Anyone with a non-standard-ly spelled name (like Keven) can relate to having people screw up their name spelling. My name is spelled Cristina (NO H!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) because my father is Italian and that's the way it's spelled there - no superfluous letters to confuse things. My maiden name (what an old-fashioned sounding word - I never felt like I was a "maiden") is Spanu, yes, it ends in a U, nothing follows the U, and no, it's not a mistake, and yes, I do know how to spell my own name, thank you very much. My husband's name is Dag (not short for anything, not even Dagwood, all you funny people), named for Dag Hammarskjold (sp?), and between the two of us we can rant at length about name misspellings and other "improvements" imposed by other people. He was Doug for a period in high school, poor guy.
It's funny because I just discussed this with my Turkish friend this week, as we were discovering that there are inter-generationally common mens' names in English (William, Michael, James, John, David, Daniel) but not as many extremely common womens' names (I did come up with Ann and Sarah and Elizabeth, but even those aren't worn by every third person - like the mens' names). I'd been asking her about common Turkish names - which of course come from the Q'uran, not the Bible!
As for natural words - flowers are the best I can think of - as already mentioned. I once had a friend named Laurel with a mother named Iris. Not kidding! And my husband's name is even unusual in Norwegian, because it means "day".
The AWAD name I'll leave for another post. It
is derived from my real name...aside from the people I've told, can anyone make the connection? It's not simple or obvious, and there are two intermediate steps.
