English/Chinese combination returns the name "Park". I don't know any Chinese or Westerners with such name ...
MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
191–200 of 261 posts
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#192Great concept, and not a criticism, but a bit of an anecdote For Chinese-English it suggested "Lee", which as far as I know (my Cantonese and Mandarin aren't that great) is typically the Cantonese anglicisation of 李 (Mandarin Pinyin for this is Li) My given English name is "Lee" and this actually causes no end of confusion in both Hong Kong and China, as it's typically used as surname - in fact, when I attempted to u…
Hopefully your surname isn't easily mistaken for a given name. I've been living in Hong Kong almost 9 years now, and my middle name is often mistaken for my first name, or less commonly, my surname. Based on my experience, "Lee Ryan" would probably be mistaken for "Ryan Lee" well over 50% of the time.
It is - and sometimes I get called by middle name instead of either of the other names.
In e-mails the failure rate for people getting my name in the right order is around 80% - sometimes even after I've corrected the sender three or four times (with decreasing subtly)
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#193German-Japanese female names include names like "Hide", "Aili" or "Uta" which I have never heared in Germany. Is the criteria that the names can be easily pronounced by native speakers of both languages?
French-Vietnamese suggests Bay or Mai (which are Vietnamese, but not French at all) and the list of "French name which may also be Vietnamese words" is a list of English names, for some reason (Ames Austin Bailey Bell Bo Bruce Desire Forster).
Then tried French-Dutch and once again, most of the suggested names aren't very French at all, and not really that much Dutch either. Even though almost all French names are also used as is as Dutch names (well, in Flanders at least). Allard, Alvin, Anne (as a male name?) or Carolus? These don't work.
I'm not sure which source these names come from, but I wouldn't use it for French.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#194I'm Irish, my partner is Dutch. We considered calling our daughter Eimear. In her dialect it would have been like calling her "bucket". We opted for a different name ;)
Limburgs?
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#195Nice! For dutch names you could link to the “firstname-database” which shows the popularity of the name over time. E.g. https://www.meertens.knaw.nl/nvb/naam/is/Bert
Popularity over time seems like something relevant to integrate: at least half the German-Dutch suggestions would be something for either great grandparents or just grandparents.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#196Earlier 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.
In the german Bible the name is actually written: Sem. But I havent yet met a person named Sem.
That’s a different Biblical personage. The son of Noah from which “Semite” derives is Shem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shem), and is quite distinct from the prophet Samuel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel).
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#197Interesting idea. We went through a similar exercise recently but had different goals.
We've tried to optimize for having the same pronunciation in the languages. That is a much more difficult problem - you basically can't do anything with containing 'r'
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#198I 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…
Both are very nice names but Aarav is the new "gaurav/neha" in India. 3 out of 10 children are named Aarav ever since Akshay kumar named his son that.
A friend of mine named his daughter meghan, which translates to megha meaning rain in hindi and megan in English of course.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#199I 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…
Yep, that was my feeling as well. Same for Chinese / Dutch. At first I tried suggesting some names that matched but none of them really stuck for me and my wife.
In the end we picked an original Dutch name. Which could be easily pronounced and shortened to English, and turned out to be easily translatable to three Chinese syllables, with nice meanings for the hanzi as well. All grandparents immediately were able to go with it.
Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is the standard heuristic parents use so you are not alone. Interestingly it seems to cause names to go in cycles. Every generation has their own popular names. You end up picking a name that is not common in your parents or in your own generation, because there is always a dickhead with the common ones. If I remember right first names go in around 60-year cycles.
The Norwegian bureau of statistics used to have a brilliant bank of historical name trends, where you could input any name and see how popular it had been throughout the years.
One of my favourites were Vidkun, which fell off a cliff in the mid-forties.
(Vidkun being the first name of our head collaborationist honcho during the Nazi occupation - his last name may be known to you. Quisling. Yup, he coined the phrase 'Quisling' for a traitor and even had a verb - to quisle, for committing treason - enter the English language.)