
MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder - capableweb
https://mixedname.com/
======
moultano
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 rules to collapse similar sounds
together to "canonicalize" names before scoring them against the language
model.

Finally we ended up with Riya for my daughter (which is pronounced the same as
the English name Rhea) and Aarav for my son, which is pronounced the same as
two of the most common English words, "are" and "of."

Edit: I was able to find the output from the girl's name list.
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Vy1dQunG4iie4H67En9T...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Vy1dQunG4iie4H67En9TXM71iR26qCZF3uHWVGsfNqQ/view)

~~~
cco
> Finally we ended up with Riya for my daughter (which is pronounced the same
> as the English name Rhea) and Aarav for my son, which is pronounced the same
> as two of the most common English words, "are" and "of."

Native English speaker from the Pacific Northwest, I would pronounce those
"Ri-yuh" and "Are-rov"(I think your intended pronunciation) or maybe "A-rav",
depends upon whether I knew they were of Indian decent, i.e. Rohan is "Roe-
hon" not "Roe-han".

Forgive my "colloquial" phonetic annotation, I don't know how to do it
properly.

~~~
Nightshaxx
I know a Riya whose name sounds like Ri-yuh, so I don't think you are
completely wrong.

~~~
nemetroid
Isn't "Ri-yuh" how you'd pronounce "Rhea"?

------
magicalhippo
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
to Brent.

For me the best part is how the "error" is the same both ways. I see "Brent"
derives from burnt ("dweller near the burnt land"), but Bernt is a short form
of the German name "Berend" or "Bernhard".

~~~
cwbrandsma
Wait a sec...I named my son Berend...and my last name means “son of fire”.
Crap, my kid is going to be a pyro.

~~~
sk0g
Now it sounds like an Chinese/Japanese person saying bellend.

Hope they stay away from the UK!

~~~
KMag
Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese (and presumably most/all other dialects)
distinguish r from l. You're thinking of some Japanese/Koreans having trouble
due to those languages using a single phoneme that's somewhat between r/l.

Also, it's a bit racist to not point out that it's only some Japanese and
Koreans that have trouble pronouncing r and l.

~~~
sk0g
I'm not so sure about the Cantonese/ Mandarin part, since a fair few
professors I've had, had those as a native tongue. Hell, even my thesis
supervisor was, with whom I communicated extensively. I can't really pinpoint
where the struggles lie, but I get the general feeling that for Chinese native
speakers there's a three way confusion between n, r, and l, and it's heavily
dependant on the placement in the word, as well as the level of stress on the
letter.

I don't think recognising phonetic differences between native speakers of
different languages is racist. The language I grew up speaking didn't
differentiate between w and v, so unless I'm making a conscious effort against
it, they will all sound like v's. When someone points it out, I don't find it
racist at all.

Re: Koreans - never realised! I haven't had many interactions with people of
Korean descent, so it's an oversight on my part there.

------
bredren
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](https://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/09/prweb1332494.htm)

~~~
jameshush
Great story :). My old boss made the first "Weight Watchers" points app. Same
idea, hacked together html5/js/hardcoded points calculator. Massively popular
at the time. Had to take it down because he got a cease and desist from Weight
Watchers. That level of organic traffic definitely no longer exists on the App
Store or Google Play :(

------
mc32
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.

~~~
throw0101a
> _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. :)

~~~
umanwizard
That’s true, but they won’t all be commonly used as names everywhere. Jesús is
a common Spanish name, but totally nonexistent in English and French as far as
I’m aware. María too is way more common than “Mary” in English (that is a real
English name, but AFAICT it’s pretty rare in the last few generations).

~~~
rsynnott
Mary used to be an _incredibly_ popular name in Catholic European countries.
Notably, two consecutive presidents of Ireland were called Mary! Definitely
less common now, but weirdly universal in the 50s.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
Almost every successful Irish female politician was called Mary, for a really
long time.

