MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

Samuel exists as a German name and is pronounced in a German way, but as far as I know the short version does not exist as a German name and I would try to pronounce it as an English name when I see it.

Without getting into pedantic arguments. Ask any person to write down the name of the Trojan prince and you get Hector or Paris depending on who you ask. The origin is Greek even if the spelling more palatable for the modern English or Spanish speaker.

The theory that Japanese and Finnish could be related is very much controversial and not widely accepted by linguists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic

Nobody knows for sure how Japonic languages relate to other families. Some theorize that it might share a genetic relationship with Korean, but even that has not been convincingly established.

At any rate even if we chose to believe that both languages share a very distant common ancestor, it won't really help in this case. Russian, Italian, Dutch, English, Hindi and Gaelic languages do all belong to the Indo-European family, yet they diverged so much that finding matching names is a challenge.

And keep in mind that genetic relationship between languages don't tell the whole story. Genetically, English is more closely related to German than French, yet in general English speakers have less trouble picking up French than German because of the huge French and Latin influence in the modern English language.

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 think we charged 99 cents for it, but I remember we made something like $12k in a few months.

Dave wrote the objective c but I wrangled assets and ran the dev builds on a hackintosh, not yet sold on the Apple ecosystem.

We got into a beef with this other Baby Names app seller that thought they had the original baby names app. There were some stern reviews.

The app was just a native UI over a baby names database I bought off some service for cheap. You could save favorites and share it and there was limited filtering.

Eventually people willing to compete moved in, with various free and paid offerings and we didn’t bother to keep it up.

Edit: I found the press release I issued. What nostalgia. https://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/09/prweb1332494.htm

I'm from EU, wife from China, so obviously she kept her surname after wedding

for children since they use my European surname (both surnames are not allowed, otherwise that would be my preferred option for children) it had to be paired with Western name, so this may be helpful for someone:

1. the length is matching length of my surname for balance, for son exactly, daughter 1 character shorter

2. names containing R are out, because of wife pronunciation, so bye bye Klara

3. names from TOP10 in recent years in country where we are settling are out, because I remember when I was kid and there were 3 other boys with same given name in my class, never again for my children despite my favorite names not surprisingly being in top 5, bye bye Ana and Adam

4. name should be written same way in as many languages as possible - German, English, country we are settling others without local variant, so no need to use in future more variants internationally

5. obviously no bad association from past, I've never in my life met woman with my daughter's name (well Taiwanese excolleague who used it as English name and had it also as official nickname in passport) and personally knew only two men with my son's name, also I liked name Alina until I've found it has mostly Russian origin and didn't want anyone to think my children are some Russian immigrants

6. you can also consider how easy is for name to rhyme and make fun of it, but I can make fun of pretty much any name, so unless it's pretty obvious this was not really a factor

and i think that's it, after this filter you end up with very limited options and you settle on something selflessly unlike all those parents choosing the most popular local names without much thinking

btw the search is giving me 404 for my language combination, but anyway even English Chinese combo is pretty stupid, I would rather look into Hong Kong or Taiwan names to see how it sound in real life