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Find bilingual baby names
- Cosi1125 3y agoIt says that Vi is a "feminine English name that may also be a Polish word".[1] Now, if Emacs were a masculine English name, it would be a perfect match for evil twins ;-) [1] Hint: it isn't.
- footy 3y agoThe data for English/Spanish isn't very good. My name (popular in the Anglosphere, given to me by spanish speaking parents) isn't there.
- AceyMan 3y agoWhy do we call them "baby names"; they're given names—a person will be using it their entire life—they just so happen to be chosen at birth. Expecting parents and their inner circle are always discussing 'cute baby names,' forgetting in the arc of life their child will only [typo] be a baby a short time (fate willing and all that). When I consider names, my standard is; "Would this sound solid and respectable if <the name> were the head of my division / a diplomat / leading thinker", etc. If it doesn't feel like it'd be a fit for those "life roles," it's scratched. (We only have one, a boy, and it met that standard but I still do that thought experiment on the premise if we'd had a girl.)
- devilbunny 3y agoYou can overthink it, though. My name, had I been female, would have been Margaret. Nice name. I could totally see being a Maggie. Except they were going to call me Marg. Hard G. Like Ms Helgenberger, the actress. I probably wouldn’t have been that attractive, which is pretty much the only way to survive with such a horrible name.
- sinuhe69 3y agoI don't know, but with many names, even if they are spelled the same, the pronunciation is completely different, not to mention the meaning. My approach is a bit different: I try to find a name that is native to one language but easier to pronounce in the other, so that at least the baby has a name with a full meaning that people can still pronounce easily. But I'm also fully aware that this is not always the case.
- bitsoda 3y agoCool idea, but it could use some work. For example, Italian-Spanish (Masculine) should yield 'Matteo' or 'Mateo' but seemingly doesn't because of a 't' despite being essentially the same name.
- nelgaard 3y agoSomething is not working. Tried Danish-Dutch names. Most suggestions are not Danish at all. Some of those e.g., Coen, Derk, Gerbrand in the "Usage of X in different languages / cultures" only has a checkmark for Dutch.
- heywhatupboys 3y agoBeing bilingual allows me to actually validate sites like this. Almost all of the English ∩ Danish are completely wrong. "Alannah, Aleesha" etc. Take this site with a spoonful of salt...
- mrweasel 3y agoI think it's just taking the lists of approved/used names in each country. Denmark has a ton of technically approved names, to accommodate refugees and immigrants, but they don't work well in Danish, because they are Arabic, Somali or whatever in origin. Perhaps easier to understand examples are Kathy and Abigail. Pretty names in English but they will get completely butchered in Danish. Kathy will pretty much lose the h, and become Cat-i. Abi works, but gail will sound like the German "geil".
- ajmurmann 3y agoSimilar in German. "Alarice" and "Allaryce" stuck out immediately.
- dev_snd 3y agoIt would be awesome if there was a mode in which the pronunciation of the names is also same in the two languages. For example, in french there is the name "Arnaud", which exists in German as "Arno". For a bilingual child it's much more important for the name to sound the same that to be written the same.
- User23 3y agoContrariwise in English/German you have names like Michael which are the same name but pronounced quite differently.
- ajmurmann 3y ago"For a bilingual child it's much more important for the name to sound the same that to be written the same." This feels like it will be annoying whenever someone asks for your name in order to write it down or when they are trying to read it. This happens a lot in a school context.
- OJFord 3y agoYou're only at school in one of the countries (at a time anyway) - pick the one that corresponds there? Of course only one of them is your 'actual' name anyway, the other is just by its existence making your name familiar and easy to pronounce. It having a different local spelling (if that's the case) doesn't have to matter or be annoying unless you decide it is. Anything where it's important obviously you make sure to get it right, as you would anyway.
- prpl 3y agoThis is my Wife’s dream, but it is usually never born out. Even simple names, like somebody mentioned Maria, can sound different enough to be annoying in the right parts of the country.
