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MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

602 points by capableweb 6y ago

schwartzworld 6y ago
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.
xbeta 6y ago
I did the same with two of my kids, and we have more than two languages to consider. We want something simple to write, spell, and pronounce in all 2 languages + dialects: Cantonese, Mandarin, English. It is super challenging. And some of my relatives are super into 八字 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pillars_of_Destiny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pillars_of_Destiny) that also need to make sure the characters written in Chinese can align with that too.
- nathanhammond 6y ago
  Is this published anywhere? Constraints I'm trying to solve for: - Reasonable English corollary. (Doesn't have to be 1:1.) - English-pronounceable Cantonese romanization. - English-pronounceable Mandarin romanization. - Doesn't diverge too much between the three. - Characters that are identical in Traditional and Simplified. - Pleasing to the relatives.
  - xbeta 6y ago
    Yep, absolutely. These constraints probably yield nothing in return. We have take compromise in some of these.
rendall 6y ago
There seems to be a mistake in the copy. It says: "Oh, and here are the Japanese-Finnish names it found for us" but does not list them
rendall 6y ago
We wanted a Finnish name for our son that wasn't so common and would sound masculine in English, so names like "Antti" and "Matti" wouldn't do. We chose Kauko.
- stevekemp 6y ago
  I was disappointed we couldn't call our boy Myrsky! In our case we wanted a name that would be easy to read/spell/pronounce for Finnish and British people. I think that might have been a stretch too far. Still Oiva is excellent, and works really well for everyone.
  - rendall 6y ago
    Oiva is a good name! Yeah, I don't think Myrsky would pass the nimilautakunta! We considered Ukko for a minute, but ... wow, English speakers would definitely have struggles.
elxavicio 6y ago
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.
ornel 6y ago
I made a generator of Panamanian-sounding names by making a syllable based 2-gram analysis of all first and middle names registered in Panama until 2012. By increasing the weight given to likely syllable sequences you can make names sound more "normal", otherwise they get stranger, but still pronunceable and weirdly familiar to those who know the peculiarities of Caribbean naming. https://yaurisbeth.com https://yaurisbeth.com
lvturner 6y ago
Great concept, and not a criticism, but a bit of an anecdote For Chinese-English it suggested "Lee", which as far as I know (my Cantonese and Mandarin aren't that great) is typically the Cantonese anglicisation of 李 (Mandarin Pinyin for this is Li) My given English name is "Lee" and this actually causes no end of confusion in both Hong Kong and China, as it's typically used as surname - in fact, when I attempted to use 李 or even 李李 (which is what my Chinese grandmother in law calls me) as a first name on a visa that required a Chinese name to be added - they wouldn't allow it! If anything - it illustrates why this is such a tough problem to crack!
- KMag 6y ago
  Hopefully your surname isn't easily mistaken for a given name. I've been living in Hong Kong almost 9 years now, and my middle name is often mistaken for my first name, or less commonly, my surname. Based on my experience, "Lee Ryan" would probably be mistaken for "Ryan Lee" well over 50% of the time.
  - lvturner 6y ago
    It is - and sometimes I get called by middle name instead of either of the other names. In e-mails the failure rate for people getting my name in the right order is around 80% - sometimes even after I've corrected the sender three or four times (with decreasing subtly)
    - orthoxerox 6y ago
      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.
tomcooks 6y ago
"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
foxrob92 6y ago
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.
longtermdd 6y ago
German X Chinese = 0 results. I need find a new girl :0.
jauco 6y ago
Nice! For dutch names you could link to the “firstname-database” which shows the popularity of the name over time. E.g. https://www.meertens.knaw.nl/nvb/naam/is/Bert https://www.meertens.knaw.nl/nvb/naam/is/Bert
- Aachen 6y ago
  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.
bargle0 6y ago
No Dothraki/Klingon names :-(
snicky 6y ago
English/Chinese combination returns the name "Park". I don't know any Chinese or Westerners with such name ...
yread 6y ago
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'
scoot 6y ago
Nice idea. A couple of usability suggestions: Add the search parameters to the URL query string so that the it can be copied and pasted. Populate the form with the last selected values, rather than resetting them.
iraldir 6y ago
I'm french, my wife is Italian, and we live in england. Any plan for trilingual names :D
- orthoxerox 6y ago
  Don't pick Andrea, Michele or Daniele :D
peterhil 6y ago
Interesting idea! One small improvement comes to mind after trying some language combinations – the chosen languages could be (pre)selected on the results page under the heading "Find names for a different language pair", so that it would be easier to try different languages combinations while keeping one language constant.
zhte415 6y ago
Names are hard. Sitting with a Polish colleague with a very biblical name he commented "Your name, in Poland.. you would be instantly labelled a psycho. You just can't have a name like yours." Was named from the traditional family book in Scotland. Korva.
- prerok 6y ago
  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.
eric4smith 6y ago
Breaks down completely for languages like English + Thai. Forget about living on the beach in Thailand with the ladyboys. Hahaha.
Pensacola 6y ago
"Worf" doesn't appear as a Klingon name...need to find a better data set :)
Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago
This is so nice, we did that with an adhoc script for the first one!
alinaregiani 6y ago
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.
gramie 6y ago
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.
jbredeche 6y ago
This is great. Our kids are a quarter Finnish, a quarter Indian, a quarter French, and a quarter Chinese. I guess we'd need to run (4 choose 2) combinations here and work off of that list!
josephcs 6y ago
This is fun and interesting. Attempted with a few combinations around Hindi/Indian, Arabic, Japanese, Latvian, and French, and the results are amazing!
Marinlemaignan 6y ago
Could that be based on pronounciation rules ?
- yorwba 6y ago
  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."
asplake 6y ago
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
Arkanosis 6y ago
That's a great idea! You can chose between feminine names, masculine names or both. At first, I thought “both” meant names that are gender-neutral but actually it means that you search for both feminine and masculine names. Which is nice, but a gender neutral option would be an even nicer addition!
james_s_tayler 6y ago
A lot of people go this route. And this is a bloody neat tool to help you do so! We chose not to though with our son though, since the list of names that works in both is small and largely unappealing. The list of names for girls is quite a bit larger with some good options. Instead we decided that since the family name is English the given name should be Japanese. I think it worked out quite well.
vonwoodson 6y ago
“English-Klingon names for girls” FTW
jlawson 6y ago
Very interesting. How did you develop the name lists for each language?
- capableweb 6y ago
  Paging bemmu as he seems to be the one who built the website https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bemmu https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bemmu
- richrichardsson 6y ago