~~~
rsynnott
Well, almost every woman of their generation in Ireland was called Mary, so
it's not that surprising :)

------
boyter
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.

~~~
Hokusai
> the family thinks it’s Spanish.

They think it is Spanish, because it is Spanish.

Hector (/ˈhɛktər/) is an English, French, Scottish, and Spanish given name.
The name is derived from the Greek name of Hektor.

~~~
boyter
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.

~~~
umanwizard
It’s English in the sense that it’s a common name in England and other
English-speaking cultures. Just like “them” is an English word despite
originally coming from Norse.

------
patrickdavey
I'm Irish, my partner is Dutch. We considered calling our daughter Eimear. In
her dialect it would have been like calling her "bucket".

We opted for a different name ;)

~~~
sjf
The Irish name selection on this site is totally bogus. Apparently Cody,
Jacqui, and Kelsi are Engish & Irish feminine names. Those are not even
Hiberno-English names.

[https://mixedname.com/english_irish_feminine_names](https://mixedname.com/english_irish_feminine_names)

~~~
bemmu
My approach was to Google things like “Irish names” and add names coming up on
such lists. Do you know of a good source I should use instead?

~~~
disgruntledphd2
The trouble with that is that "Irish" name lists are often written by Irish-
Americans, rather than Irish people.

For instance, you would often see names like Cailin, or Erin in American-Irish
(they mean girl, and Ireland respectively) names, but these would be
incredibly uncommon in Ireland itself.

This page seems reasonably legit:
[https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/100-irish-language-
first-...](https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/100-irish-language-first-names-
meanings)

------
achanda358
Fascinating. I speak Bengali and found a bunch of "English names that may also
be Bengali words" are not Bengali words. Some of those are Bengali words, but
not very flattering.

~~~
Angeo34
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.

~~~
civilian
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. All those languages are proto-indo-
european, voters! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-
European_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language)

~~~
danans
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.

------
macro-b
I tried English and Italian and I was a bit surprised... my son’s name which
is Leo and valid in both languages wasn’t there... while there were at least
dozens of names so archaic most people would never hear them in reality! Not
sure where you got your sources

~~~
detritus
I just goaded my Italian partner with a link to the page containing our
toddler's name - we agreed on the name itself, which is known in both
countries, but not the exact spelling.

I was pleased this page preferred my interpretation, so as an asshole Scot, I
was quick to share it.

Her response was less than enthused...

------
james_s_tayler
A lot of people go this route. And this is a bloody neat tool to help you do
so!

We chose not to though with our son though, since the list of names that works
in both is small and largely unappealing. The list of names for girls is quite
a bit larger with some good options. Instead we decided that since the family
name is English the given name should be Japanese.

I think it worked out quite well.

------
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.

~~~
fignews
The name Kevin in Germany is a meme and not viewed positively. It’s regularly
made fun of and to call someone a Kevin is a bit of an insult.

~~~
iraldir
Same in France. I guess that takes it root to that name being given by parents
raised by (shitty) television programs such as "The Bold and the Beautiful"
and other crap like that. "A Kevin" is expected to be a sort of wannabe Chad,
trying to be cool but failing miserably at it, pretentious with nothing to
back it up etc. Likely to be a troll on the internet.

(this is purely based on an introspection of what a Kevin means to me and is
in no mean backed up by thorough research). (also sorry to any Kevin out
there).

------
mintone
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")

------
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!

~~~
KMag
Hopefully your surname isn't easily mistaken for a given name. I've been
living in Hong Kong almost 9 years now, and my middle name is often mistaken
for my first name, or less commonly, my surname.

Based on my experience, "Lee Ryan" would probably be mistaken for "Ryan Lee"
well over 50% of the time.

~~~
lvturner
It is - and sometimes I get called by middle name instead of either of the
other names.

In e-mails the failure rate for people getting my name in the right order is
around 80% - sometimes even after I've corrected the sender three or four
times (with decreasing subtly)

~~~
orthoxerox
In the international company I work for we have a rule that surnames are
always in all caps in employee directories. So it can be "Ryan LEE" or "LEE,
Ryan" or "LEE Ryan" (in Hungary), but you know that Lee is the family name.

Before that rule was introduced, confusion was commonplace. A colleague of
mine is called, say, Vyacheslav Spirin, and he signed his emails as "V.
Spirin". To Indians this looked like a normal South Indian name, where "V."
was the family name, so they assumed his first name was Spirin. When the same
guy introduced himself in person as Slava they thought he and Spirin were
different people.

