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MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

mixedname.com

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Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#141

Post by galkk »

Having a daugther and recently went through the process of bilingual name choice I think now that how the name is written doesn't mean as much. (although we know that if we'll have another daughter, her name will be Sophia, because it was in the short list of bilingual names :) )

English speaking people will still prononuce differently even simple names like Anna (usually they spell it with one "n"), and the stress in my (and daugther's) last name is constantly spelled not like in Russian by people who don't know Russian.

At the same time acquaintance of mine called his son Christopher, and it's great name, even if Russians don't call their sons like this, because it's prononunced the same.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#142

Post by b34r »

magicalhippo wrote: post #120

A friend was half-Australian, and grew up there. His name was Brent. He then moved here to Norway, but quickly found that in Norwegian, "brent" means burnt. 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…

So he changed his name to “burnt” twice? lol

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#143

Post by fignews »

gumby wrote: post #33

This is an important problem; my parents decided to give us each two names while one of my uncles and his wife chose the “same name in both languages“ approach — for the first two kids, but were stumped and gave up for the third. My wife and I had an n-ary problem — not just the languages of all of her and all of my relatives (about five) but also the country we were living in. We finally whittled it down to phonemes…

The name Kevin in Germany is a meme and not viewed positively. It’s regularly made fun of and to call someone a Kevin is a bit of an insult.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#144

Post by IgorPartola »

It returned Maria for a combo of English/Russian/Masculine. Also Adrian and Brody which I’ve never heard in Russian. But overall not a bad idea. My former Irish coworker and his Indian wife could have used this for sure when trying to name their kids years ago.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#145

Post by cwbrandsma »

magicalhippo wrote: post #120

A friend was half-Australian, and grew up there. His name was Brent. He then moved here to Norway, but quickly found that in Norwegian, "brent" means burnt. 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…

Wait a sec...I named my son Berend...and my last name means “son of fire”. Crap, my kid is going to be a pyro.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#146

Post by rcpt »

IgorPartola wrote: post #144

It returned Maria for a combo of English/Russian/Masculine. Also Adrian and Brody which I’ve never heard in Russian. But overall not a bad idea. My former Irish coworker and his Indian wife could have used this for sure when trying to name their kids years ago.

I mean, presumably the people using the service will manually validate the results before acting on them.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#148

Post by wirthjason »

exo_duz wrote: post #130

Named my daughters Miya (Mia), Arisa (Allysa) and Remi (Remy). 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.

How did you decide the names?

Our daughter’s name is Kei. We didn’t know the gender until birth but my we had a few names picked out for girl names. Mia was one of them too.

Our only “requirement” was from my mom, “please don’t pick some crazy Japanese name I’ll never be able to pronounce.”

It seems you have slight English variants like Miya vs Mia. Is that just informal (eg for us everyone mistakenly spells Kei as Kay) or is it on official documents like passports?

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#149

Post by markdown »

cco wrote: post #98
moultano wrote: post #29

I 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…

> Finally we ended up with Riya for my daughter (which is pronounced the same as the English name Rhea) and Aarav for my son, which is pronounced the same as two of the most common English words, "are" and "of." Native English speaker from the Pacific Northwest, I would pronounce those "Ri-yuh" and "Are-rov"(I think your intended pronunciation) or maybe "A-rav", depends upon whether I knew they were of Indian decent,…

"A A Rav"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd7FixvoKBw

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#150

Post by dnautics »

School-Cotton wrote: post #105
throw0101a wrote: post #28

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).

Jesus is a bit of a special case, though right? A etymologically deeper translation into English is "Joshua", which is more numerous in English.
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