flea, X isn't really used in Spanish very much at all, but my best guess for Axa would be something like 'asha' I think there is more X going on in names in Spain, it might be Basque influence? Or I could be crazy. I speak Spanish rather well but I'm not 100% sure here. Asha is my best guess!

I don't speak Spanish, but every kid I teach barring 6 or so has a Spanish name and if those names showed up on my roster, then I'd pronounce the first, Izel, eh-(t)sel, but that's because I have a student name Itzel. The I becomes less of a hard I and much softer.

For Axa, I'd assume it's ah-sah, that the X becomes like the X in Xiomara which is not chio-mara but s-o-mara.

I would assume the names are not traditional Spanish but they look native of some sort, though I guess Basque makes more sense given location.

OH! Info on Izel: [link]

I'm all confused now because there was a Xiomara in a class of mine once and it was pronounced Shio-mara. She wasn't actually born in Spain, though.

Speaking of pronunciation of names, I pronounced a girl's name correctly in a class I was substituting on Wednesday and she was so happy/surprised she didn't know what to do. I was pleased to have made her day, although I didn't think the name looked /that/ difficult. (The name was Ifeoma)

Yeah, the X definitely made me wonder about Basque, but it is very possible her husband is Mayan (I've never met him).

From the same website, Axa could be a shortening of a longer Aztec word, Axacatyl. Then again both of those are from the internet, so take it with a grain of salt.

Zuisa, I had been pronouncing Xiomara as Chio-mara for a while until I was corrected by at least 3 of them over the course of a year. I was like, "Huh? Really? Okay!"

Noted! I apparently knew the weird Xiomara. There aren't a ton of Spanish names in the schools I work in - mostly Haitian, Cape Verdean, and Vietnamese, but they sometimes prove quite challenging.

Assiduous academic rickrolling.

I followed ita's link and happened on an absurdly distorted description of one of my own studies.

[link]

Really, sometimes I think that journalism is like a child's game of telephone. A journal writes a slightly distorted press release, someone at a science aggregating site rewrites the press release without reading the paper, then someone else rewrites the aggregator's piece without reading the paper. Where it it will end up, no one knows.

Um, I just think it's cool that you're in Jezebel.

I would first guess Axa as "a-ha" but that's more of a Mexican guess than a Spanish one.

Now I can't remember if the restaurant I used to go to called Xunta is hunta or shunta, because I had it wrong for so long.