~~~
CGamesPlay
To be fair, I would have thought that Vyacheslav and Slava were also different
people.

------
danpalmer
Extending this to regions seems like it could be a useful next step here.

I’m from the U.K. and my partner is Australian. While almost all names I’ve
encountered in Australia are known names in the U.K., some would be very out-
there for a U.K. name. I’m sure the same is true the other way around.

Not to mention the fact that this seems to be using an American English set of
names and there are some very different naming conventions in the U.S. My last
name is a first name in the U.S., and popular first names there are again very
out-there for the U.K. or Australia.

I’m sure the same must be true for Spanish or French speaking countries.

~~~
gberger
Interesting, do you have any examples of the out-there names?

~~~
eythian
"Randy" would be one that I see Americans have as a name that causes chuckles
in most of the rest of the English speaking world.

------
James_Henry
One issue that might come up using this with languages that don't use the
Latin alphabet is that you can sometimes choose how to romanize your name, a
popular one being Yoo-jin in Korean but choosing to romanize it as Eugene.

This website only comes up with Hana and Sam, however.

------
dfee
English / Spanish : Male names gives very few names that I’d recognize as
English names.
[https://mixedname.com/english_spanish_masculine_names](https://mixedname.com/english_spanish_masculine_names)

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the value of this?

~~~
anthk
\- English name \- Jacobo

Ahem...Biblical names can be traced to almost older than English, at least in
romances.

jacob <-> Jacobo, Santiago

Noah <-> Noé

George <-> Jorge

Also, Martín is French origin I think.

~~~
gostsamo
Martin is latin, meaning little Mars.

------
bertjk
It would be nice if these name suggestions also came with meanings/etymology
where available. Sometimes a name might be phonetically compatible but have an
unfortunate connotation.

There is an easy way to sidestep the multicultural name problem. For the first
name choose one from the language most familiar to the place where you choose
to live. This minimizes annoying mispronunciations. Then choose a name from
the other language, and have that be the middle name. You would have a much
wider range to choose from, and most will probably find they are forced into
fewer compromises this way.

------
Arubis
You'll inevitably run into tons of insufficiencies, edge cases, etc. but this
is a _fantastic_ idea. My wife and I have scrubbed through lists for arguably
one of the easier and more common linguistic-cultural pairings and they're
universally clickbait and usually disappointing on top. Kudos.

------
jupp0r
Having had this particular problem 2 years ago (German/English), I'm pleased
to find my sons name in the intersection set on the linked app :)

------
galkk
Having a daugther and recently went through the process of bilingual name
choice I think now that how the name is written doesn't mean as much.
(although we know that if we'll have another daughter, her name will be
Sophia, because it was in the short list of bilingual names :) )

English speaking people will still prononuce differently even simple names
like Anna (usually they spell it with one "n"), and the stress in my (and
daugther's) last name is constantly spelled not like in Russian by people who
don't know Russian.

At the same time acquaintance of mine called his son Christopher, and it's
great name, even if Russians don't call their sons like this, because it's
prononunced the same.

------
laingc
This would have been PERFECT for when my wife and I were searching for nice
German/English names. We finally settled on Lotte, which despite being German
in its pronunciation is perfect for my daughter (who is also perfect, in case
you were interested).

Really cool project!

------
paulhallett
You should add Māori names too.

Here is a resource with years worth of popular Māori names:
[https://smartstart.services.govt.nz/news/baby-
names](https://smartstart.services.govt.nz/news/baby-names)

------
dhosek
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.)

