofia”, for example, is in my opinion derived from the Hebrew “Tzofia”. “Elizabeth”, from Elisheva.