- MattGaiser 3y ago> For a bilingual child it's much more important for the name to sound the same that to be written the same. There are downsides to the different spellings. I have this issue within English. There are several ways to Matthew. If misspelled, it is usually Matthew. Occasionally, some spell it Mathieu. I hate to use phones for any kind of personal info transfer for this reason, as it has caused headaches everywhere from the bank to travel agents to charitable donations to even sharing my email.
- codegeek 3y agoAs a Bilingual person, the biggest thing I care about is a name that is in my language/culture but is easily pronounceable by others who have never heard of that name. Nothing wrong if it is tough to pronounce of course but as an American Citizen (Indian Origin), my wife and I named our kids keeping that in mind and we have a 95% success rate :) where non Indians can still pronounce it correctly.
- ajmurmann 3y ago> we have a 95% success rate You have twenty children, 19 of which have names that are easily pronounced by Americans?
- geraldwhen 3y agoAs someone with a never correctly pronounced name, it doesn’t bother me. You get over that quickly.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bradley13 3y agoInteresting idea - maybe gives you a starting point. However, you also need to consider pronunciation. Most likely you want a name that sounds fairly similar in both languages.
- PumpkinSpice 3y agoThis is actually a pretty interesting problem and the website doesn't do it full justice. Do you want the same spelling? That's easy, but the pronunciation is quite often completely different. A good example is Jules in French vs English. In this scenario, you're effectively going by two differently-pronounced names in all face-to-face interactions, not that different from the folks from China or India who are adopting "Westernized" names abroad. The only perk is that you might not have to spell it out over the phone. Do you want the same pronunciation? This is also fairly easy in many languages, but the spelling is likely to differ. An example of this might be Hannah versus Hana (English / Czech). This option makes verbal communications easy, but may confuse people who are trying to read your name out loud or to write it down - so any interactions with customer service are going to be mildly annoying. Do you want both? For most languages, the list will be extremely short, perhaps half a dozen names such as "Anna". If you don't fall in love in one of these options, tough luck. There is also a softer version of this goal: have a name that isn't native in the second language, but that is easy to spell and pronounce. For most people, this is probably the best compromise. It lets you keep your national identity, doesn't limit your choices too much, and minimizes friction.
- ant6n 3y agoFor my son, a half-German, half-Quebecer, we wanted same spelling in English/French/German but also similar pronunciation, but also native appearance, but also Chinese pronunceability for the grandparents. We ended up with Daniel.
- croisillon 3y agoeven in my country of origin most people are not sure how my (very regional) name is written or pronounced. living abroad, people are flumoxed my name is so weird
- riffraff 3y agoyou forgot the most interesting! same spelling and pronounciation, different gender! Gabriele and Andrea come to mind.
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- 01100011 3y agoDidn't seem very useful when I tried English and Vietnamese. It suggested a lot of words that aren't names in English. It's still interesting to me though. I have a daughter due in February and we're trying to come up with names now. My initial idea was to take the female name list that I downloaded from the US Census, and try to come up with a set of rules to screen out names that sound good with our family name and chosen middle name. For instance, our family name starts with a G, so i don't want to choose a name that also starts with G. I also don't want a name that rhymes or sounds silly with our family name.
- smeyer 3y agoOthers might care less about this than we did, but we were also thinking about popularity of names we were considering, including changes in popularity over time. There are names that feel very natural to me because they were common among my peers but that are actually pretty uncommon among children now and vice versa. For the US, I found it helpful (and fun) to download the social security data on frequency of names for each year, so that I could then plot the popularity of a given name over time. This was also helpful for considering how unisex a name is or isn't.
- TacticalCoder 3y agoGiving your kid a name that cannot be pronounced in many other cultures is a great reminder to these cultures that there's something else in the world than "insert culture which has trouble pronouncing that name". I've got a family with "all the colors" (my daughter's nieces/nephews are white, black and asian) and yet we picked a very french name, very hard to pronounce for native english speakers and native japanese speakers (we've got japanese family). And it's a conversation starter, for example: "It's easy: the sound 'ance' (part of my kid's name) is exactly the same as how french people pronounce the 'ance' in 'France'". People are curious. And they try to say it right. And they succeed very quickly. New school this year: two months in several teachers and kids can already pronounce the name correctly.