  It would certainly appear to be scraped (see "Name sources:" at the bottom of the page), and that there hasn't been any human curation. eg. Masculine English names that may also be Croatian words: Blagdan This is more likely a surname than a given name. And I'm not sure how names like Ivo and Kristofor can be considered in the intersection of English/Croatian. Having said all that, I think it's still a useful resource, and I don't wish this to come across as putting it down.
brianherbert 6y ago
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.
jmholla 6y ago
Nice little touch when you try to combine a language with itself.
- innomatics 6y ago
  It annoyed me when I wanted to see the list for a single language.
Havoc 6y ago
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.
dhosek 6y ago
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.)
mintone 6y ago
Very interesting. My sons are Anglo-Persian and we considered for a while Alexander (Persian version is Iskandar) which for the latter has the root of Alexander the Great (Alexandros) .. .who was not considered as "great" in Persia of old. It's interesting how personal perception of homonymous friends & acquaintances along with cultural perceptions (Alexander for me was a hero, for my wife a villain) play into the naming game. (Yes I googled "homonymous")
dfee 6y ago
English / Spanish : Male names gives very few names that I’d recognize as English names. https://mixedname.com/english_spanish_masculine_names https://mixedname.com/english_spanish_masculine_names Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the value of this?
- capableweb 6y ago
  The point of the website is to find names that sound/look acceptable in both English and Spanish, not that they _are_ both English and Spanish.
- adrianmonk 6y ago
  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.
- sarb 6y ago
  I got the same impression, lots of names that sound Spanish or English but few or none that would work in both.
- jdmichal 6y ago
  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.
- anthk 6y ago
  - English name - Jacobo Ahem...Biblical names can be traced to almost older than English, at least in romances. jacob <-> Jacobo, Santiago Noah <-> Noé George <-> Jorge Also, Martín is French origin I think.
patrickdavey 6y ago
I'm Irish, my partner is Dutch. We considered calling our daughter Eimear. In her dialect it would have been like calling her "bucket". We opted for a different name ;)
- Aachen 6y ago
  Limburgs?
  - patrickdavey 6y ago
    Uitstekend, jij hebt gelijk
- sjf 6y ago
  The Irish name selection on this site is totally bogus. Apparently Cody, Jacqui, and Kelsi are Engish & Irish feminine names. Those are not even Hiberno-English names. https://mixedname.com/english_irish_feminine_names https://mixedname.com/english_irish_feminine_names
  - bemmu 6y ago
    My approach was to Google things like “Irish names” and add names coming up on such lists. Do you know of a good source I should use instead?
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      The trouble with that is that "Irish" name lists are often written by Irish-Americans, rather than Irish people. For instance, you would often see names like Cailin, or Erin in American-Irish (they mean girl, and Ireland respectively) names, but these would be incredibly uncommon in Ireland itself. This page seems reasonably legit: https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/100-irish-language-first-names-meanings https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/100-irish-language-first-...
mc32 6y ago
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.
- mjn 6y ago
  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.
- wst_ 6y ago
  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.
- seventhtiger 6y ago
  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.
wittyreference 6y ago
English/Russian: I see names that work in Russian, and names that work in English, and very few that actually work in both.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  Hm, quite the contrary experience, I've found that list to be mostly working. Btw, a year ago I and my wife picked a name for our baby daughter, and the criteria for a name to 'work' in both English and Russian was high on the list. Her name is present in English / Russian list, so on basis of this one test I declare the service working correctly.
  - orthoxerox 6y ago
    It suggests Brody and Oral as mixed names for Ru/En, but doesn't offer Philip/Филипп. It's good, but not very good.
lqet 6y ago
German-Japanese female names include names like "Hide", "Aili" or "Uta" which I have never heared in Germany. Is the criteria that the names can be easily pronounced by native speakers of both languages?
- seszett 6y ago
  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.
- tobib 6y ago
  Uta is not uncommon, the other two I haven't heard yet though.
- microtherion 6y ago
  A loose phonetic match might map "Hide" to "Heide", which works in Germany.
achanda358 6y ago
Fascinating. I speak Bengali and found a bunch of "English names that may also be Bengali words" are not Bengali words. Some of those are Bengali words, but not very flattering.
- Angeo34 6y ago
  It shouldn't be surprising though since English, Bengali, French, Persian, Italian and Hindi belong to the same family of languages. If you actually compare the languages it's astonishing how similar the words actually are.
  - civilian 6y ago
    Not sure why you're getting downvoted. All those languages are proto-indo-european, voters! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language
    - danans 6y ago
      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.
    - Angeo34 6y ago
      It's just like on 4chins 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.
rootbear 6y ago
Nice! Too bad they don’t include Hungarian. I’d like to see if they included the name my Hungarian friends gave their daughter. They picked Edith/Edit. The Hungarian version is pronounced ED-eet, which is pretty different from EE-dith, but at least the spellings are close.
- jasonv 6y ago
  My son got the Hungarian middle name, but we went with a Greek first name, partly because it didn't map to our Hungarian family, but also something I thought my elderly father could pronounce, in his heavy accent. We'd had girl names for months, but didn't settle on the boy name option until the night he was born. This was a good while ago, but this discussion brought back the particulars of finding a good name.
  - stergios 6y ago
    The intersection of Greek and Korean names was the empty set! We went with Greek first name, Korean middle name, and Greek last name. For the first names, we made sure there are reasonable English renderings of the Greek, which unfortunately excluded my parent's names, and my name as well. The Korean middle names reference celestial/heavenly items as well as being popular Korean entertainment figures, and have a nice word play together in English. Talk about threading the needle!
rorykoehler 6y ago
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.
Angeo34 6y ago
Finnish and Japanese is another of those combinations that should work very easily since the languages are related even if it's just indirectly.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  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.
  - czzr 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, what’s the issue with those names in Japanese?
    - another-dave 6y ago
      I presume GP is talking about the Perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese speakers — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_/l/_by_Japanese_speakers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_an...
      - james_s_tayler 6y ago
        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.
- simias 6y ago
