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MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

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241–250 of 261 posts

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#241

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…

You wouldn't happen to have a similar spreadsheet with a boy's name list, would you?

The Hindu men I know whose parents wanted to give them names easily pronounceable in English are called Neel and Kiran.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mary used to be an _incredibly_ popular name in Catholic European countries. Notably, two consecutive presidents of Ireland were called Mary! Definitely less common now, but weirdly universal in the 50s.

Almost every successful Irish female politician was called Mary, for a really long time.

Well, almost every woman of their generation in Ireland was called Mary, so it's not that surprising :)

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's Arkady Pussy-slut, thank you very much

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#245
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.

> 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. :)

I've been burned by this. In Quebec my name is pronounced the same, but there is an obvious spelling difference between the Anglo and French spellings, e.g. Henry vs Henri.

They know you're Anglo before you show up. Which is a problem because they wanted a native French speaker for the role.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#246

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…

Lived in Australia for a while, have a brother who is a dual citizen. (US citizen, but I'm in Canada now).

Names in the Oz were... different. In north Melbourne damn near all of the white folks I know had painfully white, Christian names -- but I don't think a single person ever went by them except on paper. You may be a Gary or Warren -- bland Anglo names -- but down under you'd be Gazza or Wazza. Or a Matty or Johnno.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#247
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't be surprising though since English, Bengali, French, Persian, Italian and Hindi belong to the same family of languages. If you actually compare the languages it's astonishing how similar the words actually are.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. All those languages are proto-indo-european, voters! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language

It's just like on 4chins

When people see someone saying that European Persian and Indian are the same family they go dipshit because "how can someone with dark skin have any relations to someone with pale skin".

Should say something about the general view of not few HN readers.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's Arkady Pussy-slut, thank you very much

Which im sure some poor soul will mishear as "Pussy-Slut Academy" once the names are reversed and Arkady is put into Katakana and it's late into a night of drinking at the mandatory after work drinks. Hahaha.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#249
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>European language Hindi, Persian, Bengali and the likes are all European languages and I don't think those languages have the name Sam.

I didn't visit Delhi, Tehran, or Kolkata the last time I was in Europe. My mistake! I'll be sure to next time I'm out that way.

> The concepts of Europe and Asia as distinct continents date back to antiquity, and their borders are geologically arbitrary.

Either you call Hindi, Persian and Bengali European or you call German English and French Asian. But saying one is European/Asian while the other is not is simply a racist view.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#250
post #85
post #27

Finnish and Japanese is another of those combinations that should work very easily since the languages are related even if it's just indirectly.

The theory that Japanese and Finnish could be related is very much controversial and not widely accepted by linguists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic Nobody knows for sure how Japonic languages relate to other families. Some theorize that it might share a genetic relationship with Korean, but even that has not been convincingly established. At any rate even if we chose to believe that both languages share…

>Russian, Italian, Dutch, English, Hindi and Gaelic languages do all belong to the Indo-European family, yet they diverged so much

This is plainly wrong. Go on compare words in those languages and it will strike you how similar the words are whether it's German and Urdu, French and Persian or Hindi and Italian. Names are a different thing since names are rather based on religious and ethnic identity rather than actual language.

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