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Earlier quoted context omitted.
> French seems like the language which has quite a bit of names either translates or transliterated into other languages -perhaps due to proximity as well as influence. Any name of a (Catholic) saint would probably have mappings to other languages. (The Jesuits got around. :)
Except "Jarlath"
This is not a slight towards the OP, I’m just opening up for discussion. I think this is a great example of how we tend to default to algorithms and automation even when the problem is better suited to a more manual solution. This is especially problematic when our automated systems don’t allow for transparent human intervention (think ML classifiers etc.). If this page were a curated wiki, for example, it’d probably…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> French seems like the language which has quite a bit of names either translates or transliterated into other languages -perhaps due to proximity as well as influence. Any name of a (Catholic) saint would probably have mappings to other languages. (The Jesuits got around. :)
That’s true, but they won’t all be commonly used as names everywhere. Jesús is a common Spanish name, but totally nonexistent in English and French as far as I’m aware. María too is way more common than “Mary” in English (that is a real English name, but AFAICT it’s pretty rare in the last few generations).
Meanwhile "Fatima" has an interesting split between Muslim use and Catholic use:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatima_(given_name)
(I had a good (Portugese) childhood friend with that name; still sometimes manage to keep in touch.)
Assyrians have been scattered for centuries, and many have settled in other countries and have organically picked up hybridized names - it would be interesting to compare some of those to the produced ones, and especially fuzzy matches for new ideas
- I'm not sure how "Lee" is a feminine name.
- Park is more Korean and not Chinese.
How did you get your data?
Nice! Too bad they don’t include Hungarian. I’d like to see if they included the name my Hungarian friends gave their daughter. They picked Edith/Edit. The Hungarian version is pronounced ED-eet, which is pretty different from EE-dith, but at least the spellings are close.
My son got the Hungarian middle name, but we went with a Greek first name, partly because it didn't map to our Hungarian family, but also something I thought my elderly father could pronounce, in his heavy accent. We'd had girl names for months, but didn't settle on the boy name option until the night he was born. This was a good while ago, but this discussion brought back the particulars of finding a good name.
For the first names, we made sure there are reasonable English renderings of the Greek, which unfortunately excluded my parent's names, and my name as well.
The Korean middle names reference celestial/heavenly items as well as being popular Korean entertainment figures, and have a nice word play together in English.
Talk about threading the needle!
For example the name Marie is on there, which in English would be "ma-REE" while in Japanese it would be like "ma-ree-ay"
I imagine anyone using this tool would have enough knowledge of both languages to cull those results, though, so not really a problem in practice. Just an observation.
Earlier 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.
Samuel exists as a German name and is pronounced in a German way, but as far as I know the short version does not exist as a German name and I would try to pronounce it as an English name when I see it.
But again, I don't mind. I kinda like the way the rest of the world says it, actually. æ is my least favorite sound in my native tongue...
They are all a mix of English sounding Japanese names.
Tried the English-Japanese, not all the options are there. It helps that we lived in Japan for 6 years and I can speak Japanese so it was a lot easier finding the names.