  The theory that Japanese and Finnish could be related is very much controversial and not widely accepted by linguists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic Nobody knows for sure how Japonic languages relate to other families. Some theorize that it might share a genetic relationship with Korean, but even that has not been convincingly established. At any rate even if we chose to believe that both languages share a very distant common ancestor, it won't really help in this case. Russian, Italian, Dutch, English, Hindi and Gaelic languages do all belong to the Indo-European family, yet they diverged so much that finding matching names is a challenge. And keep in mind that genetic relationship between languages don't tell the whole story. Genetically, English is more closely related to German than French, yet in general English speakers have less trouble picking up French than German because of the huge French and Latin influence in the modern English language.
moultano 6y ago
I did a similar thing for our kids (Hindi/English) but we had slightly different goals. Since the kids were getting my English surname, we wanted to give them Hindi first names, but we wanted them to be easily pronounceable in English. So I wrote a character-based ngram language model based on the US census count of names, and used that to score a list of Hindi names. I then improved it by adding a bunch of rewrite rules to collapse similar sounds together to "canonicalize" names before scoring them against the language model. Finally we ended up with Riya for my daughter (which is pronounced the same as the English name Rhea) and Aarav for my son, which is pronounced the same as two of the most common English words, "are" and "of." Edit: I was able to find the output from the girl's name list. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Vy1dQunG4iie4H67En9TXM71iR26qCZF3uHWVGsfNqQ/view https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Vy1dQunG4iie4H67En9T...
- akulkarni 6y ago
  You wouldn't happen to have a similar spreadsheet with a boy's name list, would you?
  - Ichthypresbyter 6y ago
    The Hindu men I know whose parents wanted to give them names easily pronounceable in English are called Neel and Kiran.
- CarbyAu 6y ago
  And here my approach to naming was: - 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.
  - tappio 6y ago
    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.
gumby 6y ago
This is an important problem; my parents decided to give us each two names while one of my uncles and his wife chose the “same name in both languages“ approach — for the first two kids, but were stumped and gave up for the third. My wife and I had an n-ary problem — not just the languages of all of her and all of my relatives (about five) but also the country we were living in. We finally whittled it down to phonemes that pretty much everybody could pronounce (though vowels varied a lot) and just went with single-syllable names that were at least pronouncable. English names are sort of in vogue, e.g. there are a surprising number of kids named “Kevin” in Germany at the moment.
- fignews 6y ago
  The name Kevin in Germany is a meme and not viewed positively. It’s regularly made fun of and to call someone a Kevin is a bit of an insult.
  - gumby 6y ago
    That’s what makes it so surprising!
  - iraldir 6y ago
    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).
techaddict009 6y ago
This tool is awesome. Can you add one more filter? find name starting with character option?
coddle-hark 6y ago
This is not a slight towards the OP, I’m just opening up for discussion. I think this is a great example of how we tend to default to algorithms and automation even when the problem is better suited to a more manual solution. This is especially problematic when our automated systems don’t allow for transparent human intervention (think ML classifiers etc.). If this page were a curated wiki, for example, it’d probably have had a number of additions / corrections suggested by the community already. People are certainly posting corrections in this very thread, at least. Maybe the lesson is, use automated data as a seed and let humans iterate on that?
- notatoad 6y ago
  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.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  When comes time to name babies, I'll do that cross-listing by hand indeed. But it's still a cool idea and can get you started.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jupp0r 6y ago
Having had this particular problem 2 years ago (German/English), I'm pleased to find my sons name in the intersection set on the linked app :)
petters 6y ago
Does not work perfectly though: "Fisk" would be a very strange name in Swedish (means "fish") and I've never heard it in English, I think.
- DonaldFisk 6y ago
  It's quite a common surname in Suffolk, England, and is from Old Norse. It would be odd as a first name, though.
- cafard 6y ago
  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.
- Markoff 6y ago
  it's same as recommending Korean "Park" for English Chinese combination, recommendations sound like gibberish
didibus 6y ago
Looks great, may I ask where you got your dataset for the names?
- justusthane 6y ago
  I'm not the OP nor the developer, but sources are listed at the bottom of each "result" page. I think he used whatever lists of names he could find.
yuriko 6y ago
English/Chinese doesn't work at all
- savanaly 6y ago
  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?
- odiroot 6y ago
  Chinese in general is very problematic on that website.
boyter 6y ago
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.
- GFischer 6y ago
  My nephew had the same issue, had to work in English, Spanish and German. Fortunately there are several names that work in all three, they ended up choosing Max.
- Hokusai 6y ago
  > the family thinks it’s Spanish. They think it is Spanish, because it is Spanish. Hector (/ˈhɛktər/) is an English, French, Scottish, and Spanish given name. The name is derived from the Greek name of Hektor.
  - boyter 6y ago
    Without getting into pedantic arguments. Ask any person to write down the name of the Trojan prince and you get Hector or Paris depending on who you ask. The origin is Greek even if the spelling more palatable for the modern English or Spanish speaker.
    - umanwizard 6y ago
      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.
- CodeMage 6y ago
  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.
hogFeast 6y ago
English and Japanese - 5 names that start with the letter L, 2 that start with the letter R ...needs more work.
kdamica 6y ago
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.
permalac 6y ago
This is amazing, is there any chance you could add Catalan as well? Can I do it myself? I had to find Catalan - English names once and was not easy, and I hope I'll need it again soon. Good work.
stupidboy 6y ago
Yes! I can finally pick names that work with the wider English speaking world and my Dothraki familiy abroad.
James_Henry 6y ago
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.
naruciakk 6y ago
It is probably very useful not only for international couples, but also for role players
danpalmer 6y ago
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.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  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.
- gberger 6y ago
  Interesting, do you have any examples of the out-there names?
  - eythian 6y ago
    "Randy" would be one that I see Americans have as a name that causes chuckles in most of the rest of the English speaking world.
  - danpalmer 6y ago
    Looking at relatively current top baby names... Elijah, Mason, Logan, Harper, Jackson, Ethan, Avery, Madison, Carter, Wyatt, Jayden... 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".
CountHackulus 6y ago
I'm really not sure about the English/French intersection. There's quite a few names that I've definitely never heard in French and would be super awkward to pronounce. Names like Gaylord, Montgomery, Barbara. It seems like the source for French names wasn't really that reputable.
- apendleton 6y ago
  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.
theogravity 6y ago
This is cool, but needs to remember the prior selection inputs - it's a pain to set it back to how it was just to swap genders for example.
