Hi ! So… I posted earlier about Paloma & my love for the name. Quick rundown about me: I’m about 27 weeks pregnant with first child with husband, I am French & he is American (his mother is from France & father is from England), we live in Paris for 6 months out of the year & California for the other 6 months. Our surname is Eve. We had picked Sidonie.
Someone pointed out that Paloma is a name that sounds best when spoken by Spanish speakers as it is a Spanish name. No matter how much I adore this name, I agree with that. Though I do speak Spanish fluently as does my husband I’d admittedly probably not pronounce it as beautifully as a native speaker does.
Our daughter’s middle name will be Frédérique (honour name) which means “peaceful ruler”.
My whole appeal about Paloma was that it’s not only beautiful, but it symbolises peace as it means dove 
A French name (of Hebrew origin) with a similar peaceful meaning is Salomé 
. (Pronounced sa-LOH-may). It literally means peace 
!
We had previously decided on Sidonie (Fr : see-DOE-nee, Eng : sih-DOE-nee) which means “from Sidon”, which is perfect because my grandmother is from Sidon, Lebanon 
(commonly known as Saida by locals). I also love the sound of the name, even though it does bump into our surname with the EE sounds a bit I’m not too bothered by that. To catch you up to speed, yes we know that Sidonie would be mispronounced as Sydney by many Americans & we’re OK with that. I like the name Sydney, not as much as Sidonie but it’s a cool name. We don’t mind if she has the pronunciations of Sidonie in France & Sydney in America (think Timothée Chalamet going by Timothée [ti-moe-tay] in France & Timothy [tim-uh-thee] in America). We’ve also thought it’d ease her along if we gave her a nickname like Sisi (like CeeCee ), Doe, Donie, Dodie, etc. I also think that if she doesn’t want to go by Sydney, after one correction and/or introduction with the proper pronunciation, she would be called by the proper “Sidonie”.
Now for Salomé – I’ve always loved this name. It is a timeless, strong, beautiful name. It fits in here in Paris perfectly. Salome is a figure from the Bible, & while i’m not very religious, I do like the long ancestry of the name. I was thinking she could go by the nickname Sally / Sallie in America and/or we could call her Lo or Lolo. I also know it isn’t a completely unfamiliar name to Americans too because Salome is a biblical figure & the iconic actress Rita Hayworth portrayed her in a film of the same name.
Between these two names, which do you prefer ? Salomé Frédérique or Sidonie Frédérique ? I had a mixed bag of responses of people, some who adored Sidonie & some who really disliked it so I’m interested to hear what you all have to say about Salomé. Thanks so much 
- Delphine
). So I would go with [name_f]Sidonie[/name_f]. I really like how it flows with your middle name and surname as well.
Once again I wasn’t raised religiously so I hoped I could skate by on that [name_f]Salome[/name_f] since the beheaded [name_u]John[/name_u] the Baptist [name_f]Salome[/name_f] isn’t technically named in the [name_u]New[/name_u] Testament !! But alas it seems that the “bad” [name_f]Salome[/name_f] is the most known ! Shows how much I remember from my theology classes in uni 
Especially since husband & I both speak fluent Spanish & have spent time living in Spain & Mexico, I especially don’t think it’d be disrespectful to give a daughter the name “Paloma”. Thank you for your help with that. 