------
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?

~~~
notatoad
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.

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

~~~
Andrew_nenakhov
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.

~~~
orthoxerox
It suggests Brody and Oral as mixed names for Ru/En, but doesn't offer
Philip/Филипп. It's good, but not very good.

------
msikora
Well, my use case is Slovak and Romanian (but living in the USA). Missing both
languages :( I can approximate Slovak with Czech almost perfectly, but
Romanian names are quite different from related (Romance) languages...

~~~
Markoff
why though? i had Romanian colleague named Victor, sounds perfectly passable
name in most languages, I'm sure there are plenty international Romanian names

~~~
msikora
I was referring to the app that didn't have Slovak nor Romanian... Yeah, most
Christian names are going to have similar names across Europe. Victor is a
good one since it varies very little, I think it's Victor or Viktor in most
European languages.

------
ornel
I made a generator of Panamanian-sounding names by making a syllable based
2-gram analysis of all first and middle names registered in Panama until 2012.
By increasing the weight given to likely syllable sequences you can make names
sound more "normal", otherwise they get stranger, but still pronunceable and
weirdly familiar to those who know the peculiarities of Caribbean naming.

[https://yaurisbeth.com](https://yaurisbeth.com)

------
asplake
Another use: character names for books, where some ambiguity of gender &/or
background can be useful. Could have done with it a couple of years ago. For
games too I guess

------
petters
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.

~~~
cafard
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.

------
Havoc
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.

------
actuator
For the 4-5 language pairs I picked, there were more matches for the feminine
names. I wonder if that is a sample bias.

~~~
Redoubts
Yeah, kinda weird to see Zero Swahili/English masculine names.

------
Markoff
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

------
CountHackulus
I'm really not sure about the English/French intersection. There's quite a few
names that I've definitely never heard in French and would be super awkward to
pronounce. Names like Gaylord, Montgomery, Barbara. It seems like the source
for French names wasn't really that reputable.

~~~
apendleton
Yeah, it also includes surprises in the other direction -- I can imagine that
plenty of Americans wouldn't know what to make of "Arnaud," for instance.

------
rorykoehler
Nice tool. We had a struggle with this too. When we solved it we added a layer
of abstraction to what this tool does so now our kids names are the same but
different in both languages. Native in both and staying with tradition. It
worked out much better than I thought possible.

------
rootbear
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.

~~~
jasonv
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.

~~~
stergios
The intersection of Greek and Korean names was the empty set! We went with
Greek first name, Korean middle name, and Greek last name.

For the first names, we made sure there are reasonable English renderings of
the Greek, which unfortunately excluded my parent's names, and my name as
well.

The Korean middle names reference celestial/heavenly items as well as being
popular Korean entertainment figures, and have a nice word play together in
English.

Talk about threading the needle!

------
yread
Interesting idea. We went through a similar exercise recently but had
different goals.

We've tried to optimize for having the same pronunciation in the languages.
That is a much more difficult problem - you basically can't do anything with
containing 'r'

------
hogFeast
English and Japanese - 5 names that start with the letter L, 2 that start with
the letter R

...needs more work.

------
lqet
German-Japanese female names include names like "Hide", "Aili" or "Uta" which
I have never heared in Germany. Is the criteria that the names can be easily
pronounced by native speakers of both languages?

~~~
seszett
French-Vietnamese suggests Bay or Mai (which are Vietnamese, but not French at
all) and the list of "French name which may also be Vietnamese words" is a
list of English names, for some reason (Ames Austin Bailey Bell Bo Bruce
Desire Forster).

Then tried French-Dutch and once again, most of the suggested names aren't
very French at all, and not really that much Dutch either. Even though almost
all French names are also used as is as Dutch names (well, in Flanders at
least). Allard, Alvin, Anne (as a male name?) or Carolus? These don't work.

I'm not sure which source these names come from, but I wouldn't use it for
French.

------
bikitan
Great idea. One issue that I'm seeing with English/Japanese in particular is
that while there is a significant overlap of names that are orthographically
similar, the pronunciation varies considerably to the extent that the same
pronunciation would not be intelligible as a name in both languages.

For example the name Marie is on there, which in English would be "ma-REE"
while in Japanese it would be like "ma-ree-ay"

I imagine anyone using this tool would have enough knowledge of both languages
to cull those results, though, so not really a problem in practice. Just an
observation.

------
xbeta
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](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.

