I was told in a Latin class that the name Christopher has Greek roots that mean "one who carries Christ". I assume that the Latin connection here is fero, which is the verb to carry.
With that in mind, does the name Jennifer have a similar derivation? If so what would she be carrying?
No Jennifer is from
From a Cornish form of the Welsh name Gwenhwyfar (see GUINEVERE). This name has only been common outside of Cornwall since the beginning of the 20th century, after it was featured in George Bernard Shaw's play 'The Doctor's Dilemma' (1906).
From the Norman French form of the Welsh name Gwenhwyfar, composed of the elements gwen meaning "fair, white" and hwyfar meaning "smooth". In Arthurian legend she was the beautiful wife of King Arthur who engaged in an adulterous affair with Sir Lancelot. Her betrayal of her husband with Mordred prompted the battle of Camlann, which led to the deaths of both Mordred and Arthur.
The Cornish form of this name, Jennifer, has become popular in the English-speaking world.
Yes, the Latin fero is cognate to Greek phero, from which the name Christopher is derived. The name Jennifer, however, is from Welsh words meaning "white" and "smooth," so she is not carrying anything (Online Etymology Dictionary).
It's a perfect example of a false cognate pair that is created by a sort of linguistic homogenization. When we come across foreign words, we pronounce them with our own sounds, mapping a foreign sound to one natural to our own ear that seems close enough for our purposes. Unrelated sounds and syllables from unrelated languages might in this way each get mapped to a single native sound/syllable. In this way, we come to hear the sounds and syllables as related when they are not.
Mesoamerican languages, for instance, did not have a "v" sound. Consequently, when learning Spanish, the natives of Central America had a devil of time with the fairly common v sound and ended up usually pronouncing it as a b. The b sound is related to the v sound, so it wasn't a subtle shift. In consequence, very often to this day words like "votar" (to vote) get pronounced identically with words like "botar" (to throw out) giving rise to numerous puns. When native Spanish speakers from Latin America learn English, they are often heard saying things like "Thank you bery much," as a result. But "bery," and its false homophones "berry" and "bury" have no shared ancestry.
As a last point of interest, consider English spelling. It is so difficult precisely because speakers of English and the academic sources that safeguard the English language (Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Dictionary, etc.) have made a general decision to preserve as best as possible the original spelling of the words in their original languages, making only occasional modifications to bring them into some kind of conventional conformity. So the Greek suffix -φορος is conventionally transliterated as -pher, whereas the ending of Gwenhwyfar gets transliterated as -fer and the ending of aquifer stays as the Romans wrote it: -fer. This makes our spelling a bear to get a handle of, but it also locks the secret of most words' origins right into the words themselves. That means, once one has understood a bit of Latin, Greek, some common Celtic endings and a bit of German, one can almost always discern the origins of the word just by looking at it. Of course, it also means that we have to spend years and years memorizing spelling word lists and still relying on spellchecker far more than we care to admit.
The names Christopher and Jennifer are not etymologically related.
Jennifer is derived from the Welsh Gwenhwyfar, translated as "white wave", "white skin", or "white shoulders", depending on whom you ask.
