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MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

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Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#161

Post by nathanhammond »

xbeta wrote: post #153

I did the same with two of my kids, and we have more than two languages to consider. We want something simple to write, spell, and pronounce in all 2 languages + dialects: Cantonese, Mandarin, English. It is super challenging. And some of my relatives are super into 八字 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pillars_of_Destiny ) that also need to make sure the characters written in Chinese can align with that too.

Is this published anywhere? Constraints I'm trying to solve for:

- Reasonable English corollary. (Doesn't have to be 1:1.)

- English-pronounceable Cantonese romanization.

- English-pronounceable Mandarin romanization.

- Doesn't diverge too much between the three.

- Characters that are identical in Traditional and Simplified.

- Pleasing to the relatives.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#162

Post by asveikau »

james_s_tayler wrote: post #152
magicalhippo wrote: post #120

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…

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.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#163

Post by samatman »

mc32 wrote: post #140
samatman wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would probably pronounce it /sɑm/, or maybe /sam/, while I would pronounce it /sæm/. But again, I don't mind. I kinda like the way the rest of the world says it, actually. æ is my least favorite sound in my native tongue...

Speaking of least favorites I’d propose the glottal stop /ʔ/.

uh-oh!

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#164

Post by xbeta »

nathanhammond wrote: post #161
xbeta wrote: post #153

I did the same with two of my kids, and we have more than two languages to consider. We want something simple to write, spell, and pronounce in all 2 languages + dialects: Cantonese, Mandarin, English. It is super challenging. And some of my relatives are super into 八字 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pillars_of_Destiny ) that also need to make sure the characters written in Chinese can align with that too.

Is this published anywhere? Constraints I'm trying to solve for: - Reasonable English corollary. (Doesn't have to be 1:1.) - English-pronounceable Cantonese romanization. - English-pronounceable Mandarin romanization. - Doesn't diverge too much between the three. - Characters that are identical in Traditional and Simplified. - Pleasing to the relatives.

Yep, absolutely. These constraints probably yield nothing in return. We have take compromise in some of these.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#165

Post by james_s_tayler »

another-dave wrote: post #86
czzr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what’s the issue with those names in Japanese?

I presume GP is talking about the Perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese speakers — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_an...

It's probably more non-Japanese would pronounce the /l/ so differently that it would change the way the name sounds enough to be jarring to the individual who bears the name. That'd be a straight pain in the ass.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#166

Post by Arnavion »

asveikau wrote: post #162
james_s_tayler wrote: post #152

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.

マンコビッチ == MA-N-KO-BI-CCHI

manko is slang for vagina. bicchi is borrowed from English "bitch", but is used more like English "slut"

That said, those Russians could've used ヴィッチ WI-CCHI, such as in https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B8%E3%83%A7%E3%83%B3%E3... So why does Mankovich use BI but Markovich uses WI ? Because expecting katakana spellings to make sense is already too much to ask for, let along expecting them to be consistent.

(Bonus: sandwich uses neither BI nor WI. It uses I. SA-N-DO-I-CCHI)

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#167

Post by lvturner »

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 use 李 or even 李李 (which is what my Chinese grandmother in law calls me) as a first name on a visa that required a Chinese name to be added - they wouldn't allow it!

If anything - it illustrates why this is such a tough problem to crack!

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#168

Post by akulkarni »

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…

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

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#169

Post by danans »

civilian wrote: post #117
Angeo34 wrote: 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

They are Indo European, not Proto Indo European. Big difference.

Indo European is a language family.

Proto Indo European is the reconstructed hypothetical language that languages in that family descend from.

There are indeed a huge number of cognates between the descendant languages, but due to the linguistic changes and borrowings that have occurred in the millenia that have elapsed since their divergence, there are also a massive number of false cognates between them also, which likely accounts for the non flattering meanings the GGP was referring to.

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