It is probably very useful not only for international couples, but also for role players
MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
61–70 of 261 posts
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
My name (Sam) is useful in that respect: I'm fairly sure it exists in every European language, being Biblical, and that it's spelled the same (in short form) in all of them. The vast majority can't pronounce it correctly by the standards of my American dialect. But I don't mind.
>European language Hindi, Persian, Bengali and the likes are all European languages and I don't think those languages have the name Sam.
I think you’re redefining the term european language —which typically means a language that developed in that region. It’s like saying English is a Japanese language because a percentage of people in Japan speak English except it did not originate there.
Indo-european is different but that is ancient family of prehistoric languages and hardly anyone would think this is what people mean.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
My name (Sam) is useful in that respect: I'm fairly sure it exists in every European language, being Biblical, and that it's spelled the same (in short form) in all of them. The vast majority can't pronounce it correctly by the standards of my American dialect. But I don't mind.
>European language Hindi, Persian, Bengali and the likes are all European languages and I don't think those languages have the name Sam.
I didn't visit Delhi, Tehran, or Kolkata the last time I was in Europe.
My mistake! I'll be sure to next time I'm out that way.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#64Extending this to regions seems like it could be a useful next step here.
I’m from the U.K. and my partner is Australian. While almost all names I’ve encountered in Australia are known names in the U.K., some would be very out-there for a U.K. name. I’m sure the same is true the other way around.
Not to mention the fact that this seems to be using an American English set of names and there are some very different naming conventions in the U.S. My last name is a first name in the U.S., and popular first names there are again very out-there for the U.K. or Australia.
I’m sure the same must be true for Spanish or French speaking countries.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#65I'm really not sure about the English/French intersection. There's quite a few names that I've definitely never heard in French and would be super awkward to pronounce. Names like Gaylord, Montgomery, Barbara. It seems like the source for French names wasn't really that reputable.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#66Hah only two? My wife is Chinese/Panamanian. We had to try and find names that worked in English Spanish and Chinese. Appeal to everyone. That was not an easy task. In the end it was more about picking names that aren’t something weird or offensive in the other ones but sound good in English. My moment was using Hector. The old Greek name appeals to my love of history and yet the family thinks it’s Spanish.
> the family thinks it’s Spanish.
They think it is Spanish, because it is Spanish.
Hector (/ˈhɛktər/) is an English, French, Scottish, and Spanish given name. The name is derived from the Greek name of Hektor.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
My name (Sam) is useful in that respect: I'm fairly sure it exists in every European language, being Biblical, and that it's spelled the same (in short form) in all of them. The vast majority can't pronounce it correctly by the standards of my American dialect. But I don't mind.
>European language Hindi, Persian, Bengali and the likes are all European languages and I don't think those languages have the name Sam.
Just to reinforce the point: Those are all part of the INDO-European language group. Emphasis on the fact that European is only half that name, and you're enumerating languages in the other half.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#68I did a similar thing for our kids (Hindi/English) but we had slightly different goals. Since the kids were getting my English surname, we wanted to give them Hindi first names, but we wanted them to be easily pronounceable in English. So I wrote a character-based ngram language model based on the US census count of names, and used that to score a list of Hindi names. I then improved it by adding a bunch of rewrite r…
I worked on a project with similar motivations; in my case, I had a list of criteria in mind, one of which was the number of syllables in a name. I couldn't find a good source for name syllabification, so built an n-gram language model trained on the CMUdict corpus.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#69This is cool, but needs to remember the prior selection inputs - it's a pain to set it back to how it was just to swap genders for example.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#70Cool project, need support for Estonian :)