rvnx 6y ago
Cool project, need support for Estonian :)
Arubis 6y ago
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.
ivanhoe 6y ago
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?
msikora 6y ago
Well, my use case is Slovak and Romanian (but living in the USA). Missing both languages :( I can approximate Slovak with Czech almost perfectly, but Romanian names are quite different from related (Romance) languages...
- Markoff 6y ago
  why though? i had Romanian colleague named Victor, sounds perfectly passable name in most languages, I'm sure there are plenty international Romanian names
  - msikora 6y ago
    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.
- msikora 6y ago
  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".
bredren 6y ago
Unrelated, but I created the very first Baby Names app for iOS with my pal David. I didn’t have a baby, but my friend Marie was having one and suggested the idea. Imagine having such a simple idea and it not already existing on iOS. Those were the days. It held the namespace “Baby Names” in the App Store, which someone tried to buy later but before that no longer mattered. It was the gold rush of the App Store. I think we charged 99 cents for it, but I remember we made something like $12k in a few months. Dave wrote the objective c but I wrangled assets and ran the dev builds on a hackintosh, not yet sold on the Apple ecosystem. We got into a beef with this other Baby Names app seller that thought they had the original baby names app. There were some stern reviews. The app was just a native UI over a baby names database I bought off some service for cheap. You could save favorites and share it and there was limited filtering. Eventually people willing to compete moved in, with various free and paid offerings and we didn’t bother to keep it up. Edit: I found the press release I issued. What nostalgia. https://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/09/prweb1332494.htm https://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/09/prweb1332494.htm
- jameshush 6y ago
  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 :(
chrisofspades 6y ago
There are more Dothraki names than African names combined :(
Markoff 6y ago
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
actuator 6y ago
For the 4-5 language pairs I picked, there were more matches for the feminine names. I wonder if that is a sample bias.
- Redoubts 6y ago
  Yeah, kinda weird to see Zero Swahili/English masculine names.
acephal 6y ago
The sooner we get to Cowboy Bebop names, the better
losvedir 6y ago
Great idea! Was just doing something like this manually, so this is a neat resource. I'd love to see the intersection of three languages, though.
etiennekroger 6y ago
What about trilingual? :)
5n 6y ago
Would be interesting if the Chinese-Japanese ones did homographs on Kanji/Hanzi too!
plantel 6y ago
But totally different pronounciation to the point where you might as well use a translated name. For example: English Kate > K-ay-t Croatian Kate > K-aw-teh
paulhallett 6y ago
You should add Māori names too. Here is a resource with years worth of popular Māori names: https://smartstart.services.govt.nz/news/baby-names https://smartstart.services.govt.nz/news/baby-names
benatkin 6y ago
One of the first I noticed is Hugo, which is in fact a good name. https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/
viburnum 6y ago
This is great. Would have saved me easily eight hours of research time.
Azleur 6y ago
Would it be possible to add Catalan? I can give a hand.
laingc 6y ago
This would have been PERFECT for when my wife and I were searching for nice German/English names. We finally settled on Lotte, which despite being German in its pronunciation is perfect for my daughter (who is also perfect, in case you were interested). Really cool project!
felixledem 6y ago
Could you add support for three languages? Gotta please the in-laws!
macro-b 6y ago
I tried English and Italian and I was a bit surprised... my son’s name which is Leo and valid in both languages wasn’t there... while there were at least dozens of names so archaic most people would never hear them in reality! Not sure where you got your sources
- detritus 6y ago
  I just goaded my Italian partner with a link to the page containing our toddler's name - we agreed on the name itself, which is known in both countries, but not the exact spelling. I was pleased this page preferred my interpretation, so as an asshole Scot, I was quick to share it. Her response was less than enthused...
- poutrathor 6y ago
  I checked French & Italian and the data source is rather bad : Bonny ? Blondene ?
magicalhippo 6y ago
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".
- james_s_tayler 6y ago
  Well can't be worse than Russians with a surname of Mankovich having to introduce themselves in Japan as マンコビッチ
  - asveikau 6y ago
    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.
    - Arnavion 6y ago
      マンコビッチ == MA-N-KO-BI-CCHI 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%83%BB%E3%83%9E%E3%83%AB%E3%82%B3%E3%83%B4%E3%82%A3%E3%83%83%E3%83%81 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)
      - 6y ago
curlyQueue 6y ago
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
chaostheory 6y ago
Did the Chinese & English: - I'm not sure how "Lee" is a feminine name. - Park is more Korean and not Chinese. How did you get your data?
bikitan 6y ago
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.
aminozuur 6y ago
I am Persian and in an interracial relationship. I'm playing around with your tool and I like it. Keep it up :).
exo_duz 6y ago
Named my daughters Miya (Mia), Arisa (Allysa) and Remi (Remy). They are all a mix of English sounding Japanese names. Tried the English-Japanese, not all the options are there. It helps that we lived in Japan for 6 years and I can speak Japanese so it was a lot easier finding the names.
- wirthjason 6y ago
  How did you decide the names? Our daughter’s name is Kei. We didn’t know the gender until birth but my we had a few names picked out for girl names. Mia was one of them too. Our only “requirement” was from my mom, “please don’t pick some crazy Japanese name I’ll never be able to pronounce.” It seems you have slight English variants like Miya vs Mia. Is that just informal (eg for us everyone mistakenly spells Kei as Kay) or is it on official documents like passports?
rizpanjwani 6y ago
Tried Hindi + Japanese + Both and could not find Akira, which is quite popular in both cultures...
bertjk 6y ago
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.
Ozzie_osman 6y ago
OK my name is Osman in Arabic and though Osman shows up on the English/Arabic page I can definitely confirm, having lived in the US for over ten years, it is NOT english friendly to pronounce at all. But i love the idea of this app!
monkeycantype 6y ago
We took a slightly different approach and chose names that were deliberately common nouns that translate well, such as 蜜蜂 https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto&tl=en&text=%E8%9C%9C%E8%9C%82 https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto...
jojobas 6y ago
Names with an L in Japanese? The concept is cute, the execution is questionable.
deleted 6y ago
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galkk 6y ago
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.
IgorPartola 6y ago
It returned Maria for a combo of English/Russian/Masculine. Also Adrian and Brody which I’ve never heard in Russian. But overall not a bad idea. My former Irish coworker and his Indian wife could have used this for sure when trying to name their kids years ago.
- rcpt 6y ago
  I mean, presumably the people using the service will manually validate the results before acting on them.
  - IgorPartola 6y 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.
627467 6y ago
How can we improve from these "fuzzy matches": - filipa vs felipa - glória vs gloria Imo these are not fuzzy at all, they are great matches.

