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MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

mixedname.com

11–20 of 261 posts

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#11
Haha. Great idea. My parents did this but w/ three languages. There are surprisingly few that are pronounced similarly.

I can see this tool being very useful in coming up with ideas. You do need to sense check it though ultimately. e.g. English/German suggests "Lear". Which in German sounds similar to "leer" meaning empty.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#12
We were looking for names that worked in both English and Spanish for our kids (a boy and a girl). Interestingly, neither kid's first name shows up in the listed intersections but their middle names do. For my daughter, she has a specifically Spanish first name, but one that's easily pronounced/spelled by English speakers (we gave up on "Elena" as her first name because of the frequent misspellings of that we encountered). Our son's name, according to my wife is valid in both languages but appears in the English-only part of the Venn diagram at the top of the list. (Children's actual names omitted for privacy.)

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#14
Very interesting. My sons are Anglo-Persian and we considered for a while Alexander (Persian version is Iskandar) which for the latter has the root of Alexander the Great (Alexandros) .. .who was not considered as "great" in Persia of old. It's interesting how personal perception of homonymous friends & acquaintances along with cultural perceptions (Alexander for me was a hero, for my wife a villain) play into the naming game.

(Yes I googled "homonymous")

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#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.

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