~~~
nathanhammond
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.

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

------
vonwoodson
“English-Klingon names for girls” FTW

------
foxrob92
Some family friends had the "trilingual" version of this - the wife is from
the French/Spanish border, so she had both French and Spanish speaking
parents. The husband is from Australia, so they were looking for names that
don't change much under translation between English, French and Spanish.

They went with Robert (en/fr)/Roberto (es), and Ines (fr)/Inez (es)/Agnes
(en). Ines doesn't really use her "English" name.

------
jmholla
Nice little touch when you try to combine a language with itself.

~~~
innomatics
It annoyed me when I wanted to see the list for a single language.

------
josephcs
This is fun and interesting. Attempted with a few combinations around
Hindi/Indian, Arabic, Japanese, Latvian, and French, and the results are
amazing!

------
Angeo34
Finnish and Japanese is another of those combinations that should work very
easily since the languages are related even if it's just indirectly.

~~~
simias
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](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.

~~~
Angeo34
>Russian, Italian, Dutch, English, Hindi and Gaelic languages do all belong to
the Indo-European family, yet they diverged so much

This is plainly wrong. Go on compare words in those languages and it will
strike you how similar the words are whether it's German and Urdu, French and
Persian or Hindi and Italian. Names are a different thing since names are
rather based on religious and ethnic identity rather than actual language.

------
permalac
This is amazing, is there any chance you could add Catalan as well?

Can I do it myself?

I had to find Catalan - English names once and was not easy, and I hope I'll
need it again soon.

Good work.

------
theogravity
This is cool, but needs to remember the prior selection inputs - it's a pain
to set it back to how it was just to swap genders for example.

------
curlyQueue
This is so cool! Definitely not a major use case, but it would be awesome to
add support for Assyrian/Akkadian names as well.

Assyrians have been scattered for centuries, and many have settled in other
countries and have organically picked up hybridized names - it would be
interesting to compare some of those to the produced ones, and especially
fuzzy matches for new ideas

------
monkeycantype
We took a slightly different approach and chose names that were deliberately
common nouns that translate well, such as 蜜蜂

[https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto...](https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto&tl=en&text=%E8%9C%9C%E8%9C%82)

------
peterhil
Interesting idea!

One small improvement comes to mind after trying some language combinations –
the chosen languages could be (pre)selected on the results page under the
heading "Find names for a different language pair", so that it would be easier
to try different languages combinations while keeping one language constant.

------
yuriko
English/Chinese doesn't work at all

~~~
savanaly
Yeah that was the first one I tried and it wants me to name my baby..."China".
Not sure about that; seems confusing at the minimum. Surely this has to be one
of the more common combinations people will need too?

------
jauco
Nice! For dutch names you could link to the “firstname-database” which shows
the popularity of the name over time. E.g.
[https://www.meertens.knaw.nl/nvb/naam/is/Bert](https://www.meertens.knaw.nl/nvb/naam/is/Bert)

~~~
Aachen
Popularity over time seems like something relevant to integrate: at least half
the German-Dutch suggestions would be something for either great grandparents
or just grandparents.

------
zhte415
Names are hard. Sitting with a Polish colleague with a very biblical name he
commented "Your name, in Poland.. you would be instantly labelled a psycho.
You just can't have a name like yours." Was named from the traditional family
book in Scotland. Korva.

~~~
prerok
I know we are talking about people's names here and it's a bit off-topic but
it used to be that companies did exhaustive research into naming their
products as well. Lately, it seems they aren't doing a good job anymore.

As an example, Ford Kuga seems to be a decent car but I would never buy it.
"Kuga" means plague in my native language.

That said, there are plenty of them on the roads here, so I guess people don't
really mind.

------
Arkanosis
That's a great idea!

You can chose between feminine names, masculine names or both. At first, I
thought “both” meant names that are gender-neutral but actually it means that
you search for both feminine and masculine names. Which is nice, but a gender
neutral option would be an even nicer addition!

