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MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

mixedname.com

41–50 of 261 posts

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#41

Nice! Too bad they don’t include Hungarian. I’d like to see if they included the name my Hungarian friends gave their daughter. They picked Edith/Edit. The Hungarian version is pronounced ED-eet, which is pretty different from EE-dith, but at least the spellings are close.

My son got the Hungarian middle name, but we went with a Greek first name, partly because it didn't map to our Hungarian family, but also something I thought my elderly father could pronounce, in his heavy accent.

We'd had girl names for months, but didn't settle on the boy name option until the night he was born.

This was a good while ago, but this discussion brought back the particulars of finding a good name.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#43
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 name (Sam) is useful in that respect: I'm fairly sure it exists in every European language, being Biblical, and that it's spelled the same (in short form) in all of them.

The vast majority can't pronounce it correctly by the standards of my American dialect. But I don't mind.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#44

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…

this website isn't actually naming your baby for you, it's suggesting a list of names using an algorithm. literally the whole point is to generate data for humans to use as a "seed".

and it already appears to support community suggestions in addition to the machine-chosen names.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#46
post #39

Does not work perfectly though: "Fisk" would be a very strange name in Swedish (means "fish") and I've never heard it in English, I think.

Fisk is not unheard of as an English surname, nor for that matter is Fish--a family named Fish had a role in New York Republican politics from Lincoln's day through about the 1990s.

There was a kid at my son's high school nicknamed "Fish", but I have never heard of it as a real given name.

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#47
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. :)

Except "Jarlath"

Re: MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

#48
Hah only two? My wife is Chinese/Panamanian. We had to try and find names that worked in English Spanish and Chinese. Appeal to everyone. That was not an easy task.

In the end it was more about picking names that aren’t something weird or offensive in the other ones but sound good in English.

My moment was using Hector. The old Greek name appeals to my love of history and yet the family thinks it’s Spanish.

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