[HN Gopher] Find bilingual baby names
___________________________________________________________________
Find bilingual baby names
Author : higgins
Score : 166 points
Date : 2023-11-11 16:30 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mixedname.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mixedname.com)
| heywhatupboys wrote:
| Being bilingual allows me to actually validate sites like this.
|
| Almost all of the English [?] Danish are completely wrong.
| "Alannah, Aleesha" etc.
|
| Take this site with a spoonful of salt...
| mrweasel wrote:
| I think it's just taking the lists of approved/used names in
| each country. Denmark has a ton of technically approved names,
| to accommodate refugees and immigrants, but they don't work
| well in Danish, because they are Arabic, Somali or whatever in
| origin.
|
| Perhaps easier to understand examples are Kathy and Abigail.
| Pretty names in English but they will get completely butchered
| in Danish. Kathy will pretty much lose the h, and become Cat-i.
| Abi works, but gail will sound like the German "geil".
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Similar in German. "Alarice" and "Allaryce" stuck out
| immediately.
| dev_snd wrote:
| It would be awesome if there was a mode in which the
| pronunciation of the names is also same in the two languages.
|
| For example, in french there is the name "Arnaud", which exists
| in German as "Arno". For a bilingual child it's much more
| important for the name to sound the same that to be written the
| same.
| User23 wrote:
| Contrariwise in English/German you have names like Michael
| which are the same name but pronounced quite differently.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| "For a bilingual child it's much more important for the name to
| sound the same that to be written the same."
|
| This feels like it will be annoying whenever someone asks for
| your name in order to write it down or when they are trying to
| read it. This happens a lot in a school context.
| prpl wrote:
| This is my Wife's dream, but it is usually never born out.
|
| Even simple names, like somebody mentioned Maria, can sound
| different enough to be annoying in the right parts of the
| country.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > For a bilingual child it's much more important for the name
| to sound the same that to be written the same.
|
| There are downsides to the different spellings.
|
| I have this issue within English. There are several ways to
| Matthew. If misspelled, it is usually Matthew. Occasionally,
| some spell it Mathieu.
|
| I hate to use phones for any kind of personal info transfer for
| this reason, as it has caused headaches everywhere from the
| bank to travel agents to charitable donations to even sharing
| my email.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Took me a while to understand, so to make it explicit for
| anyone else:
|
| _Arnaud and Arno sound the same!_ (in this language pair.) In
| Dutch, I know both an Arnaud and an Arno, and it 's pronounced
| correctly^W like you read it (IPA: /arn^ud/ and /arno:/) so
| that threw me off probably.
|
| Anyway, your request is a bunch of human labeling work if there
| isn't already IPA conversions for every name (and if LLM can't
| already guess correctly 95% of the time and that's good enough
| for an initial comparison), but from an algorithmic standpoint
| shouldn't be hard: use the same comparison but on phonetic
| spellings of the names rather than language-specific spellings.
| Example: in Dutch, we pronounce "u" like IPA /y/, whereas
| German pronounces it as /u/, so any name with "u" in it will
| automatically be incompatible pronunciation-wise.
| codegeek wrote:
| As a Bilingual person, the biggest thing I care about is a name
| that is in my language/culture but is easily pronounceable by
| others who have never heard of that name. Nothing wrong if it is
| tough to pronounce of course but as an American Citizen (Indian
| Origin), my wife and I named our kids keeping that in mind and we
| have a 95% success rate :) where non Indians can still pronounce
| it correctly.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| > we have a 95% success rate
|
| You have twenty children, 19 of which have names that are
| easily pronounced by Americans?
| 01100011 wrote:
| OP probably is estimating that people correctly pronounce the
| names they've chosen about 95% of the time.
| codegeek wrote:
| lol no. I meant 95% of the time people pronounce the names
| correctly.
| gryn wrote:
| they were able to 'reproduce' the results for sience /s
| geraldwhen wrote:
| As someone with a never correctly pronounced name, it doesn't
| bother me. You get over that quickly.
| bradley13 wrote:
| Interesting idea - maybe gives you a starting point. However, you
| also need to consider pronunciation. Most likely you want a name
| that sounds fairly similar in both languages.