- layer8 3y agoIn my experience, the name just gets converted to whatever is the closest equivalent in the target language. Or gets horribly mangled if the two languages are different in phonetics and syllable repertoire, which they usually are.
- Spivak 3y agoYep which is why it's the smart play to make the spelling in the target language just whatever will make a speaker of said target language say it right. I've always considered my name to be the sound, the spelling is just an implementation detail.
- layer8 3y ago> make the spelling in the target language just whatever will make a speaker of said target language say it right. That’s often not possible, due to the differences in the phonetic repertoire of the respective languages.
- cycomanic 3y agoI can tell you that this is not always the case. I have a relatively old (and uncommon) German name and have many friends from English speaking countries who can't pronounce my name correctly even after knowing my for many years (it contains the German "ch" sound which most English speakers and several other languages struggle with). I can't count the number of pronunciations I have heard and I have largely given up except for the most extreme mispronouncations. It's fascinating what people make up when seeing an unfamiliar spelling, often it does not even resemble the straight-forward English pronunciations, which is straight forward although not really correct. I only encountered this as an adult and I'm not easily bothered, but I can imagine a kid or teenager feeling quite different about their name being a conversation starter after years of the same.
- ponector 3y agoThis says Karen is good English-Japanese name. To find a good name internationally recognized just open a Bible. Anna, Maria, etc. Some biblical names are different, though: Giovanni - John - Jan.
- spandextwins 3y ago[flagged]
- sho_hn 3y agoHaving just named our little Korean-German girl 8 days ago (we're doing great!), this page is not realized very well - the suggestions it comes up with are poor and wouldn't work. But how is it racist?
- spandextwins 3y agoIt asks for race then outputs stereotypical names for that race.
- seszett 3y agoIt asks for language only, unless we're talking about a different website.
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- cycomanic 3y agoHah, funny to see this here. When our daughters were born we were a French and German living in an English speaking country so we tried to make sure that the name works in 3 languages. Actually when we finally decided on a name for our first daughter (Tia) we chose a long form of the name (Tiahana) because my mother in law is half Spanish (Tia means Aunty in Spanish). Incidentally most of the names we considered don't seem to be on the list returned by this website (and we didn't go for very uncommon names). It seems the algorithm selects on names that exist in both languages (judging by the graphic in the results). I'd argue that's often not really what you want, as they might sound very different.
- esafak 3y agoThanks for the laugh! It suggested using Elle as a Turkish-compatible English name for girls. It is the imperative for "grope". I ought to contact them to add an English-compatible Turkish girls' name: Semen. (From Yasemin, or Jasmine.)
- OJFord 3y agoI don't think avoiding things like that is a goal though, it explicitly warns you too to do further research including checking that at the bottom. But that's the easy bit right, there's already tools (e.g. Google Translate) for that.
- resolutebat 3y agoSemen is a reasonably common if unfortunate transcription of the common Russian male name Semyon (Семён).
- dieselgate 3y agoYeah it's reasonably common and unfortunate for people to have to deal with but is not really an issue or funny for me personally. Am close with a mixed race family in the USA and the dad's last name is spelled very similarly to Semen and they ended up just changing it to Simon. I get it but also find it kind of sad. But people have been making variations of names for a long time for things like this.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> the common Russian male name Semyon (Семён) Something that I wonder about is when Russian "e" gets transcribed "e" and when it gets transcribed "ye". They both happen and there doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason. All other iotated vowels are consistently transcribed with leading Y. I am pretty sure that in most cases where the vowel is transcribed "e", it's still iotated and should have been transcribed as "ye". But I'm not completely sure. Is there a rule that frequently reduces e to э? I note that the English-language wiktionary entry for Семён indicates that the е is iotated. :/
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- Scoundreller 3y agoAs the born and raised local, I enjoyed it when colleagues would run by ethnic names under consideration for their kids when trying to do a bilingual name. That’s real trust. Also have no idea why how/why a few Canadian-Italian families named their daughters “Andrea” which is traditionally a male name in Italy.
