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MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

mixedname.com

211–220 of 261 posts

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#211

Extending 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?

Looking at relatively current top baby names...

Elijah, Mason, Logan, Harper, Jackson, Ethan, Avery, Madison, Carter, Wyatt, Jayden...

These are just a few from the top ~20 boys and girls names. I've heard all of these in a US media context but never heard any of them in the UK. That's not to say they aren't used here, but they certainly aren't common. And of course there's "Randy".

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Having no Japanese language skills I pasted that into Google translate. Then inserted spaces between glyphs until one part of it (vich) translated as "bitch". Aside: there are a lot of languages where /b/ and /v/ move around. Eg. Romance languages during the vulgar Latin period. Today in Spanish these are pronounced identically.

You shoulda pasted it into image search.

マンコ is pussy and ビッチ (bitch) is slut. So, it's like "nice to meet you, I'm pussy slut" and then handing someone a business card.

I remember seeing it come up as example of unfortunate foreign names in Japanese when watching some variety program once. I cracked up pretty hard at that one. Though I've encountered a doozy in real life too, though it escapes me exactly what it was now.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#213
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.

Biblical names have versions in all languages from the Middle East and Europe, and to a lesser extent Africa and Asia as well. Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Mary are near-universal.

Some of the different versions are not easily recognizable, like the English John and the Arabic Yahya, but if you knew the original Hebrew Yohanan it's not so hard.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#214
post #200
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 '…

Names that went unpopular also include Katrina, Isis and.. Adolf https://www.huffpostbrasil.com/entry/unpopular-baby-names_n_...

It's a shame that Isis (the Egyptian goddess) is now associated to the Islamic State. It's a beautiful name.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#215
post #200
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 '…

Tbh I’ve never heard those words before.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

In the international company I work for we have a rule that surnames are always in all caps in employee directories. So it can be "Ryan LEE" or "LEE, Ryan" or "LEE Ryan" (in Hungary), but you know that Lee is the family name. Before that rule was introduced, confusion was commonplace. A colleague of mine is called, say, Vyacheslav Spirin, and he signed his emails as "V. Spirin". To Indians this looked like a normal S…

To be fair, I would have thought that Vyacheslav and Slava were also different people.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#217
Names are hard. Sitting with a Polish colleague with a very biblical name he commented "Your name, in Poland.. you would be instantly labelled a psycho. You just can't have a name like yours." Was named from the traditional family book in Scotland. Korva.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#218
post #182
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now it sounds like an Chinese/Japanese person saying bellend. Hope they stay away from the UK!

Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese (and presumably most/all other dialects) distinguish r from l. You're thinking of some Japanese/Koreans having trouble due to those languages using a single phoneme that's somewhat between r/l. Also, it's a bit racist to not point out that it's only some Japanese and Koreans that have trouble pronouncing r and l.

It’s not racist. It’s phonetics. Foreign kids who grow up Japanese have the same issue.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#219

I tried English and Italian and I was a bit surprised... my son’s name which is Leo and valid in both languages wasn’t there... while there were at least dozens of names so archaic most people would never hear them in reality! Not sure where you got your sources

I just goaded my Italian partner with a link to the page containing our toddler's name - we agreed on the name itself, which is known in both countries, but not the exact spelling.

I was pleased this page preferred my interpretation, so as an asshole Scot, I was quick to share it.

Her response was less than enthused...

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#220

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…

That's fantastic. It reminds me of the GNU Hurd mutually recursive acronyms :-)

> It's time [to] explain the meaning of "Hurd". "Hurd" stands for "Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons". And, then, "Hird" stands for "Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth". We have here, to my knowledge, the first software to be named by a pair of mutually recursive acronyms.

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