| PumpkinSpice wrote:
| This is actually a pretty interesting problem and the website
| doesn't do it full justice.
|
| Do you want the same spelling? That's easy, but the pronunciation
| is quite often completely different. A good example is Jules in
| French vs English. In this scenario, you're effectively going by
| two differently-pronounced names in all face-to-face
| interactions, not that different from the folks from China or
| India who are adopting "Westernized" names abroad. The only perk
| is that you might not have to spell it out over the phone.
|
| Do you want the same pronunciation? This is also fairly easy in
| many languages, but the spelling is likely to differ. An example
| of this might be Hannah versus Hana (English / Czech). This
| option makes verbal communications easy, but may confuse people
| who are trying to read your name out loud or to write it down -
| so any interactions with customer service are going to be mildly
| annoying.
|
| Do you want both? For most languages, the list will be
| _extremely_ short, perhaps half a dozen names such as "Anna". If
| you don't fall in love in one of these options, tough luck.
|
| There is also a softer version of this goal: have a name that
| isn't native in the second language, but that is easy to spell
| and pronounce. For most people, this is probably the best
| compromise. It lets you keep your national identity, doesn't
| limit your choices too much, and minimizes friction.
| croisillon wrote:
| even in my country of origin most people are not sure how my
| (very regional) name is written or pronounced. living abroad,
| people are flumoxed my name is so weird
| riffraff wrote:
| you forgot the most interesting! same spelling and
| pronounciation, different gender!
|
| Gabriele and Andrea come to mind.
| umanwizard wrote:
| The Spanish woman's name Andrea and the Italian men's name
| Andrea are pronounced the same, I think. It's only the
| English approximation that's pronounced differently.
| schrijver wrote:
| Don't see the problem with different pronunciations... I have a
| first name like Jules, I like it... indeed depending on whether
| people are French or English speaking they pronounce it
| differently--but that doesn't bother me at all! It still feels
| very much like they are referring to me, and it feels like two
| versions of the same name, not two names.
| PumpkinSpice wrote:
| None of this is a problem in any objective sense. It's just
| that if your goal is to use one name across two languages,
| it's not exactly what you get in this scenario.
|
| Stuff like that doesn't bother me at all, but I bumped into
| quite a few immigrants who had strong preferences one way or
| the other.
| lucb1e wrote:
| I perceive my name to be how it is pronounced, with writing
| being secondary. Interesting that others see it the
| opposite way. Maybe related: I remember stuff best when
| it's spoken, whereas apparently most people learn best when
| they read it or hear+write_along. I'm not dyslexic so it's
| not that I don't read well or anything, but still, audio
| seems to be my brain-compatible format.
|
| When someone says luke, yeah I'll get it and I definitely
| don't mind, but IPA /lyk/ or French Luc is what my name is.
| Apparently the /y/ sound just doesn't exist in most
| languages I interact with and that makes it impossible for
| virtually any non-French/Dutch person to pronounce it
| properly. I don't fault them, I don't mind, but I
| appreciate if someone makes an effort (even if it's wrong,
| it's only about trying) to call me by my name rather than
| by a translation thereof.
|
| (Edit: wtf, don't trust tools like http://ipa-reader.xyz
| that is near the top of search results. The default
| american voice pronounces /y/ like the "o" in "who". What's
| the point of IPA reader if you're going to pronounce an A
| like a B when your language doesn't have the A sound?!
| Accent is fine but don't change the sound to a different
| IPA character altogether... For the symbols /lyk/, I've
| tested all voices: Dutch, French (+Canadian), Icelandic,
| German, Norwegian, Turkish, and Swedish are correct,
| whereas English, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese
| incorrectly read the IPA. Some others are glitchy or mixed
| results between male/female voices.)
| keiferski wrote:
| I agree with your take that the spoken version of my name
| is what I identify with most, not the written one. This
| is maybe a little more relevant to people that have names
| from languages with non-Latin alphabets or with Latin
| characters that use different sounds than in English. (Sz
| in Polish for example.)
