Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

mixedname.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 261 posts

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#251

Post by rendall »

stevekemp wrote: post #175
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.

Oiva is a good name! Yeah, I don't think Myrsky would pass the nimilautakunta!

We considered Ukko for a minute, but ... wow, English speakers would definitely have struggles.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#252

Post by CarbyAu »

tappio wrote: post #188
CarbyAu wrote: post #173

Earlier 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.

Well I guess no one is naming their kid "Karen" for a while...

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#253

Post by junar »

lvturner wrote: post #167

Great 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…

李 is typically used as a surname. At least in Mandarin, there are other Chinese characters like 丽 (for females) and 力 (for males) that can be spelled Li/Lee, and also used as given names. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Li https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Leehom

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#254

Post by jameshush »

bredren wrote: post #87

Unrelated, but I created the very first Baby Names app for iOS with my pal David. I didn’t have a baby, but my friend Marie was having one and suggested the idea. Imagine having such a simple idea and it not already existing on iOS. Those were the days. It held the namespace “Baby Names” in the App Store, which someone tried to buy later but before that no longer mattered. It was the gold rush of the App Store. I thi…

Great story :). My old boss made the first "Weight Watchers" points app. Same idea, hacked together html5/js/hardcoded points calculator. Massively popular at the time. Had to take it down because he got a cease and desist from Weight Watchers. That level of organic traffic definitely no longer exists on the App Store or Google Play :(

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#255

Post by sk0g »

KMag wrote: post #182
sk0g wrote: 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.

I'm not so sure about the Cantonese/ Mandarin part, since a fair few professors I've had, had those as a native tongue. Hell, even my thesis supervisor was, with whom I communicated extensively. I can't really pinpoint where the struggles lie, but I get the general feeling that for Chinese native speakers there's a three way confusion between n, r, and l, and it's heavily dependant on the placement in the word, as well as the level of stress on the letter.

I don't think recognising phonetic differences between native speakers of different languages is racist. The language I grew up speaking didn't differentiate between w and v, so unless I'm making a conscious effort against it, they will all sound like v's. When someone points it out, I don't find it racist at all.

Re: Koreans - never realised! I haven't had many interactions with people of Korean descent, so it's an oversight on my part there.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#256

Post by IgorPartola »

rcpt wrote: post #146
IgorPartola wrote: post #144

It returned Maria for a combo of English/Russian/Masculine. Also Adrian and Brody which I’ve never heard in Russian. But overall not a bad idea. My former Irish coworker and his Indian wife could have used this for sure when trying to name their kids years ago.

I mean, presumably the people using the service will manually validate the results before acting on them.

You would think. I knew a person who was named after a character in a Russian movie. The name was Akim but the parents wanted to spell it to look like Cyrillic, so they spelled it Akum (pronounced as Akim but not by anyone who read it before hearing it). Akim is a masculine name and the person was a woman. It’s unclear how the parents managed to do this, they admitted that they mixed up the names of the man and the woman characters in the movie. So I wouldn’t be so sure people are smart enough to always check things. I don’t know if Maria would get mistaken by anyone for a masculine name. But I can 100% see someone thinking that Brody and Adrian are real Russian names when they absolutely are not.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#258

Post by samatman »

Angeo34 wrote: post #249
samatman wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Haha this is insane

India and Europe are subcontinents of Asia, that's true

Languages from India are Indian and languages from Europe are European, that's also true

Your mom's racist bud

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#259

Post by moultano »

ghoomketu wrote: post #198
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…

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.

Yeah we've encountered that. We've heard of at least 3 friends of friends named Aarav.
Post reply on HN