- williamdclt 3y agoI’ve seen men and women named Andrea in France, maybe more women actually
- seszett 3y agoThat's really not common, the French versions are André for a man and Andrée for a woman (same pronunciation).
- dfxm12 3y agoAnd there's a quite famous Italian man named Andrea at that! On the other hand, there's a pretty famous Canadian woman named Andrea as well...
- user_7832 3y agoWhile this website seems great in theory, finding English-Hindi or English-Bangla names is a lost cause (especially masculine). I'm not sure how it "finds" the results but the names appear to be of either language and not "common" to both.
- petre 3y agoIt attempts to solve a naming problem using a dataset and algorithms, failing miserably. "There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors."
- constantly 3y agoThe key is to use descriptive names. I’m naming my child conceived_january_22_on_a_snowy_day_after_too_much_wine.
- lucb1e 3y ago"using a dataset and algorithms" is a lot of fancy words for ctrl+f At least, I have no indication that it does more than just find which items in list A also occur in list B. This text on the results page also hints at that: "All of the suggested [language_A]-[language_B] names on this page are matched solely on their written form"
- nicoburns 3y agoYou might at least be able to find a name that is easily pronounced in both languages. For example I have a friend called Pavit, which is not an english name. But is nevertheless easy for english people to say.
- OJFord 3y agoNot if they're reading it on their own though? I'm English but learning Hindi, so I know to pronounce it 'puh-vit' as it were, but 'naturally' (or however many years since I started learning ago) I would read/say it like पैवित almost, you know, short English 'a'.
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- samyar 3y agoAdd Kurdish to the names
- throwaway7361 3y ago[dead]
- lucb1e 3y agoThere's contact info on the homepage if you want to contribute a list
- giorgioz 3y agoIt does not seem to work very well for Italian-French names. I'm Italian and my partner is French and we searched for names that would be identical for Italian and French. We did it manually and the trick is for each partner to look at names of the other language and write down the ones that are the same in theirs. For example I'm Italian and so I read a list of French names and could easily spot the ones that are identical in Italian too. Also my partner who is French red a list names in Italian and could easily spot the ones that are identical in French.
- croisillon 3y agohoping you didn't end up choosing daniele or michele ;)
- giorgioz 3y agoeheh luckily I knew the gender ambiguity of Italian names ending in A/E (Andrea/Luca/Daniele/Michele) compounded by the fact that in French male and female names can end in e. In Italy most female names end in A and most male name end in O (with some exceptions we mentioned). It's very easy to find female Italian-French-English names because also in English and French some female name end in A/E. So we found a lot of options for Italian-French female names. Male names were more of a challenge since almost no French male name end in O.
- croisillon 3y agoBruno, Leo, H/Ugo... although a lot of french kids receive Italian names like Enzo or Matteo
- achanda358 3y agoDoes not work well for Bengali-English names. Some of the Bengali words are way too informal, or borderline cuss words.
- Kwpolska 3y agoI tried it for English and Polish and the results seem quite mediocre. It gave me some names that are misspellings in Polish (like Carolina, Joanne, Veronica; those would typically be spelled Karolina, Joanna, Weronika, but bad parents can of course pick the wrong spellings). And some names don't feel very English to me.
- AYBABTME 3y agoI tried with French/Korean and it yielded nothing. However we have two kids and gave them similar-ish sounding names that are both common/hard to mistake/unambiguous in each languages: - Mireille / 미래 (Mirea/Milea) - Sarah / 사랑 (Sarang/Salang) I think this website isn't as capable or imaginative as it would look.
- polotics 3y agoSeriously? This looks pretty random: "Arleigh" is in the list of English-German names...
