Tried Hindi + Japanese + Both and could not find Akira, which is quite popular in both cultures...
MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
131–140 of 261 posts
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#132It would be nice if these name suggestions also came with meanings/etymology where available. Sometimes a name might be phonetically compatible but have an unfortunate connotation.
There is an easy way to sidestep the multicultural name problem. For the first name choose one from the language most familiar to the place where you choose to live. This minimizes annoying mispronunciations. Then choose a name from the other language, and have that be the middle name. You would have a much wider range to choose from, and most will probably find they are forced into fewer compromises this way.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#133OK my name is Osman in Arabic and though Osman shows up on the English/Arabic page I can definitely confirm, having lived in the US for over ten years, it is NOT english friendly to pronounce at all.
But i love the idea of this app!
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#134Extending 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 nam…
Interesting, do you have any examples of the out-there names?
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#135We took a slightly different approach and chose names that were deliberately common nouns that translate well, such as 蜜蜂
https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto...
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#136Names with an L in Japanese?
The concept is cute, the execution is questionable.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
> That’s true, but they won’t all be commonly used as names everywhere. 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.)
Huh, interesting the uptake by Catholics was greatly due to a Marian apparition in the town of Fatima, Portugal.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#138[deleted]
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#139I 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…
The webapp didn't work well for English/Chinese. This type of bilingual naming isn't that common for that combination, but some people do it, and it's much tricker than in most other languages because you're dealing with both different naming cultures (e.g. Chinese names are almost never more than 3 syllables including surname) and different phoenetics at the same time. A few examples of common given names that work are 安妮 (Annie) 麗娜 (Lina) 瑞 (Ray) 凱亮 (Calvin), all appended to a Chinese surname of course.
What IS much more common, though, is Chinese parents picking a Chinese name that happens to be easy to pronounce for English speakers and forget the need for an English name. For example most native English speakers have no problem pronouncing a character pronounced "ting" or "fei" or "wei" but may get tripped up by "xie/hsieh" or "xuan/hsuan".
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You would probably pronounce it /sɑm/, or maybe /sam/, while I would pronounce it /sæm/. 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...
Speaking of least favorites I’d propose the glottal stop /ʔ/.