111–120 of 261 posts
I'm Irish, my partner is Dutch. We considered calling our daughter Eimear. In her dialect it would have been like calling her "bucket". We opted for a different name ;)
Here is a resource with years worth of popular Māori names: https://smartstart.services.govt.nz/news/baby-names
Really cool project!
Fascinating. I speak Bengali and found a bunch of "English names that may also be Bengali words" are not Bengali words. Some of those are Bengali words, but not very flattering.
It shouldn't be surprising though since English, Bengali, French, Persian, Italian and Hindi belong to the same family of languages. If you actually compare the languages it's astonishing how similar the words actually are.
So he changed his name to a that of his Norwegian great-grandfather, Bernt, a fairly typical Norwegian name.
Many years later he moved back to Australia, and quickly discovered the exact same problem: "Bernt" gets pronounced as "burnt"... so he had to change back to Brent.
For me the best part is how the "error" is the same both ways. I see "Brent" derives from burnt ("dweller near the burnt land"), but Bernt is a short form of the German name "Berend" or "Bernhard".