- Ingaz 3y agoI once worked with a man of Bashkir-Estonian descent. His name is Aivar which I suspect is bilingual: - it sounds Turkic ("ai" is "moon" iirc) - on the other hand there are mentions of Aivor/Aivar from Scandinavia and so on I tried mixednames.com but Bashkir or Tatar are not available
- jkrems 3y agoThe dataset seems pretty unreliable. For example this page claims both that "Kai" isn't a name used in German: https://mixedname.com/name/kai https://mixedname.com/name/kai. But then half of the "celebrities named Kai" are... German. I wonder what the source for the names is. Kai is #289 in at least one list of the most popular names given to German kids in 2022: https://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/jahrgang/j2022/top-500-2022 https://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/jahrgang/j2022/top-500-2022. So I'm surprised that it wouldn't show up in a list of >1000 "German" names.
- trumpeta 3y agoGreat! Now do trilingual!
- LAC-Tech 3y agoAlways worth remembering that there's no law that you have to use the same first name that's on your birth certificate. You can introduce yourself to people as whatever you want and people will call you that, they won't ask for ID. So you might as well choose the official name name that the average bureaucrat in your jurisdiction is unlikely to misspell, and use other name(s) in different cultural or linguistic contexts.
- vintermann 3y agoYes. It was common to translate names in the past. There wasn't this same idea that you had one fixed, official name either (admittedly, that became a tendency early in western Europe). If going by different names in different contexts makes things easier for the people you care about, why should it matter that it makes things harder for some distant bureaucrat?
- Hasnep 3y agoWhile that's true, there are situations where it can backfire. For example, I've had people send packages to me using the name everyone calls me, but when I go to pick it up at the post office, it doesn't match the name on my ID.
- HorizonXP 3y agoMy legal first name is Xitij. Everyone knows me as Ritesh. It does not appear on any of my identification. I've dealt with this for 38 years.
- Hasnep 3y agoI agree it's not really a problem, if it was I would ask people to call me by my legal name or change my legal name to my preferred name.
- OJFord 3y agoHow do you resolve the post office issue then, just out of curiosity? Show them a chat on your phone where people are calling you the written name or something? And the address should match still so actually why do they care anyway?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- brnt 3y agoNow do trilingual, or arbitrarily multilingual. We are Dutch and Polish, met in France, converse in (mostly) English, and worked in a few more, and now live somewhere with a dialect that only our oldest commands. Double checking meaning and pronouncability involved at least four languages for us, and it wasnt easy, especially when you are nonnative! In Europe, this is not that special, and in many other places neither. So many countries have people that speak a few natively.
- lucb1e 3y agoDutch and German, met in Belgium, converse in exclusively English. I was also very much missing the tri+lingual option! The site clearly has comparison data between all languages if you scroll down on the homepage. Feels similar to the results page between two languages, where it'll say "I've got 1234 names for Dutch and 2345 names for German" in a nice venn diagram, but then omits the most interesting information of how many names it found shared between the two! (The answer, btw, was 402. You can copy and paste them to an editor with line numbers.)
- santiagobasulto 3y agoTrue. Most Latin names are gonna work in several languages + English. For example, Amalia. As far as I know it works in English, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. In French there’s a small variation to Amelie (still pretty close).
- slater 3y agoHow is "Fitzhugh" considered a German name?
- throwaway7361 3y ago[dead]
- adelie 3y agothese results are absolutely hilarious for chinese, where names are almost entirely freeform, gender is determined by character choice (not sound), and there's only a limited set of suffixes to choose from in the first place. i think these are probably scraped from historical figures, since i see some very recognizable ones (i.e. enlai, zedong, jianguo), but there's also a data integrity issue because a lot of the masculine chinese names show up with , or £ in them.
- realusername 3y agoThe idea is okay but the dataset is way too small to make it work, only 130 names in French or Vietnamese for example while 5k in English
- victorbjorklund 3y agoThat is a pretty good idea!