602 points by capableweb 6y ago

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.

xbeta 6y ago

I did the same with two of my kids, and we have more than two languages to consider. We want something simple to write, spell, and pronounce in all 2 languages + dialects: Cantonese, Mandarin, English. It is super challenging. And some of my relatives are super into 八字 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pillars_of_Destiny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pillars_of_Destiny) that also need to make sure the characters written in Chinese can align with that too.

nathanhammond 6y ago
Is this published anywhere? Constraints I'm trying to solve for: - Reasonable English corollary. (Doesn't have to be 1:1.) - English-pronounceable Cantonese romanization. - English-pronounceable Mandarin romanization. - Doesn't diverge too much between the three. - Characters that are identical in Traditional and Simplified. - Pleasing to the relatives.
- xbeta 6y ago
  Yep, absolutely. These constraints probably yield nothing in return. We have take compromise in some of these.

rendall 6y ago

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

rendall 6y ago

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

stevekemp 6y ago
I was disappointed we couldn't call our boy Myrsky! In our case we wanted a name that would be easy to read/spell/pronounce for Finnish and British people. I think that might have been a stretch too far. Still Oiva is excellent, and works really well for everyone.
- rendall 6y ago
  Oiva is a good name! Yeah, I don't think Myrsky would pass the nimilautakunta! We considered Ukko for a minute, but ... wow, English speakers would definitely have struggles.

elxavicio 6y ago

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.

ornel 6y ago

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

lvturner 6y ago

Great concept, and not a criticism, but a bit of an anecdote For Chinese-English it suggested "Lee", which as far as I know (my Cantonese and Mandarin aren't that great) is typically the Cantonese anglicisation of 李 (Mandarin Pinyin for this is Li) My given English name is "Lee" and this actually causes no end of confusion in both Hong Kong and China, as it's typically used as surname - in fact, when I attempted to use 李 or even 李李 (which is what my Chinese grandmother in law calls me) as a first name on a visa that required a Chinese name to be added - they wouldn't allow it! If anything - it illustrates why this is such a tough problem to crack!

KMag 6y ago
Hopefully your surname isn't easily mistaken for a given name. I've been living in Hong Kong almost 9 years now, and my middle name is often mistaken for my first name, or less commonly, my surname. Based on my experience, "Lee Ryan" would probably be mistaken for "Ryan Lee" well over 50% of the time.
- lvturner 6y ago
  It is - and sometimes I get called by middle name instead of either of the other names. In e-mails the failure rate for people getting my name in the right order is around 80% - sometimes even after I've corrected the sender three or four times (with decreasing subtly)
  - orthoxerox 6y ago
    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.

tomcooks 6y ago

"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

foxrob92 6y ago

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.

longtermdd 6y ago

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

jauco 6y ago

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

Aachen 6y ago
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.

bargle0 6y ago

No Dothraki/Klingon names :-(

snicky 6y ago

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

yread 6y ago

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'

scoot 6y ago

Nice idea. A couple of usability suggestions: Add the search parameters to the URL query string so that the it can be copied and pasted. Populate the form with the last selected values, rather than resetting them.

iraldir 6y ago

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

orthoxerox 6y ago
Don't pick Andrea, Michele or Daniele :D

peterhil 6y ago

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

zhte415 6y ago

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

prerok 6y ago
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.

eric4smith 6y ago

Breaks down completely for languages like English + Thai. Forget about living on the beach in Thailand with the ladyboys. Hahaha.

