This is fun and interesting. Attempted with a few combinations around Hindi/Indian, Arabic, Japanese, Latvian, and French, and the results are amazing!
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."
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
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!
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 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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".
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).
> 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.
> > 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
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/.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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."
Also did something similar and generalized it across languages by using Metaphone phonetic encoding (which is biased towards English pronunciation however):
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.
> 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.
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 :)
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.
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).
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.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 376 ms ] threadYou 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!
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.
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.
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.
(Yes I googled "homonymous")
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the value of this?
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.
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.
We opted for a different name ;)
https://mixedname.com/english_irish_feminine_names
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-...
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.
Any name of a (Catholic) saint would probably have mappings to other languages. (The Jesuits got around. :)
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.
Meanwhile "Fatima" has an interesting split between Muslim use and Catholic use:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatima_(given_name)
(I had a good (Portugese) childhood friend with that name; still sometimes manage to keep in touch.)
> 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.
They know you're Anglo before you show up. Which is a problem because they wanted a native French speaker for the role.
The vast majority can't pronounce it correctly by the standards of my American dialect. But I don't mind.
Indo-european is different but that is ancient family of prehistoric languages and hardly anyone would think this is what people mean.
My mistake! I'll be sure to next time I'm out that way.
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.
India and Europe are subcontinents of Asia, that's true
Languages from India are Indian and languages from Europe are European, that's also true
Your mom's racist bud
I'd bet you'll find it among Copts and the Ethiopian Orthodox as well, which is also not in contradiction to what I said.
But again, I don't mind. I kinda like the way the rest of the world says it, actually. æ is my least favorite sound in my native tongue...
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.
No more validation errors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you actually compare the languages it's astonishing how similar the words actually are.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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://github.com/zigam/ginkgo/blob/gh-pages/README.md
https://github.com/cloudkj/ngram-syllables
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.
I agree pronunciation is not 100% obvious from the spelling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd7FixvoKBw
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".
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.
- veto names of dickheads I knew.
Of course, I know good people with those names too but that wasn't the deciding factor.
I simply didn't want my kids name to be associated with a dickhead in my own mind in any way, shape or form.
Very me-centric I guess but I wanted the best personal relationship with my kid.
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.)
It's a shame that Isis (the Egyptian goddess) is now associated to the Islamic State. It's a beautiful name.
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 :)
A friend of mine named his daughter meghan, which translates to megha meaning rain in hindi and megan in English of course.
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.
(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).
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?
and it already appears to support community suggestions in addition to the machine-chosen names.