- hirenj 3y agoI had a go at something like this when my kids were born. We were after names that could be pronounced in both Danish and Gujarati. After grabbing name lists from various websites, I generated phonetic translations of each name, and then looked at the names that had the shortest edit distances in the phonetic representation between both languages. It was a great exercise in taping bits of software together, and I ended up coming down to a shortlist of 7 names. I very proudly showed this list to my wife, and she showed me her list of names that she had written down. Turns out two of the names were on both the lists, so we went with them. I have a feeling that it wasn’t so important that they were on my lists.
- therealdrag0 3y agoUp for pushing your scripts to GitHub to share. I’d be interested in trying it out.
- magicalhippo 3y agoA friend of the family was half-Norwegian and half-Kiwi. He was born in Norway and his parents named him Bernt, a common Norwegian name. When they moved to New Zealand, he quickly found that his name was pronounced "burnt", and after some time decided to change his name to Brent. Many years later he moved back to Norway, and quickly realized "brent" is Norwegian for "burnt"...
- andrelaszlo 3y agoNorway and their odd names... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_(name)#See_also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_(name)#See_also
- jgilias 3y agoIt’s a bit hard to believe though that the parents wouldn’t have realized how the name sounds like in their respective native languages.
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- cyberax 3y agoUgh. English <-> Mandarin names are just a mess. Most of the suggestions can't even be expressed phonetically in Mandarin. English <-> Russian is much better, but it misses the mark a lot. It also offers a lot of names that are too informal (e.g. Tanya is an informal variant of Tatiana).
- transreal 3y agoI’m Indian and I’ve got a name that’s super common in both Arabic & Hindi, almost everyone I meet from the Arab world comments on it, but it didn’t show when I chose those 2 languages.
- lucb1e 3y agoDon't get sidetracked by the call-to-action inputs, scroll down for what is, for me, the most interesting part! (Feedback if the author is here: can't link to a section!) In a div with the class top_names (there's no ID or a[name]), it shows the names that occur in most languages: Sara and Maria (21 languages) and Adam and Daniel (18 languages). There's also second and third places with 19, 18, and 17, 16 languages for female and male, respectively. There's also this near the bottom, leftover testing or just seeing if anyone notices? <script>document.write("hello");</script> Edit: from the author's website "I used to run a subscription box called Candy Japan". Oh, it's that guy! To me this feels like an HN celebrity though I have no idea whether it's just me who remembers seeing that on HN. (I'm not actually interested in Japanese candy, for the record.)
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- jrflowers 3y agoIt seems somewhat dubious to call a baby bilingual. Most of them can’t speak a single language let alone two.
- stevekemp 3y agoWhile you jest it is true that babies, and small toddlers, can understand a lot of words even before they can speak. We experimented with sign-language for a while, for our child, and he understood a few gestures at a very young age. Similarly he understood words like "walk", "bed", and "food" in two languages while very young.
- ic_fly2 3y agoReminds me of a Russian guy I knew called anus. The site misses the mark. Either the cultures share the bible in which case most biblical names are game, or they don’t in which case a phonetic similarity match is the way forward.
- meitham 3y agoNice idea but I question the correctness of the data. Looking at Arabic-English names, I see Damian, Daniel and Tobias! These are definitely not Arabic names, but there has been a recent trend among Arabs living in Europe to take on European names, but that pretty much extends to every other English name! It doesn’t mean these have now become valid Arabic names.
- zymhan 3y agoI also checked for Arabic-English names, and my name is almost identical in both languages, but it's not on the list either. It's a cool concept, but I think it's needs more humans reviewing the data.
- tokai 3y agoDaniel and Tobias are semitic names popularized in europe by christianity. Damian is a greek name used in the Levant for thousands of years. They are at least as valid as Arabic names as English names, if not even more.
- meitham 3y agoArabic isn’t the only Semitic language, you also have Hebrew and Aramaic, and many extinct languages such as Akkadian. Not every Semitic name can be considered valid in Arabic, Nebuchadnezzar is an example.
