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."
This is the standard heuristic parents use so you are not alone. Interestingly it seems to cause names to go in cycles. Every generation has their own popular names. You end up picking a name that is not common in your parents or in your own generation, because there is always a dickhead with the common ones. If I remember right first names go in around 60-year cycles.
The Norwegian bureau of statistics used to have a brilliant bank of historical name trends, where you could input any name and see how popular it had been throughout the years.
One of my favourites were Vidkun, which fell off a cliff in the mid-forties.
(Vidkun being the first name of our head collaborationist honcho during the Nazi occupation - his last name may be known to you. Quisling. Yup, he coined the phrase 'Quisling' for a traitor and even had a verb - to quisle, for committing treason - enter the English language.)
The Archer TV show had a similar problem. (Minor spoilers ahead.) The show pre-dates Islamic State, and the heroes' spy organisation was named ISIS. I was a little disappointed by the way they escaped it, they just did away with the spy organisation as they mixed up the later seasons of the show. It would have been a bold move, but it could have been played for laughs.
I never thought clearly about this, when deciding my kid's name I thought about people who I really admired and picked up the name I liked the most. But of course, I'd veto any name that reminded of someone I don't like.
What hit me hard about your comment is that I know a bunch of couples who have kids with my name, and it's not a common name. I will sleep happier today :)
> 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.
The webapp didn't work well for English/Chinese. This type of bilingual naming isn't that common for that combination, but some people do it, and it's much tricker than in most other languages because you're dealing with both different naming cultures (e.g. Chinese names are almost never more than 3 syllables including surname) and different phoenetics at the same time. A few examples of common given names that work are 安妮 (Annie) 麗娜 (Lina) 瑞 (Ray) 凱亮 (Calvin), all appended to a Chinese surname of course.
What IS much more common, though, is Chinese parents picking a Chinese name that happens to be easy to pronounce for English speakers and forget the need for an English name. For example most native English speakers have no problem pronouncing a character pronounced "ting" or "fei" or "wei" but may get tripped up by "xie/hsieh" or "xuan/hsuan".
Yep, that was my feeling as well. Same for Chinese / Dutch. At first I tried suggesting some names that matched but none of them really stuck for me and my wife.
In the end we picked an original Dutch name. Which could be easily pronounced and shortened to English, and turned out to be easily translatable to three Chinese syllables, with nice meanings for the hanzi as well. All grandparents immediately were able to go with it.
I worked on a project with similar motivations; in my case, I had a list of criteria in mind, one of which was the number of syllables in a name. I couldn't find a good source for name syllabification, so built an n-gram language model trained on the CMUdict corpus.
Also did something similar and generalized it across languages by using Metaphone phonetic encoding (which is biased towards English pronunciation however):
My older child is 11 years old, and since a few years before she was born, everyone we knew in India had been naming their children starting with the sound of "Aa" ... We know quite a few kids named "Aarav" and "Aadya" among others. So any names with that starting sound were immediately discarded. We wanted her name to sound significantly different from all contemporary names, and we decided that the best way to do it was to go retro. So "Surabhi" is what we chose. It has a very nice meaning, and it's just sufficiently old to be fashionable again. And it also reminded us of a favourite TV serial from our childhood.
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".
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.
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.
That's fantastic. It reminds me of the GNU Hurd mutually recursive acronyms :-)
> It's time [to] explain the meaning of "Hurd". "Hurd" stands for "Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons". And, then, "Hird" stands for "Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth". We have here, to my knowledge, the first software to be named by a pair of mutually recursive acronyms.
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.
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)
マンコ is pussy and ビッチ (bitch) is slut. So, it's like "nice to meet you, I'm pussy slut" and then handing someone a business card.
I remember seeing it come up as example of unfortunate foreign names in Japanese when watching some variety program once. I cracked up pretty hard at that one. Though I've encountered a doozy in real life too, though it escapes me exactly what it was now.
Which im sure some poor soul will mishear as "Pussy-Slut Academy" once the names are reversed and Arkady is put into Katakana and it's late into a night of drinking at the mandatory after work drinks. Hahaha.
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.
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 :(
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. :)
I've been burned by this. In Quebec my name is pronounced the same, but there is an obvious spelling difference between the Anglo and French spellings, e.g. Henry vs Henri.
They know you're Anglo before you show up. Which is a problem because they wanted a native French speaker for the role.
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).
FWIW “Mary” is sort of the stereotypical female name here in Ireland, though I see from looking at the stats that its use has dropped off a good bit (#92 in girls names last year). I’d bet that drop-off is precisely because it’s seen as a very common old-fashioned name redolent of pre-90s world which modern Ireland has a very complex relationship with.
> > Any name of a (Catholic) saint would probably have mappings to other languages
> Jesús is a common Spanish name, but totally nonexistent in English and French as far as I’m aware.
Jesus is not a saint.
> 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).
Mary is the most common female name in the US, but, José and María are by far more common first names in many parts of the Spanish-speaking world than Joseph and Mary in the English world, to the extent that often people who have them as their first name use their middle name as their common name, not their first name.
Good to know, but the overall point is the same, I think. He was a person who is (obviously) very important to Catholicism, and therefore the name has an equivalent in every widely-used language.
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.