Pensacola 6y ago

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

Fire-Dragon-DoL 6y ago

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

alinaregiani 6y ago

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.

gramie 6y ago

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.

jbredeche 6y ago

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

josephcs 6y ago

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

Marinlemaignan 6y ago

Could that be based on pronounciation rules ?

yorwba 6y ago
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."

asplake 6y ago

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

Arkanosis 6y ago

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

james_s_tayler 6y ago

A lot of people go this route. And this is a bloody neat tool to help you do so! We chose not to though with our son though, since the list of names that works in both is small and largely unappealing. The list of names for girls is quite a bit larger with some good options. Instead we decided that since the family name is English the given name should be Japanese. I think it worked out quite well.

vonwoodson 6y ago

“English-Klingon names for girls” FTW

jlawson 6y ago

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

capableweb 6y ago
Paging bemmu as he seems to be the one who built the website https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bemmu https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bemmu
richrichardsson 6y ago
It would certainly appear to be scraped (see "Name sources:" at the bottom of the page), and that there hasn't been any human curation. eg. Masculine English names that may also be Croatian words: Blagdan This is more likely a surname than a given name. And I'm not sure how names like Ivo and Kristofor can be considered in the intersection of English/Croatian. Having said all that, I think it's still a useful resource, and I don't wish this to come across as putting it down.

brianherbert 6y ago

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.

jmholla 6y ago

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

innomatics 6y ago
It annoyed me when I wanted to see the list for a single language.

Havoc 6y ago

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.

dhosek 6y ago

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.)

mintone 6y ago

Very interesting. My sons are Anglo-Persian and we considered for a while Alexander (Persian version is Iskandar) which for the latter has the root of Alexander the Great (Alexandros) .. .who was not considered as "great" in Persia of old. It's interesting how personal perception of homonymous friends & acquaintances along with cultural perceptions (Alexander for me was a hero, for my wife a villain) play into the naming game. (Yes I googled "homonymous")

dfee 6y ago

English / Spanish : Male names gives very few names that I’d recognize as English names. https://mixedname.com/english_spanish_masculine_names https://mixedname.com/english_spanish_masculine_names Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the value of this?

capableweb 6y ago
The point of the website is to find names that sound/look acceptable in both English and Spanish, not that they _are_ both English and Spanish.
adrianmonk 6y ago
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.
sarb 6y ago
I got the same impression, lots of names that sound Spanish or English but few or none that would work in both.
jdmichal 6y ago
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.
anthk 6y ago
- English name - Jacobo Ahem...Biblical names can be traced to almost older than English, at least in romances. jacob <-> Jacobo, Santiago Noah <-> Noé George <-> Jorge Also, Martín is French origin I think.

patrickdavey 6y ago

I'm Irish, my partner is Dutch. We considered calling our daughter Eimear. In her dialect it would have been like calling her "bucket". We opted for a different name ;)

Aachen 6y ago
Limburgs?
- patrickdavey 6y ago
  Uitstekend, jij hebt gelijk
sjf 6y ago
The Irish name selection on this site is totally bogus. Apparently Cody, Jacqui, and Kelsi are Engish & Irish feminine names. Those are not even Hiberno-English names. https://mixedname.com/english_irish_feminine_names https://mixedname.com/english_irish_feminine_names
- bemmu 6y ago
  My approach was to Google things like “Irish names” and add names coming up on such lists. Do you know of a good source I should use instead?
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    The trouble with that is that "Irish" name lists are often written by Irish-Americans, rather than Irish people. For instance, you would often see names like Cailin, or Erin in American-Irish (they mean girl, and Ireland respectively) names, but these would be incredibly uncommon in Ireland itself. This page seems reasonably legit: https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/100-irish-language-first-names-meanings https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/100-irish-language-first-...

mc32 6y ago

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.

mjn 6y ago
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.
wst_ 6y ago
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.
seventhtiger 6y ago
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.

wittyreference 6y ago

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

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
Hm, quite the contrary experience, I've found that list to be mostly working. Btw, a year ago I and my wife picked a name for our baby daughter, and the criteria for a name to 'work' in both English and Russian was high on the list. Her name is present in English / Russian list, so on basis of this one test I declare the service working correctly.
- orthoxerox 6y ago
  It suggests Brody and Oral as mixed names for Ru/En, but doesn't offer Philip/Филипп. It's good, but not very good.

lqet 6y ago

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

seszett 6y ago
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.
tobib 6y ago
Uta is not uncommon, the other two I haven't heard yet though.
microtherion 6y ago
A loose phonetic match might map "Hide" to "Heide", which works in Germany.

achanda358 6y ago

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

Angeo34 6y ago
It shouldn't be surprising though since English, Bengali, French, Persian, Italian and Hindi belong to the same family of languages. If you actually compare the languages it's astonishing how similar the words actually are.
- civilian 6y ago
  Not sure why you're getting downvoted. All those languages are proto-indo-european, voters! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language
  - danans 6y ago
    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.
  - Angeo34 6y ago
    It's just like on 4chins 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.

rootbear 6y ago

Nice! Too bad they don’t include Hungarian. I’d like to see if they included the name my Hungarian friends gave their daughter. They picked Edith/Edit. The Hungarian version is pronounced ED-eet, which is pretty different from EE-dith, but at least the spellings are close.

jasonv 6y ago
My son got the Hungarian middle name, but we went with a Greek first name, partly because it didn't map to our Hungarian family, but also something I thought my elderly father could pronounce, in his heavy accent. We'd had girl names for months, but didn't settle on the boy name option until the night he was born. This was a good while ago, but this discussion brought back the particulars of finding a good name.
- stergios 6y ago
  The intersection of Greek and Korean names was the empty set! We went with Greek first name, Korean middle name, and Greek last name. For the first names, we made sure there are reasonable English renderings of the Greek, which unfortunately excluded my parent's names, and my name as well. The Korean middle names reference celestial/heavenly items as well as being popular Korean entertainment figures, and have a nice word play together in English. Talk about threading the needle!

rorykoehler 6y ago

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.

