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MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

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Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#171

Post by gostsamo »

msikora wrote: post #91
samatman wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To really flog on it, Hungarian isn't Indo-European at all, and Sámuel is a Hungarian name. I'd bet you'll find it among Copts and the Ethiopian Orthodox as well, which is also not in contradiction to what I said.

Samuel is really the perfect name as even the spelling is the same in all European languages except for diacritics in some languages. My name, Michal (Slovak), is not too bad, but the local version varies greatly across Europe: Michael, Michele, Mikael, Miguel, Михаил (Michail), Mihái, etc.

Unfortunately, at least in bulgarian Samuel is spelled Samuil (Самуил). Not sure about russian and ukrainian, but they've gotten the slavic translation of the Bible from medieval Bulgaria and a fast ddg shows the family form to exists as "Самуилович".

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#172

Post by quickthrower2 »

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 what? To avoid being thought of as "Burnt" he changed his name to "Bernt". Funny!

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#173

Post by CarbyAu »

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…

And here my approach to naming was:

- veto names of dickheads I knew.

Of course, I know good people with those names too but that wasn't the deciding factor.

I simply didn't want my kids name to be associated with a dickhead in my own mind in any way, shape or form.

Very me-centric I guess but I wanted the best personal relationship with my kid.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#174

Post by gostsamo »

anthk wrote: post #104
dfee wrote: post #15

English / Spanish : Male names gives very few names that I’d recognize as English names. https://mixedname.com/english_spanish_masculine_names Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the value of this?

- English name - Jacobo Ahem...Biblical names can be traced to almost older than English, at least in romances. jacob Jacobo, Santiago Noah Noé George Jorge Also, Martín is French origin I think.

Martin is latin, meaning little Mars.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#175

Post by stevekemp »

rendall wrote: post #156

We 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.

I was disappointed we couldn't call our boy Myrsky!

In our case we wanted a name that would be easy to read/spell/pronounce for Finnish and British people. I think that might have been a stretch too far.

Still Oiva is excellent, and works really well for everyone.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#176

Post by foxrob92 »

Some family friends had the "trilingual" version of this - the wife is from the French/Spanish border, so she had both French and Spanish speaking parents. The husband is from Australia, so they were looking for names that don't change much under translation between English, French and Spanish.

They went with Robert (en/fr)/Roberto (es), and Ines (fr)/Inez (es)/Agnes (en). Ines doesn't really use her "English" name.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#177

Post by mjn »

mc32 wrote: post #17

I prefer the ones that have translations like: John. Ian, Ivan, Jan, Johan, Aidan, Juan, Joao, etc. Charles, Matthew, Katherine, Ann, and so on so you have an actual name with a standard accepted translation in many languages. French seems like the language which has quite a bit of names either translated or transliterated into other languages -perhaps due to proximity as well as influence.

I have a name like this, and like it: I'm Mark in English, and Μάρκος/Markos in Greek. My parents are mixed Greek/American, and wanted to choose a name that translated.

But it has caused some bureaucratic problems, because properly translating (rather than transliterating) your name seems to have fallen out of fashion, and authorities don't like that documents don't "match", even though that used to be very common. So nowadays authorities don't like that my American birth certificate and Greek registration of birth have "different" names.

And I'm a relatively easy case, because at least Mark vs. Markos look obviously similar. It's an even bigger problem if your U.S. documents say John while your Greek ones say Ιωάννης/Ioannis, even though these are direct translations. In the modern era, governments seem to want people in this situation to either choose Ioannis as their legal English name, or to choose Τζον/Tzon as their legal Greek name. But not everyone wants that.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#178

Post by dragonwriter »

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).

> > Any name of a (Catholic) saint would probably have mappings to other languages

> Jesús is a common Spanish name, but totally nonexistent in English and French as far as I’m aware.

Jesus is not a saint.

> 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).

Mary is the most common female name in the US, but, José and María are by far more common first names in many parts of the Spanish-speaking world than Joseph and Mary in the English world, to the extent that often people who have them as their first name use their middle name as their common name, not their first name.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#179

Post by gumby »

fignews wrote: post #143
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.

That’s what makes it so surprising!

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#180

Post by wst_ »

mc32 wrote: post #17

I prefer the ones that have translations like: John. Ian, Ivan, Jan, Johan, Aidan, Juan, Joao, etc. Charles, Matthew, Katherine, Ann, and so on so you have an actual name with a standard accepted translation in many languages. French seems like the language which has quite a bit of names either translated or transliterated into other languages -perhaps due to proximity as well as influence.

Unfortunately, it doesn't always work like that in the wild. In some countries people will choose to butcher your original name for the sake of politeness, even if there is ideal translation in their langiage. At least this is what's happening in the UK. Not sure if it's common elsewere. For this reason I'd rather choose the name with better pronounciation outlook in both countries.
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