| umanwizard wrote:
| I know exactly how Luc is pronounced in French, but I
| wouldn't do so (unless we were speaking French) because
| it sounds weird to use non-English sounds in English.
|
| Btw, this sound also exists in German and is spelled "y".
| If you meet a German and want them to say your name in
| your preferred way, tell them to imagine it's spelled
| "Lyk".
| renewiltord wrote:
| The objective, in my case, is to choose a name that represents
| both parents' ancestry.
|
| That's pretty much it. Most people with foreign names are used
| to many pronunciations in the US and I am comfortable and will
| respond to any of them.
|
| I think it's a pretty cool site but the overlap between China
| and the rest of the world is perhaps insufficient in reality.
| Sad.
| mgaunard wrote:
| I'm French. I pronounce my name (including my last name) the
| English way when introducing myself in English.
|
| The way I pronounce my son's name, who speaks French, Russian
| and English, also depends on which language I speak to him.
| micheljansen wrote:
| My wife and I wanted to give our son a name that would
| intuitively be pronounced the same by both sides of the family
| (who speak respectively Brazilian Portuguese and Dutch). Turns
| out that really does limit your options a lot (aside from the
| perennial names with Greek/Hebrew/biblical roots).
| neilv wrote:
| > _the list will be extremely short, perhaps half a dozen names
| such as "Anna"._
|
| Even shorter, if the languages include Brazilian Portuguese:
| "Ana".
|
| (Source: In a research poster/demo session in the US, I'd named
| one of the example characters as "Ana", since I was recently
| interested in Brazil, and had been seeing that name. One of the
| people who saw the poster/demo wasn't a native English speaker,
| but they made an effort to kindly and gently point out the
| spelling error, with a smile, as if they were trying to save me
| from the additional embarrassment of showing the error any
| longer. I thanked them, and didn't tell them.)
| jcul wrote:
| I have a Brazilian friend living in Ireland, who went for this
| route, of easy to spell / pronounce for Irish English speakers.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Didn't seem very useful when I tried English and Vietnamese. It
| suggested a lot of words that aren't names in English.
|
| It's still interesting to me though. I have a daughter due in
| February and we're trying to come up with names now. My initial
| idea was to take the female name list that I downloaded from the
| US Census, and try to come up with a set of rules to screen out
| names that sound good with our family name and chosen middle
| name. For instance, our family name starts with a G, so i don't
| want to choose a name that also starts with G. I also don't want
| a name that rhymes or sounds silly with our family name.
| smeyer wrote:
| Others might care less about this than we did, but we were also
| thinking about popularity of names we were considering,
| including changes in popularity over time. There are names that
| feel very natural to me because they were common among my peers
| but that are actually pretty uncommon among children now and
| vice versa.
|
| For the US, I found it helpful (and fun) to download the social
| security data on frequency of names for each year, so that I
| could then plot the popularity of a given name over time. This
| was also helpful for considering how unisex a name is or isn't.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Giving your kid a name that cannot be pronounced in many other
| cultures is a great reminder to these cultures that there's
| something else in the world than _" insert culture which has
| trouble pronouncing that name"_.
|
| I've got a family with "all the colors" (my daughter's
| nieces/nephews are white, black and asian) and yet we picked a
| very french name, very hard to pronounce for native english
| speakers and native japanese speakers (we've got japanese
| family).
|
| And it's a conversation starter, for example: _" It's easy: the
| sound 'ance' (part of my kid's name) is exactly the same as how
| french people pronounce the 'ance' in 'France'"_.
|
| People are _curious_. And they try to say it right. And they
| succeed very quickly.
|
| New school this year: two months in several teachers and kids can
| already pronounce the name correctly.
| layer8 wrote:
| In my experience, the name just gets converted to whatever is
| the closest equivalent in the target language. Or gets horribly
| mangled if the two languages are different in phonetics and
| syllable repertoire, which they usually are.
| Spivak wrote:
| Yep which is why it's the smart play to make the spelling in
| the target language just whatever will make a speaker of said
| target language say it right.
|
| I've always considered my name to be the sound, the spelling
| is just an implementation detail.
| layer8 wrote:
| > make the spelling in the target language just whatever
| will make a speaker of said target language say it right.