Angeo34 6y ago

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

Hamuko 6y ago
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.
- czzr 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, what’s the issue with those names in Japanese?
  - another-dave 6y ago
    I presume GP is talking about the Perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese speakers — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_/l/_by_Japanese_speakers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_an...
    - james_s_tayler 6y ago
      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.
simias 6y ago
The theory that Japanese and Finnish could be related is very much controversial and not widely accepted by linguists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic Nobody knows for sure how Japonic languages relate to other families. Some theorize that it might share a genetic relationship with Korean, but even that has not been convincingly established. At any rate even if we chose to believe that both languages share a very distant common ancestor, it won't really help in this case. Russian, Italian, Dutch, English, Hindi and Gaelic languages do all belong to the Indo-European family, yet they diverged so much that finding matching names is a challenge. And keep in mind that genetic relationship between languages don't tell the whole story. Genetically, English is more closely related to German than French, yet in general English speakers have less trouble picking up French than German because of the huge French and Latin influence in the modern English language.

moultano 6y ago

I did a similar thing for our kids (Hindi/English) but we had slightly different goals. Since the kids were getting my English surname, we wanted to give them Hindi first names, but we wanted them to be easily pronounceable in English. So I wrote a character-based ngram language model based on the US census count of names, and used that to score a list of Hindi names. I then improved it by adding a bunch of rewrite rules to collapse similar sounds together to "canonicalize" names before scoring them against the language model. Finally we ended up with Riya for my daughter (which is pronounced the same as the English name Rhea) and Aarav for my son, which is pronounced the same as two of the most common English words, "are" and "of." Edit: I was able to find the output from the girl's name list. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Vy1dQunG4iie4H67En9TXM71iR26qCZF3uHWVGsfNqQ/view https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Vy1dQunG4iie4H67En9T...

akulkarni 6y ago
You wouldn't happen to have a similar spreadsheet with a boy's name list, would you?
- Ichthypresbyter 6y ago
  The Hindu men I know whose parents wanted to give them names easily pronounceable in English are called Neel and Kiran.
CarbyAu 6y ago
And here my approach to naming was: - 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.
- tappio 6y ago
  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.

gumby 6y ago

This is an important problem; my parents decided to give us each two names while one of my uncles and his wife chose the “same name in both languages“ approach — for the first two kids, but were stumped and gave up for the third. My wife and I had an n-ary problem — not just the languages of all of her and all of my relatives (about five) but also the country we were living in. We finally whittled it down to phonemes that pretty much everybody could pronounce (though vowels varied a lot) and just went with single-syllable names that were at least pronouncable. English names are sort of in vogue, e.g. there are a surprising number of kids named “Kevin” in Germany at the moment.

fignews 6y ago
The name Kevin in Germany is a meme and not viewed positively. It’s regularly made fun of and to call someone a Kevin is a bit of an insult.
- gumby 6y ago
  That’s what makes it so surprising!
- iraldir 6y ago
  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).

techaddict009 6y ago

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

coddle-hark 6y ago

This is not a slight towards the OP, I’m just opening up for discussion. I think this is a great example of how we tend to default to algorithms and automation even when the problem is better suited to a more manual solution. This is especially problematic when our automated systems don’t allow for transparent human intervention (think ML classifiers etc.). If this page were a curated wiki, for example, it’d probably have had a number of additions / corrections suggested by the community already. People are certainly posting corrections in this very thread, at least. Maybe the lesson is, use automated data as a seed and let humans iterate on that?

notatoad 6y ago
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.
benhurmarcel 6y ago
When comes time to name babies, I'll do that cross-listing by hand indeed. But it's still a cool idea and can get you started.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

jupp0r 6y ago

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

petters 6y ago

Does not work perfectly though: "Fisk" would be a very strange name in Swedish (means "fish") and I've never heard it in English, I think.

DonaldFisk 6y ago
It's quite a common surname in Suffolk, England, and is from Old Norse. It would be odd as a first name, though.
cafard 6y ago
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.
Markoff 6y ago
it's same as recommending Korean "Park" for English Chinese combination, recommendations sound like gibberish

didibus 6y ago

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

justusthane 6y ago
I'm not the OP nor the developer, but sources are listed at the bottom of each "result" page. I think he used whatever lists of names he could find.

yuriko 6y ago

English/Chinese doesn't work at all

savanaly 6y ago
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?
odiroot 6y ago
Chinese in general is very problematic on that website.

boyter 6y ago

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.

GFischer 6y ago
My nephew had the same issue, had to work in English, Spanish and German. Fortunately there are several names that work in all three, they ended up choosing Max.
Hokusai 6y ago
> the family thinks it’s Spanish. They think it is Spanish, because it is Spanish. Hector (/ˈhɛktər/) is an English, French, Scottish, and Spanish given name. The name is derived from the Greek name of Hektor.
- boyter 6y ago
  Without getting into pedantic arguments. Ask any person to write down the name of the Trojan prince and you get Hector or Paris depending on who you ask. The origin is Greek even if the spelling more palatable for the modern English or Spanish speaker.
  - umanwizard 6y ago
    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.
CodeMage 6y ago
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.

hogFeast 6y ago

English and Japanese - 5 names that start with the letter L, 2 that start with the letter R ...needs more work.

kdamica 6y ago

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.

permalac 6y ago

This is amazing, is there any chance you could add Catalan as well? Can I do it myself? I had to find Catalan - English names once and was not easy, and I hope I'll need it again soon. Good work.

stupidboy 6y ago

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

James_Henry 6y ago

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.

naruciakk 6y ago

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

danpalmer 6y ago

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.

blaser-waffle 6y ago
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.
gberger 6y ago
Interesting, do you have any examples of the out-there names?
- eythian 6y ago
  "Randy" would be one that I see Americans have as a name that causes chuckles in most of the rest of the English speaking world.
- danpalmer 6y ago
  Looking at relatively current top baby names... Elijah, Mason, Logan, Harper, Jackson, Ethan, Avery, Madison, Carter, Wyatt, Jayden... 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".

