🔼The name Minni: Summary
- Meaning
- My Portion, Partly
- Etymology
- From the preposition מן (min), from, or the verb מנה (mana), to count or reckon.
🔼The name Minni in the Bible
The name Minni occurs only one time in the Bible. It's the name of a kingdom in Aram; the prophet Jeremiah mentions it together with Ararat and Ashkenaz (Jeremiah 51:27).
🔼Etymology of the name Minni
The name Minni most likely originated in a language other than Hebrew, but transliterated into Hebrew it looks like it comes from a word מן:
מן
The interrogative pronoun מן (man) means "what?" but the preposition מן (min) means "out of" or "from". The latter is often deployed as prefix, in which only the מ (m) is written. Nouns formed from "מ plus root" commonly describe an "agent" or "place-of" whatever the action of the root describes.
The core function of these words is to distinguish an entity from its environment: hence to distinguish. In Proto-Indo-European appears a strikingly similar root, namely men-, from which we get words like mnemonic and mind (and money).
Verb מנה (mana) means to count or assign or partition (to demarcate a thing from where it emerged from). Nouns מנה (mana) and מנת (menat) mean portion or part. Noun מנה (maneh) is a unit of weight; the mina. And noun מנה (moneh) means time (not clock time but as in ten "times").
Noun מן (men) describes a harp string and is an Aramaic loan word.
The letter י (yod) upon which our name ends, may either create an adjective or a possessive form.
🔼Minni meaning
For a meaning of the name Minni, Jones' Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names reads Part. Neither NOBSE Study Bible Name List nor BDB Theological Dictionary tries to interpret this name. Taking the final י (yod) into account, the name Minni would mean My Portion or even Partly.