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MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

mixedname.com

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Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#31

Post by spiznnx »

mc32 wrote: 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.

My parents came from different catholic countries, and biblical names were an obvious choice for my brother and I

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#32

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

wittyreference wrote: post #18

English/Russian: I see names that work in Russian, and names that work in English, and very few that actually work in both.

Hm, quite the contrary experience, I've found that list to be mostly working.

Btw, a year ago I and my wife picked a name for our baby daughter, and the criteria for a name to 'work' in both English and Russian was high on the list. Her name is present in English / Russian list, so on basis of this one test I declare the service working correctly.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#33

Post by gumby »

This is an important problem; my parents decided to give us each two names while one of my uncles and his wife chose the “same name in both languages“ approach — for the first two kids, but were stumped and gave up for the third.

My wife and I had an n-ary problem — not just the languages of all of her and all of my relatives (about five) but also the country we were living in. We finally whittled it down to phonemes that pretty much everybody could pronounce (though vowels varied a lot) and just went with single-syllable names that were at least pronouncable.

English names are sort of in vogue, e.g. there are a surprising number of kids named “Kevin” in Germany at the moment.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#34

Post by Hamuko »

Angeo34 wrote: 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.

I actually tried out Finnish-Japanese girl names just to take a look. There were some pretty good bilingual ones, like Erika, Mari, Marika and Sara.

However, there was quite a bit of names that I'd be really hesitant to use. Aili, Alisa, Elina, Lina, Lumi. If you know a thing or two about Japanese, you might realise a common failure with these names.

There was also the user suggestion of "Minna". It seems that it's really a feminine name in Japanese, but at least to me it seems kinda awkward as a name for an individual person.

Also, I'm not really sure if Finnish and Japanese are "indirectly related". As far as I know, it's just that they sound similar for reasons unknown.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#36

Post by adrianmonk »

dfee wrote: post #15

English / Spanish : Male names gives very few names that I’d recognize as English names. https://mixedname.com/english_spanish_masculine_names Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the value of this?

I think it would be a nice addition to rank the names. At the top would be ones that work really naturally in both languages. Lower down would be names that work naturally in one language but only work OK in the other.

Naturalness might be tricky to define, though. Really common names are probably natural by definition, but uncommon names may also be natural. For example, Roman isn't a common name, but it's natural.

Another thing to take into account is if there is a more natural equivalent. For example, it is OK in English to name someone Antonio, but Anthony is the more-English version.

One of the core issues is whether you're looking for names that occur in both languages by coincidence or ones that have been borrowed because of cultural overlap. Maybe you're looking for a name that both cultures understand, or maybe you're looking for a false cognate that just happens to work in both languages.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#37

Post by coddle-hark »

This is not a slight towards the OP, I’m just opening up for discussion.

I think this is a great example of how we tend to default to algorithms and automation even when the problem is better suited to a more manual solution. This is especially problematic when our automated systems don’t allow for transparent human intervention (think ML classifiers etc.). If this page were a curated wiki, for example, it’d probably have had a number of additions / corrections suggested by the community already. People are certainly posting corrections in this very thread, at least.

Maybe the lesson is, use automated data as a seed and let humans iterate on that?

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