|
| That's often not possible, due to the differences in the
| phonetic repertoire of the respective languages.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I can tell you that this is not always the case. I have a
| relatively old (and uncommon) German name and have many friends
| from English speaking countries who can't pronounce my name
| correctly even after knowing my for many years (it contains the
| German "ch" sound which most English speakers and several other
| languages struggle with). I can't count the number of
| pronunciations I have heard and I have largely given up except
| for the most extreme mispronouncations. It's fascinating what
| people make up when seeing an unfamiliar spelling, often it
| does not even resemble the straight-forward English
| pronunciations, which is straight forward although not really
| correct.
|
| I only encountered this as an adult and I'm not easily
| bothered, but I can imagine a kid or teenager feeling quite
| different about their name being a conversation starter after
| years of the same.
| ponector wrote:
| This says Karen is good English-Japanese name.
|
| To find a good name internationally recognized just open a Bible.
| Anna, Maria, etc. Some biblical names are different, though:
| Giovanni - John - Jan.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Hah, funny to see this here. When our daughters were born we were
| a French and German living in an English speaking country so we
| tried to make sure that the name works in 3 languages. Actually
| when we finally decided on a name for our first daughter (Tia) we
| chose a long form of the name (Tiahana) because my mother in law
| is half Spanish (Tia means Aunty in Spanish).
|
| Incidentally most of the names we considered don't seem to be on
| the list returned by this website (and we didn't go for very
| uncommon names).
|
| It seems the algorithm selects on names that exist in both
| languages (judging by the graphic in the results). I'd argue
| that's often not really what you want, as they might sound very
| different.
| esafak wrote:
| Thanks for the laugh! It suggested using Elle as a Turkish-
| compatible English name for girls. It is the imperative for
| "grope".
|
| I ought to contact them to add an English-compatible Turkish
| girls' name: Semen. (From Yasemin, or Jasmine.)
| resolutebat wrote:
| Semen is a reasonably common if unfortunate transcription of
| the common Russian male name Semyon (Semion).
| dieselgate wrote:
| Yeah it's reasonably common and unfortunate for people to
| have to deal with but is not really an issue or funny for me
| personally. Am close with a mixed race family in the USA and
| the dad's last name is spelled very similarly to Semen and
| they ended up just changing it to Simon. I get it but also
| find it kind of sad.
|
| But people have been making variations of names for a long
| time for things like this.
| ryncewynd wrote:
| Semen has the opposite problem of Elle. The English translation
| isn't good for a name.
|
| Perhaps the website could add dictionary definitions of the
| names in each language to help avoid these issues
| lucb1e wrote:
| > Semen has the opposite problem of Elle.
|
| I think that's their point.
|
| > add dictionary definitions ... to help avoid these issues
|
| It doesn't give definitions, but it kinda already does that
| by showing you it's a word in the other language (rather than
| just a name), so you know you'd better look it up before use.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > It suggested using Elle as a Turkish-compatible English name
| for girls.
|
| Not for me.
|
| The suggestions are: Cari, Karli, Kismet, Lara, Leila, Leyla,
| Nadia, Selma, and Yasmin.
|
| The English names it _explicitly warns you against_ , because
| they're indeed words in Turkish, are: ..., Bina, Dede, Eden,
| _Elle_ , Elma, Eve, Evin, ...
|
| That these are warnings could be more clear, though. The color
| scheme is the same as the suggestions. Then again, the heading
| text is pretty big.
| nurettin wrote:
| Not even suggesting "can" (a common name that sounds very much
| like "john" in turkish) means that they aren't taking phonetics
| into account.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| As the born and raised local, I enjoyed it when colleagues would
| run by ethnic names under consideration for their kids when
| trying to do a bilingual name. That's real trust.
|
| Also have no idea why how/why a few Canadian-Italian families
| named their daughters "Andrea" which is traditionally a male name
| in Italy.
| williamdclt wrote:
| I've seen men and women named Andrea in France, maybe more
| women actually
| seszett wrote:
| That's really not common, the French versions are Andre for a
| man and Andree for a woman (same pronunciation).
