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"And he called his name Noah, saying, This one will comfort us from our work and from the painful toil of our hands, from the ground which Yahweh cursed."
The verb comfort is odd here. This kind of statement "He called him X, saying Y" intends to give an etymology of the person named. The name Noah does look identical to the noun nwḥ, "rest", related to a verb (rest, comfort, give comfort) with the same spelling. But oddly, the verb found in the Hebrew of this verse is nḥm, which would be more naturally paired with a name like Menahem.
Kittel thinks that 5:29 originally used the verb nwḥ in the form yeniḥeinu, rather than the present form yenaḥmeinu of nḥm found in the text today. Kittel says his suggestion is supported by the Septuagint here, and I don't know enough Greek to really evaluate that properly.
On the other hand, proposals in the opposite direction have also been made. The Sefer ha-Yashar notices the problem and suggests that Noah's father named him Menahem. A modern variant of the same idea can be found in Julian Morgenstern's (1930) "A Note on Genesis 5:29" (JBL).
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