- beAbU 3y agoDaniel is literally a book in the christian bible. The very same Daniel features in a few islam writings as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_in_Islam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_in_Islam
- meitham 3y agoIslam and Arabic largely overlap but not every Islamic name is valid in Arabic. Given Daniel has a shrine in Iran it might be a valid name in Farsi. There’re biblical names in Arabic but they sound very different in Arabic than in Europe, largely as European used the Hebrew version. Abraham in Arabic is Ibrahim, Moses is Musa, Jesus is I’sa…
- jl6 3y agoIs there something like the opposite of this, that allows you to find names that don’t have meanings in any other language? Specifically, names that don’t have rude or controversial meanings.
- PumpkinSpice 3y agoThat's gonna be tough with phonetics across several thousand languages... not to mention regional slang and other subculture stuff. I think the surest bet is just to avoid short names. If it's four or five letters, the likelihood of a collision is high. Stuff like Josephine, Gabriella, or Nathaniel is probably pretty safe. Most of these are commonly shortened and then you're back in the danger zone, but then, at least you have the option of reverting to the long form without jumping through any legal hoops.
- EugeneOZ 3y agoEmma is marked as a name not being used in Catalonia, but in fact, it has been the most popular name for newborn girls here since 2018, every year.
- renke1 3y agoMy own name is actually only used in the very country I live in. Unexpectedly, my daughter's name is apparently also used in Arabic countries, it means something like "Gift from Allah".
- thaumasiotes 3y ago"Gift of god" is a pretty common name cross culturally. [Allah is not a name; it's just the ordinary word meaning "god".] The Hebrew version is Nathaniel [rather, that's the Anglicized form of the Hebrew version]; is your daughter's name similar?
- fsckboy 3y agothe Hebrew "gift of God" is (also?) Matityahu --> Matthew (and why Matthew has two T's)
- thaumasiotes 3y agoMatthew includes the name YHWH as opposed to the ordinary word referring to any god (el). It would be more analogous to the many Greek names along the lines of Apollodorus / Diodorus / Asclepiodorus. This makes it unlikely to have an Arabic cognate. It also appears to be based off a nounal stem "gift" as opposed to a verbal stem "give". But yes, it appears to be a fundamentally similar name. There are more; Jonathan combines the explicit YHWH reference with the verbal stem of Nathaniel. https://www.behindthename.com/name/nathanael https://www.behindthename.com/name/nathanael https://www.behindthename.com/name/matthew https://www.behindthename.com/name/matthew https://www.behindthename.com/name/theodore https://www.behindthename.com/name/theodore https://www.behindthename.com/name/dieudonne10 https://www.behindthename.com/name/dieudonne10
- freetime2 3y agoFirst suggestion I got for English/Japanese masculine names was “Hide”. That doesn’t strike me as a very common name in English. And the Japanese pronunciation (he-day) would constantly be mispronounced by English speakers who would read it like “hide”.
- schroeding 3y agoYeah, the data isn't super clean. English-German suggests "Abigail" - which just straight up isn't a German name at all.
- vintermann 3y agoIt's an old Hebrew name, so anywhere Abraham, Josef, Sara or Rebekka appears, you may (rarely) run into it, too. A way to tell your neighbours, "I really know my obscure biblical characters".
- keiferski 3y agoIn practice, what happens in many cases is that you have a separate name for each place. For example, your English passport will say “John” but your Polish one will say “Jan.” The Polish one won’t actually let you have the name “John”, or at least it will be translated by default. So it isn’t always necessary to have a single name that can translate into X languages, but that there is a version of the name in the languages you care about.
- p1esk 3y agoAlmost completely wrong for English-Russian names.
- RandomWorker 3y agoWent to Dutch and Chinese. But only one match on feminine and non on masculine. Sad for me!
- andrelaszlo 3y agoI would hold off on naming your son Adolph if you're going for a name that works in both English and Swedish... It's a name, sure, but it kind of fell out of fashion. Statistics Sweden are publishing some statistics: > 131 men have Adolf as a first name normally used > The average age for the name Adolf is 74 years amongst men https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/sverige-i-siffror/namesearch/Search?nameSearchInput=Adolf https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/sverige-i-siffror/n...
