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I know an elder among Jehovah's witnesses and, naturally enough, for him God's covenant name is of paramount importance. He uses "Jehovah" as the way to spell and pronounce God's name. That spelling is mistaken but it isn't hugely important to me that their chosen spelling isn't quite right; after all, we spell the Lord's name as "Jesus" and we know that is not quite right too.
But for the elder from Jehovah's witnesses "Jehovah" has a very specific meaning. It is explained like this:
Any thoughts?
But for the elder from Jehovah's witnesses "Jehovah" has a very specific meaning. It is explained like this:
(Je·hoʹvah) [the causative form, the imperfect state, of the Heb. verb ha·wahʹ (become); meaning “He Causes to Become”].
The personal name of God. (Isa 42:8; 54:5) Though Scripturally designated by such descriptive titles as “God,” “Sovereign Lord,” “Creator,” “Father,” “the Almighty,” and “the Most High,” his personality and attributes—who and what he is—are fully summed up and expressed only in this personal name.—Ps 83:18. [Insight on the Scriptures]
Catholics present a different derivation and meaning.Jahveh (Yahweh) is one of the archaic Hebrew nouns, such as Jacob, Joseph, Israel, etc. (cf. Ewald, "Lehrbuch der hebr. Sprache", 7th ed., 1863, p. 664), derived from the third person imperfect in such a way as to attribute to a person or a thing the action of the quality expressed by the verb after the manner of a verbal adjective or a participle. Furst has collected most of these nouns, and calls the form forma participialis imperfectiva. As the Divine name is an imperfect form of the archaic Hebrew verb "to be", Jahveh means "He Who is", Whose characteristic note consists in being, or The Being simply.
Here we are confronted with the question, whether Jahveh is the imperfect hiphil or the imperfect qal . Calmet and Le Clere believe that the Divine name is a hiphil form; hence it signifies, according to Schrader (Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, 2nd ed., p. 25), He Who brings into existence, the Creator; and according to Lagarde (Psalterium Hieronymi, 153), He Who causes to arrive, Who realises His promises, the God Providence. But this opinion is not in keeping with Exodus 3:14 , nor is there any trace in Hebrew of a hiphil form of the verb meaning "to be"; moreover, this hiphil form is supplied in the cognate languages by the pi'el form, except in Syriac where the hiphil is rare and of late occurrence.
...
Since then the Hebrew imperfect is admittedly not to be considered as a future, and since the nature of the language does not force us to see in it the expression of transition or of becoming, and since, moreover, early tradition is quite fixed and the absolute character of the verb hayah has induced even the most ardent patrons of its historical sense to admit in the texts a description of God's nature , the rules of hermeneutics urge us to take the expressions in Exodus 3:13-15 , for what they are worth. Jahveh is He Who Is, i.e., His nature is best characterised by Being, if indeed it must be designated by a personal proper name distinct from the term God (Revue biblique, 1893, p. 338). The scholastic theories as to the depth of meaning latent in Yahveh (Yahweh) rest, therefore, on a solid foundation. Finite beings are defined by their essence : God can be defined only by being, pure and simple, nothing less and nothing more; not be abstract being common to everything, and characteristic of nothing in particular, but by concrete being, absolute being, the ocean of all substantial being, independent of any cause, incapable of change, exceeding all duration, because He is infinite : "Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, . . . who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty" ( Revelation 1:8 ). Cf. St. Thomas, I, qu. xiii, a. 14; Franzelin, "De Deo Uno" (3rd ed., 1883, thesis XXIII, pp. 279-86. [Catholic Encyclopedia]
So Jehovah's witnesses see the name as meaning "He causes to become" and Catholics see the meaning of the name as "He who is".Any thoughts?
thus for the greek Iisoús (Jesus) in the Latin alphabet became IHS, so they added a tail onto the I to distinguish the two pronunciations for "I", giving us "J" 
.. (h)ey-sus/G-sus = Jesus)