| dfxm12 wrote:
| And there's a quite famous Italian man named Andrea at that!
|
| On the other hand, there's a pretty famous Canadian woman named
| Andrea as well...
| user_7832 wrote:
| While this website seems great in theory, finding English-Hindi
| or English-Bangla names is a lost cause (especially masculine).
| I'm not sure how it "finds" the results but the names appear to
| be of either language and not "common" to both.
| petre wrote:
| It attempts to solve a naming problem using a dataset and
| algorithms, failing miserably.
|
| "There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache
| invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors."
| constantly wrote:
| The key is to use descriptive names. I'm naming my child
| conceived_january_22_on_a_snowy_day_after_too_much_wine.
| lucb1e wrote:
| "using a dataset and algorithms" is a lot of fancy words for
| ctrl+f
|
| At least, I have no indication that it does more than just
| find which items in list A also occur in list B. This text on
| the results page also hints at that: "All of the suggested
| [language_A]-[language_B] names on this page are matched
| solely on their written form"
| nicoburns wrote:
| You might at least be able to find a name that is easily
| pronounced in both languages. For example I have a friend
| called Pavit, which is not an english name. But is nevertheless
| easy for english people to say.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Wonder how many people first try "pave it", since a vowel
| consonant vowel frequently means the first vowel is
| pronounced as the way the letter sounds.
| samyar wrote:
| Add Kurdish to the names
| lucb1e wrote:
| There's contact info on the homepage if you want to contribute
| a list
| giorgioz wrote:
| It does not seem to work very well for Italian-French names.
|
| I'm Italian and my partner is French and we searched for names
| that would be identical for Italian and French.
|
| We did it manually and the trick is for each partner to look at
| names of the other language and write down the ones that are the
| same in theirs.
|
| For example I'm Italian and so I read a list of French names and
| could easily spot the ones that are identical in Italian too.
| Also my partner who is French red a list names in Italian and
| could easily spot the ones that are identical in French.
| croisillon wrote:
| hoping you didn't end up choosing daniele or michele ;)
| achanda358 wrote:
| Does not work well for Bengali-English names. Some of the Bengali
| words are way too informal, or borderline cuss words.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| I tried it for English and Polish and the results seem quite
| mediocre. It gave me some names that are misspellings in Polish
| (like Carolina, Joanne, Veronica; those would typically be
| spelled Karolina, Joanna, Weronika, but bad parents can of course
| pick the wrong spellings). And some names don't feel very English
| to me.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| I tried with French/Korean and it yielded nothing. However we
| have two kids and gave them similar-ish sounding names that are
| both common/hard to mistake/unambiguous in each languages:
| - Mireille / mirae (Mirea/Milea) - Sarah / sarang
| (Sarang/Salang)
|
| I think this website isn't as capable or imaginative as it would
| look.
| polotics wrote:
| Seriously? This looks pretty random: "Arleigh" is in the list of
| English-German names...
| Ingaz wrote:
| I once worked with a man of Bashkir-Estonian descent. His name is
| Aivar which I suspect is bilingual: - it sounds Turkic ("ai" is
| "moon" iirc) - on the other hand there are mentions of
| Aivor/Aivar from Scandinavia and so on
|
| I tried mixednames.com but Bashkir or Tatar are not available
| jkrems wrote:
| The dataset seems pretty unreliable. For example this page claims
| both that "Kai" isn't a name used in German:
| https://mixedname.com/name/kai. But then half of the "celebrities
| named Kai" are... German.
|
| I wonder what the source for the names is. Kai is #289 in at
| least one list of the most popular names given to German kids in
| 2022: https://www.beliebte-
| vornamen.de/jahrgang/j2022/top-500-2022. So I'm surprised that it
| wouldn't show up in a list of >1000 "German" names.
| trumpeta wrote:
| Great! Now do trilingual!
