When launching a startup, you must take care of many things. Choosing the right name is one of them and it’s far from easy. Apart from an available domain, you need a name that is unique, short, and ideally easy to pronounce and remember. Its usability for foreign speakers is also something to consider. We chose Geneea (registered as Geneea Analytics). We love that it brings together magic tricks of a genie from a lamp and the confidence we have in our own abilities. It also reflects the playfulness we took to the business world with us.
Being a Czech company, many of our clients and partners are Czechs. And they often wonder how to pronounce our name. Czech spelling is very straightforward – it is not completely one letter – one sound, but it is fairly close. If a Czech sees Geneea, they often pronounce it the Czech way: [gɛnɛ:a] (ghe-neh-ah). At the same time, they feel it looks a little bit exotic and wonder: should it be [gɛni:a] (ghe-nee-ah)? Or maybe… We use [d͡ʒɪˈni:ə] (je-NEE-ah), but if anyone pronounces it differently, we’re absolutely fine with that.
It also gets a little tricky when people are looking for us on-line:
geenea – geneaa – geneae – geneee – geniea – gennea – etc.
Fortunately, Google has started to return our pages even with some of the above forms:
While still not at 100 percent, finding us on Google using an incorrect form of our name has gotten considerably less difficult, especially when the name is followed by “NLP”, “text analytics”, or something similar.
Inflecting the word Geneea is another reason why our Czech clients and partners turn to us for help. Czech as most other Slavic languages likes to use different forms of nouns depending on whether they are subjects, objects, something is given to them or taken from them, etc. So to address Geneea in Czech, remember to use Geneeo! ;-).
If you ever feel like talking or writing about us, please do so and don’t worry about spelling or pronunciation too much. We are no grammar nazis and really appreciate your mentioning us in any form :-).
Yours sincerely,
GENEEA
[d͡ʒɪˈni:ə] (je-NEE-ah) (or any way you want to say it :-))