I love the idea. I tried entering Armenian and English (the two languages spoken in our home) and the results were not great. Astrid, Natalia and Veronica.
MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
151–160 of 261 posts
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#152A 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…
Well can't be worse than Russians with a surname of Mankovich having to introduce themselves in Japan as マンコビッチ
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#153I did the same with two of my kids, and we have more than two languages to consider. We want something simple to write, spell, and pronounce in all 2 languages + dialects: Cantonese, Mandarin, English.
It is super challenging. And some of my relatives are super into 八字 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pillars_of_Destiny) that also need to make sure the characters written in Chinese can align with that too.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#154A 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.
You got it wrong, it's a fantastic superhero origin story. Well, hopefully superhero, not supervillain. :)
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#155There seems to be a mistake in the copy. It says: "Oh, and here are the Japanese-Finnish names it found for us" but does not list them
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#156We wanted a Finnish name for our son that wasn't so common and would sound masculine in English, so names like "Antti" and "Matti" wouldn't do. We chose Kauko.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#157This is great, thanks! I felt so alone having this problem :). But I based my decision on phonetics Spanish vs English since I didn't want the grandparents to struggle to say it :). For reference, I ended up picking Leia and Rafa.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#158I 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,…
I know a Riya whose name sounds like Ri-yuh, so I don't think you are completely wrong.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#159I made a generator of Panamanian-sounding names by making a syllable based 2-gram analysis of all first and middle names registered in Panama until 2012. By increasing the weight given to likely syllable sequences you can make names sound more "normal", otherwise they get stranger, but still pronunceable and weirdly familiar to those who know the peculiarities of Caribbean naming.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#160A 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.
Now it sounds like an Chinese/Japanese person saying bellend.
Hope they stay away from the UK!