------
IgorPartola
It returned Maria for a combo of English/Russian/Masculine. Also Adrian and
Brody which I’ve never heard in Russian. But overall not a bad idea. My former
Irish coworker and his Indian wife could have used this for sure when trying
to name their kids years ago.

~~~
rcpt
I mean, presumably the people using the service will manually validate the
results before acting on them.

~~~
IgorPartola
You would think. I knew a person who was named after a character in a Russian
movie. The name was Akim but the parents wanted to spell it to look like
Cyrillic, so they spelled it Akum (pronounced as Akim but not by anyone who
read it before hearing it). Akim is a masculine name and the person was a
woman. It’s unclear how the parents managed to do this, they admitted that
they mixed up the names of the man and the woman characters in the movie. So I
wouldn’t be so sure people are smart enough to always check things. I don’t
know if Maria would get mistaken by anyone for a masculine name. But I can
100% see someone thinking that Brody and Adrian are real Russian names when
they absolutely are not.

------
iraldir
I'm french, my wife is Italian, and we live in england. Any plan for
trilingual names :D

~~~
orthoxerox
Don't pick Andrea, Michele or Daniele :D

------
exo_duz
Named my daughters Miya (Mia), Arisa (Allysa) and Remi (Remy).

They are all a mix of English sounding Japanese names.

Tried the English-Japanese, not all the options are there. It helps that we
lived in Japan for 6 years and I can speak Japanese so it was a lot easier
finding the names.

~~~
wirthjason
How did you decide the names?

Our daughter’s name is Kei. We didn’t know the gender until birth but my we
had a few names picked out for girl names. Mia was one of them too.

Our only “requirement” was from my mom, “please don’t pick some crazy Japanese
name I’ll never be able to pronounce.”

It seems you have slight English variants like Miya vs Mia. Is that just
informal (eg for us everyone mistakenly spells Kei as Kay) or is it on
official documents like passports?

------
elxavicio
This is great, thanks! I felt so alone having this problem :). But I based my
decision on phonetics Spanish vs English since I didn't want the grandparents
to struggle to say it :). For reference, I ended up picking Leia and Rafa.

------
Ozzie_osman
OK my name is Osman in Arabic and though Osman shows up on the English/Arabic
page I can definitely confirm, having lived in the US for over ten years, it
is NOT english friendly to pronounce at all.

But i love the idea of this app!

------
ivanhoe
Cool idea, but it looks like it needs a bit more work. English/Italian male
names have some typically Dutch names in the list like Rembrandt, while it's
missing some common Italian names like Luka/Luca?

------
alinaregiani
Are you going to add Ukrainian to the list? After all, you already have
languages with a much smaller number of speakers. I would use your service if
you did.

------
brianherbert
This is great. My wife and I spent many hours looking for names that work in
both of our native languages / cultures that weren't super common and having a
starting point would have been nice.

------
rendall
We wanted a Finnish name for our son that wasn't so common and would sound
masculine in English, so names like "Antti" and "Matti" wouldn't do. We chose
Kauko.

~~~
stevekemp
I was disappointed we couldn't call our boy Myrsky!

In our case we wanted a name that would be easy to read/spell/pronounce for
Finnish and British people. I think that might have been a stretch too far.

Still Oiva is excellent, and works really well for everyone.

~~~
rendall
Oiva is a good name! Yeah, I don't think Myrsky would pass the nimilautakunta!

We considered Ukko for a minute, but ... wow, English speakers would
definitely have struggles.

------
scoot
Nice idea. A couple of usability suggestions:

Add the search parameters to the URL query string so that the it can be copied
and pasted.

Populate the form with the last selected values, rather than resetting them.

------
jbredeche
This is great.

Our kids are a quarter Finnish, a quarter Indian, a quarter French, and a
quarter Chinese. I guess we'd need to run (4 choose 2) combinations here and
work off of that list!

------
gramie
This would have been handy when we were naming our boys 19 and 23 years ago.
There are lots of girls' names that work in both languages, but no good boys'
names.