Probably common among Americans who ethnically identify as Irish-American too, but since the mass migration of Irish people to the US was more than a century ago, that is increasingly rare. My grandmother is named Mary, though.
> 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).
I think thats partly because Maria itself has been quite popular in English recently. Marie is also quite well accepted as an English name even if it's technically not.
I think that was the original, and Jarlath is a transliteration. It's sufficiently rare in English that I think it's fair to call it "not an English name".
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.
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.
No, that's kinda my point, there's no reason for me to pronounce it /sɑm/. The German version of Samuel is /zaːmueːl/, so if I'd try to make a short version of the German Samuel I'd use /zam/ but that sounds very, very weird to my ears. Instead I'd probably pronounce it like /sɛm/, which is the German attempt to imitate /sæm/.
> The concepts of Europe and Asia as distinct continents date back to antiquity, and their borders are geologically arbitrary.
Either you call Hindi, Persian and Bengali European or you call German English and French Asian. But saying one is European/Asian while the other is not is simply a racist view.
I think you’re redefining the term european language —which typically means a language that developed in that region. It’s like saying English is a Japanese language because a percentage of people in Japan speak English except it did not originate there.
Indo-european is different but that is ancient family of prehistoric languages and hardly anyone would think this is what people mean.
Just to reinforce the point: Those are all part of the INDO-European language group. Emphasis on the fact that European is only half that name, and you're enumerating languages in the other half.
Samuel is really the perfect name as even the spelling is the same in all European languages except for diacritics in some languages.
My name, Michal (Slovak), is not too bad, but the local version varies greatly across Europe: Michael, Michele, Mikael, Miguel, Михаил (Michail), Mihái, etc.
Unfortunately, at least in bulgarian Samuel is spelled Samuil (Самуил). Not sure about russian and ukrainian, but they've gotten the slavic translation of the Bible from medieval Bulgaria and a fast ddg shows the family form to exists as "Самуилович".
I have a name like this, and like it: I'm Mark in English, and Μάρκος/Markos in Greek. My parents are mixed Greek/American, and wanted to choose a name that translated.
But it has caused some bureaucratic problems, because properly translating (rather than transliterating) your name seems to have fallen out of fashion, and authorities don't like that documents don't "match", even though that used to be very common. So nowadays authorities don't like that my American birth certificate and Greek registration of birth have "different" names.
And I'm a relatively easy case, because at least Mark vs. Markos look obviously similar. It's an even bigger problem if your U.S. documents say John while your Greek ones say Ιωάννης/Ioannis, even though these are direct translations. In the modern era, governments seem to want people in this situation to either choose Ioannis as their legal English name, or to choose Τζον/Tzon as their legal Greek name. But not everyone wants that.
Unfortunately, it doesn't always work like that in the wild. In some countries people will choose to butcher your original name for the sake of politeness, even if there is ideal translation in their langiage. At least this is what's happening in the UK. Not sure if it's common elsewere. For this reason I'd rather choose the name with better pronounciation outlook in both countries.
Biblical names have versions in all languages from the Middle East and Europe, and to a lesser extent Africa and Asia as well. Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Mary are near-universal.
Some of the different versions are not easily recognizable, like the English John and the Arabic Yahya, but if you knew the original Hebrew Yohanan it's not so hard.
I personally would choose a famous person for a name with a very slight modification so people will misspell it and remember the former.
It will be hard for people to search online so more privacy.
People judge a lot based on the names in absence of other information so having familiar, well known and something they already attach good meaning to should help.
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.
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.
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.
At least you can find all your languages in the list. I'm in that funny position where I can see Dothraki and Klingon, but not one of the real world languages I care about ;)
FWIW, there is another one that I can use, that is almost identical to the one I'm looking for.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When people see someone saying that European Persian and Indian are the same family they go dipshit because "how can someone with dark skin have any relations to someone with pale skin".
Should say something about the general view of not few HN readers.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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)
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.
李 is typically used as a surname. At least in Mandarin, there are other Chinese characters like 丽 (for females) and 力 (for males) that can be spelled Li/Lee, and also used as given names. For example:
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.
Lived in Australia for a while, have a brother who is a dual citizen. (US citizen, but I'm in Canada now).
Names in the Oz were... different. In north Melbourne damn near all of the white folks I know had painfully white, Christian names -- but I don't think a single person ever went by them except on paper. You may be a Gary or Warren -- bland Anglo names -- but down under you'd be Gazza or Wazza. Or a Matty or Johnno.
These are just a few from the top ~20 boys and girls names. I've heard all of these in a US media context but never heard any of them in the UK. That's not to say they aren't used here, but they certainly aren't common. And of course there's "Randy".
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.
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.
I checked out English / Spanish also, since that was the dilemma my wife and I dealt with. I think the fuzzy matches are actually much higher quality than the top list.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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...
BTW we named are son Eugene for family reasons. We chose the English spelling as for the time being we live in the USA. The Slovak version is "Eugen" and Romanian version is "Eugeniu".
why though? i had Romanian colleague named Victor, sounds perfectly passable name in most languages, I'm sure there are plenty international Romanian names
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is fun and interesting. Attempted with a few combinations around Hindi/Indian, Arabic, Japanese, Latvian, and French, and the results are amazing!
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
"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
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.
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.
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."
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...