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Always worth remembering that there's no law that you have to use
| the same first name that's on your birth certificate. You can
| introduce yourself to people as whatever you want and people will
| call you that, they won't ask for ID.
|
| So you might as well choose the official name name that the
| average bureaucrat in your jurisdiction is unlikely to misspell,
| and use other name(s) in different cultural or linguistic
| contexts.
| brnt wrote:
| Now do trilingual, or arbitrarily multilingual.
|
| We are Dutch and Polish, met in France, converse in (mostly)
| English, and worked in a few more, and now live somewhere with a
| dialect that only our oldest commands.
|
| Double checking meaning and pronouncability involved at least
| four languages for us, and it wasnt easy, especially when you are
| nonnative!
|
| In Europe, this is not that special, and in many other places
| neither. So many countries have people that speak a few natively.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Dutch and German, met in Belgium, converse in exclusively
| English. I was also very much missing the tri+lingual option!
|
| The site clearly has comparison data between all languages if
| you scroll down on the homepage. Feels similar to the results
| page between two languages, where it'll say "I've got 1234
| names for Dutch and 2345 names for German" in a nice venn
| diagram, but then omits the most interesting information of how
| many names it found shared between the two! (The answer, btw,
| was 402. You can copy and paste them to an editor with line
| numbers.)
| slater wrote:
| How is "Fitzhugh" considered a German name?
| adelie wrote:
| these results are absolutely hilarious for chinese, where names
| are almost entirely freeform, gender is determined by character
| choice (not sound), and there's only a limited set of suffixes to
| choose from in the first place.
|
| i think these are probably scraped from historical figures, since
| i see some very recognizable ones (i.e. enlai, zedong, jianguo),
| but there's also a data integrity issue because a lot of the
| masculine chinese names show up with , or PS in them.
| realusername wrote:
| The idea is okay but the dataset is way too small to make it
| work, only 130 names in French or Vietnamese for example while 5k
| in English
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| That is a pretty good idea!
| hirenj wrote:
| I had a go at something like this when my kids were born. We were
| after names that could be pronounced in both Danish and Gujarati.
| After grabbing name lists from various websites, I generated
| phonetic translations of each name, and then looked at the names
| that had the shortest edit distances in the phonetic
| representation between both languages. It was a great exercise in
| taping bits of software together, and I ended up coming down to a
| shortlist of 7 names. I very proudly showed this list to my wife,
| and she showed me her list of names that she had written down.
|
| Turns out two of the names were on both the lists, so we went
| with them. I have a feeling that it wasn't so important that they
| were on my lists.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| A friend of the family was half-Norwegian and half-Kiwi. He was
| born in Norway and his parents named him Bernt, a common
| Norwegian name.
|
| When they moved to New Zealand, he quickly found that his name
| was pronounced "burnt", and after some time decided to change his
| name to Brent.
|
| Many years later he moved back to Norway, and quickly realized
| "brent" is Norwegian for "burnt"...
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| Norway and their odd names...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_(name)#See_also
| jgilias wrote:
| It's a bit hard to believe though that the parents wouldn't
| have realized how the name sounds like in their respective
| native languages.
| cyberax wrote:
| Ugh. English <-> Mandarin names are just a mess. Most of the
| suggestions can't even be expressed phonetically in Mandarin.
|
| English <-> Russian is much better, but it misses the mark a lot.
| It also offers a lot of names that are too informal (e.g. Tanya
| is an informal variant of Tatiana).
| transreal wrote:
| I'm Indian and I've got a name that's super common in both Arabic
| & Hindi, almost everyone I meet from the Arab world comments on
| it, but it didn't show when I chose those 2 languages.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Don't get sidetracked by the call-to-action inputs, scroll down
| for what is, for me, the most interesting part!
|
| (Feedback if the author is here: can't link to a section!)
|
| In a div with the class top_names (there's no ID or a[name]), it
| shows the names that occur in most languages: Sara and Maria (21
| languages) and Adam and Daniel (18 languages). There's also
| second and third places with 19, 18, and 17, 16 languages for
| female and male, respectively.
|
| There's also this near the bottom, leftover testing or just
| seeing if anyone notices?
| <script>document.write("hello");</script>
|
| Edit: from the author's website "I used to run a subscription box
| called Candy Japan". Oh, it's that guy! To me this feels like an
| HN celebrity though I have no idea whether it's just me who
| remembers seeing that on HN. (I'm not actually interested in
| Japanese candy, for the record.)