CountHackulus 6y ago

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

apendleton 6y ago
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.

theogravity 6y ago

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

rvnx 6y ago

Cool project, need support for Estonian :)

Arubis 6y ago

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.

ivanhoe 6y ago

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?

msikora 6y ago

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

Markoff 6y ago
why though? i had Romanian colleague named Victor, sounds perfectly passable name in most languages, I'm sure there are plenty international Romanian names
- msikora 6y ago
  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.
msikora 6y ago
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".

bredren 6y ago

Unrelated, but I created the very first Baby Names app for iOS with my pal David. I didn’t have a baby, but my friend Marie was having one and suggested the idea. Imagine having such a simple idea and it not already existing on iOS. Those were the days. It held the namespace “Baby Names” in the App Store, which someone tried to buy later but before that no longer mattered. It was the gold rush of the App Store. I think we charged 99 cents for it, but I remember we made something like $12k in a few months. Dave wrote the objective c but I wrangled assets and ran the dev builds on a hackintosh, not yet sold on the Apple ecosystem. We got into a beef with this other Baby Names app seller that thought they had the original baby names app. There were some stern reviews. The app was just a native UI over a baby names database I bought off some service for cheap. You could save favorites and share it and there was limited filtering. Eventually people willing to compete moved in, with various free and paid offerings and we didn’t bother to keep it up. Edit: I found the press release I issued. What nostalgia. https://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/09/prweb1332494.htm https://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/09/prweb1332494.htm

jameshush 6y ago
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 :(

chrisofspades 6y ago

There are more Dothraki names than African names combined :(

Markoff 6y ago

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

actuator 6y ago

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

Redoubts 6y ago
Yeah, kinda weird to see Zero Swahili/English masculine names.

acephal 6y ago

The sooner we get to Cowboy Bebop names, the better

losvedir 6y ago

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

etiennekroger 6y ago

What about trilingual? :)

5n 6y ago

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

plantel 6y ago

But totally different pronounciation to the point where you might as well use a translated name. For example: English Kate > K-ay-t Croatian Kate > K-aw-teh

paulhallett 6y ago

You should add Māori names too. Here is a resource with years worth of popular Māori names: https://smartstart.services.govt.nz/news/baby-names https://smartstart.services.govt.nz/news/baby-names

benatkin 6y ago

One of the first I noticed is Hugo, which is in fact a good name. https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/

viburnum 6y ago

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

Azleur 6y ago

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

laingc 6y ago

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

felixledem 6y ago

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

macro-b 6y ago

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

detritus 6y ago
I just goaded my Italian partner with a link to the page containing our toddler's name - we agreed on the name itself, which is known in both countries, but not the exact spelling. I was pleased this page preferred my interpretation, so as an asshole Scot, I was quick to share it. Her response was less than enthused...
poutrathor 6y ago
I checked French & Italian and the data source is rather bad : Bonny ? Blondene ?

magicalhippo 6y ago

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".

james_s_tayler 6y ago
Well can't be worse than Russians with a surname of Mankovich having to introduce themselves in Japan as マンコビッチ
- asveikau 6y ago
  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.
  - Arnavion 6y ago
    マンコビッチ == MA-N-KO-BI-CCHI 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%83%BB%E3%83%9E%E3%83%AB%E3%82%B3%E3%83%B4%E3%82%A3%E3%83%83%E3%83%81 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)
    - 6y ago

curlyQueue 6y ago

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

chaostheory 6y ago

Did the Chinese & English: - I'm not sure how "Lee" is a feminine name. - Park is more Korean and not Chinese. How did you get your data?

bikitan 6y ago

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.

aminozuur 6y ago

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

exo_duz 6y ago

Named my daughters Miya (Mia), Arisa (Allysa) and Remi (Remy). They are all a mix of English sounding Japanese names. Tried the English-Japanese, not all the options are there. It helps that we lived in Japan for 6 years and I can speak Japanese so it was a lot easier finding the names.

wirthjason 6y ago
How did you decide the names? Our daughter’s name is Kei. We didn’t know the gender until birth but my we had a few names picked out for girl names. Mia was one of them too. Our only “requirement” was from my mom, “please don’t pick some crazy Japanese name I’ll never be able to pronounce.” It seems you have slight English variants like Miya vs Mia. Is that just informal (eg for us everyone mistakenly spells Kei as Kay) or is it on official documents like passports?

rizpanjwani 6y ago

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

bertjk 6y ago

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.

Ozzie_osman 6y ago

OK my name is Osman in Arabic and though Osman shows up on the English/Arabic page I can definitely confirm, having lived in the US for over ten years, it is NOT english friendly to pronounce at all. But i love the idea of this app!

monkeycantype 6y ago

We took a slightly different approach and chose names that were deliberately common nouns that translate well, such as 蜜蜂 https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto&tl=en&text=%E8%9C%9C%E8%9C%82 https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto...

jojobas 6y ago

Names with an L in Japanese? The concept is cute, the execution is questionable.

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galkk 6y ago

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.

IgorPartola 6y ago

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

rcpt 6y ago
I mean, presumably the people using the service will manually validate the results before acting on them.
- IgorPartola 6y 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.

627467 6y ago

How can we improve from these "fuzzy matches": - filipa vs felipa - glória vs gloria Imo these are not fuzzy at all, they are great matches.