------
tomcooks
"Alano" (Great Dane) in the English-Italian page is not the best suggestion
for a name, careful when adding suffixes at random unless you hate your kid

------
kdamica
My wife and I recently tried to find a name that sounds good in English and
Korean. It's nice to see that the one we chose shows up in the fuzzy matches
section.

------
benatkin
One of the first I noticed is Hugo, which is in fact a good name.
[https://gohugo.io/](https://gohugo.io/)

------
chrisofspades
There are more Dothraki names than African names combined :(

------
schwartzworld
I love the idea. I tried entering Armenian and English (the two languages
spoken in our home) and the results were not great. Astrid, Natalia and
Veronica.

------
losvedir
Great idea! Was just doing something like this manually, so this is a neat
resource. I'd love to see the intersection of three languages, though.

------
Azleur
Would it be possible to add Catalan? I can give a hand.

------
rendall
There seems to be a mistake in the copy. It says: "Oh, and here are the
Japanese-Finnish names it found for us" but does not list them

------
snicky
English/Chinese combination returns the name "Park". I don't know any Chinese
or Westerners with such name ...

------
627467
How can we improve from these "fuzzy matches": \- filipa vs felipa \- glória
vs gloria

Imo these are not fuzzy at all, they are great matches.

------
plantel
But totally different pronounciation to the point where you might as well use
a translated name. For example:

English Kate > K-ay-t

Croatian Kate > K-aw-teh

------
aminozuur
I am Persian and in an interracial relationship. I'm playing around with your
tool and I like it. Keep it up :).

------
stupidboy
Yes! I can finally pick names that work with the wider English speaking world
and my Dothraki familiy abroad.

------
chaostheory
Did the Chinese & English:

\- I'm not sure how "Lee" is a feminine name.

\- Park is more Korean and not Chinese.

How did you get your data?

------
rizpanjwani
Tried Hindi + Japanese + Both and could not find Akira, which is quite popular
in both cultures...

------
Pensacola
"Worf" doesn't appear as a Klingon name...need to find a better data set :)

------
techaddict009
This tool is awesome. Can you add one more filter? find name starting with
character option?

------
5n
Would be interesting if the Chinese-Japanese ones did homographs on
Kanji/Hanzi too!

------
naruciakk
It is probably very useful not only for international couples, but also for
role players

------
Fire-Dragon-DoL
This is so nice, we did that with an adhoc script for the first one!

------
viburnum
This is great. Would have saved me easily eight hours of research time.

------
jlawson
Very interesting. How did you develop the name lists for each language?

~~~
richrichardsson
It would certainly appear to be scraped (see "Name sources:" at the bottom of
the page), and that there hasn't been any human curation.

eg.

Masculine English names that may also be Croatian words:

Blagdan

This is more likely a surname than a given name.

And I'm not sure how names like Ivo and Kristofor can be considered in the
intersection of English/Croatian.

Having said all that, I think it's still a useful resource, and I don't wish
this to come across as putting it down.

------
felixledem
Could you add support for three languages? Gotta please the in-laws!

------
didibus
Looks great, may I ask where you got your dataset for the names?

~~~
justusthane
I'm not the OP nor the developer, but sources are listed at the bottom of each
"result" page. I think he used whatever lists of names he could find.

------
jojobas
Names with an L in Japanese?

The concept is cute, the execution is questionable.

------
acephal
The sooner we get to Cowboy Bebop names, the better

------
Marinlemaignan
Could that be based on pronounciation rules ?

~~~
yorwba
From the bottom of the results page: "All of the suggested X-Y names on this
page are matched solely on their written form — pronunciation may differ."

------
rvnx
Cool project, need support for Estonian :)

------
bargle0
No Dothraki/Klingon names :-(

------
eric4smith
Breaks down completely for languages like English + Thai.

Forget about living on the beach in Thailand with the ladyboys. Hahaha.

------
longtermdd
German X Chinese = 0 results. I need find a new girl :0.

------
etiennekroger
What about trilingual? :)