| jrflowers wrote:
| It seems somewhat dubious to call a _baby_ bilingual. Most of
| them can't speak a single language let alone two.
| stevekemp wrote:
| While you jest it is true that babies, and small toddlers, can
| understand a lot of words even before they can speak.
|
| We experimented with sign-language for a while, for our child,
| and he understood a few gestures at a very young age.
|
| Similarly he understood words like "walk", "bed", and "food" in
| two languages while very young.
| ic_fly2 wrote:
| Reminds me of a Russian guy I knew called anus.
|
| The site misses the mark. Either the cultures share the bible in
| which case most biblical names are game, or they don't in which
| case a phonetic similarity match is the way forward.
| meitham wrote:
| Nice idea but I question the correctness of the data. Looking at
| Arabic-English names, I see Damian, Daniel and Tobias! These are
| definitely not Arabic names, but there has been a recent trend
| among Arabs living in Europe to take on European names, but that
| pretty much extends to every other English name! It doesn't mean
| these have now become valid Arabic names.
| zymhan wrote:
| I also checked for Arabic-English names, and my name is almost
| identical in both languages, but it's not on the list either.
|
| It's a cool concept, but I think it's needs more humans
| reviewing the data.
| tokai wrote:
| Daniel and Tobias are semitic names popularized in europe by
| christianity. Damian is a greek name used in the Levant for
| thousands of years. They are at least as valid as Arabic names
| as English names, if not even more.
| jl6 wrote:
| Is there something like the opposite of this, that allows you to
| find names that _don't_ have meanings in any other language?
| Specifically, names that don't have rude or controversial
| meanings.
| PumpkinSpice wrote:
| That's gonna be tough with phonetics across several thousand
| languages... not to mention regional slang and other subculture
| stuff. I think the surest bet is just to avoid _short_ names.
| If it 's four or five letters, the likelihood of a collision is
| high. Stuff like Josephine, Gabriella, or Nathaniel is probably
| pretty safe.
|
| Most of these are commonly shortened and then you're back in
| the danger zone, but then, at least you have the option of
| reverting to the long form without jumping through any legal
| hoops.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| Emma is marked as a name not being used in Catalonia, but in
| fact, it has been the most popular name for newborn girls here
| since 2018, every year.
| renke1 wrote:
| My own name is actually only used in the very country I live in.
| Unexpectedly, my daughter's name is apparently also used in
| Arabic countries, it means something like "Gift from Allah".
| keiferski wrote:
| In practice, what happens in many cases is that you have a
| separate name for each place. For example, your English passport
| will say "John" but your Polish one will say "Jan." The Polish
| one won't actually let you have the name "John", or at least it
| will be translated by default.
|
| So it isn't always necessary to have a single name that can
| translate into X languages, but that there is a version of the
| name in the languages you care about.
| freetime2 wrote:
| First suggestion I got for English/Japanese masculine names was
| "Hide". That doesn't strike me as a very common name in English.
| And the Japanese pronunciation (he-day) would constantly be
| mispronounced by English speakers who would read it like "hide".
| schroeding wrote:
| Yeah, the data isn't super clean. English-German suggests
| "Abigail" - which just straight up isn't a German name at all.
| p1esk wrote:
| Almost completely wrong for English-Russian names.
| RandomWorker wrote:
| Went to Dutch and Chinese. But only one match on feminine and non
| on masculine. Sad for me!
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| I would hold off on naming your son Adolph if you're going for a
| name that works in both English and Swedish... It's a name, sure,
| but it kind of fell out of fashion.
|
| Statistics Sweden are publishing some statistics:
|
| > 131 men have Adolf as a first name normally used
|
| > The average age for the name Adolf is 74 years amongst men
|
| https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/sverige-i-siffror/n...
| frozenlettuce wrote:
| "Gloria" spans multiple European languages (with some having an
| "o", but mostly recognizable)
| bedobi wrote:
| Don't mean to be uncharitable but all the examples of "bilingual"
| names in European languages aren't that impressive. Names shared
| across language families are way cooler!
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