Ashzee

I've never heard it, but it's probably quite common in America.

what sort of weird answer was that?

You mean you're none the wiser?!

The idea, I guess, is that in the US, you can find all sorts of names, variants on anmes, strange spelling of names and so on.

I am not familiar with the name, in either spelling, as a given name or surname. The only things I can find on Google are screen names and some stuff in Chinese & Japanese I can't read. A Chinese physicist named S. H. An uses it for an email address [ashzy (at) mail.ustc.edu.cn ]

Ashkenazi... is it a pet form of this?

It does look like some name created by young American parents, that kind of thing seems quite common these days, so it wasn't a weird answer Mathilda, it was a humorous answer. Even on the Japanese sites it seems to be just a screen ID. Possibly someone called Ashley might use it as a kind of nickname.

Where did you come across it?

an iraqi kurd uses each of the types of spelling in his two different e-mail adresses.
i can't remember his name and wondered if that may be it.

toot's guess is probably wrong then.

You couldn't have an sh immediately followed by a z in Arabic. (Although people sometime transliterate things badly so that the Roman transliteration has impossible-in-Arabic combinations.) I don't know about Kurdish, though.

Kurdish is Indoeuropean. It is written in Latin, Cyrillic & Arabic letters, depending on the region. Looking at The alphabet, and checking another site, it looks like the "ee" sound is represented by the letter I with either an accent or a circumflex. So maybe he is "Ashi." Or maybe she is Ashi. I found a news story from the first Gulf War: "Ashi Salih Mostafa, a 60-year-old woman."