- arran-nz 3y agoRelevant Art House movie about this particular name: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt7477310/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt7477310/
- titanomachy 3y agoI wonder if we’d have seen a similar effect if Hitler had had a common English name like “Max” or something. Would there be almost no Maxes today in either the Anglo- or Germanospheres? Or was “Adolf” already a rare enough name that the association between the name and Hitler became unavoidable?
- frozenlettuce 3y ago"Gloria" spans multiple European languages (with some having an "ó", but mostly recognizable)
- bedobi 3y agoDon’t mean to be uncharitable but all the examples of “bilingual” names in European languages aren’t that impressive. Names shared across language families are way cooler!
- ivanjermakov 3y agoI went through the list and want to say that I've never heard a third of these names in the selected language. Not sure what data source it uses, but I suggest double checking before deciding a baby name.
- silvestrov 3y agoData for Danish is absolute garbage. It says 18835 names for Danish compared to 410 for Norwegian. The Danish and Norwegian languages and names are extremly similar. Most of the names listed for Danish/English combo does not make any sense in Denmark.
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- gumby 3y agoIt's hard enough finding names that people can pronounce, much less are literally cross-language. We just thought of names that various family members could pronounce, throwing out "impossible" sounds until we ended up with only single syllable names. It works.
- gramie 3y agoThis would have made things easy for us in 1997, when we were deciding on a boy's name that would be recognizable in English and Japanese. In the end, we settled on a variation of "Ken", which is the one recommended by this site anyway! We struggled a lot more with our second son....
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- Tade0 3y agoI'm seeing names that use letters either not present in my language or pronounced differently (like Veronica - the local spelling is Weronika).
- parentheses 3y agoThis is a nice idea. I want to call out that I really like how the names are grouped by how they relate with each parent's heritage.
- rvba 3y agoIt is sad when parents give rheir children English sounding names like Kewin or Dżesika. I think Nordics have "Hary" with one "r". USA has a problem of names with terrible non standard spellings. One of the Freakonomics books explaind how trashy names make a child's life miserable. Even reduce job prospects.
- neontomo 3y agoMy parents, who are not religious, gave all my siblings and me biblical names because they work in many countries and languages (not just western). Although, I wouldn't recommend Beelzebub.
- joduplessis 3y agoThis is actually something I can relate to. Over the years, I've opted to shorten my name to something more "english" (I'm Afrikaans), simply because it's easier for the people around me - and also because hearing the same jokes & mispronunciations a thousand times becomes tiring. Ironically, living in Germany for a bit quickly taught me it's not always the case.
- HorizonXP 3y agoI had to solve this problem too. For my first son, it wasn't that easy, it was many hours of Google searching, only to be "thwarted" by my wife's off-hand suggestion that actually worked out well. For my second son, I used ChatGPT to help. It nailed it. https://twitter.com/xitijpatel/status/1656088692899848198 https://twitter.com/xitijpatel/status/1656088692899848198
- cafard 3y agoNeighbors tried this. They settled on a name that is uncommon in their native lands, and which they supposed was pronounced the same way in their cradle tongues. Perhaps it is supposed to be pronounced the same way, but his family gives the first vowel a different sound.
- aikinai 3y agoYou’re supposed to test before shipping.
- verst 3y agoI like the concept of this website but this data seems very wrong. Take a look at English and German female names. Abigail is not a German name. Or take a look at Chinese and English names. Park is not Chinese...
- dudeinjapan 3y agoHe made this site because he wanted to find a Japanese-Finnish bilingual name… many Finnish surnames already sound vaguely Japanese (Raikkonnen, Suutari, Makinen, Harju)
- BrandiATMuhkuh 3y agoWe came across the same problem. We look for a male name that works for Male + Arabic + English + German and must not have special characters. We chose Josef. Interestingly the webpage doesn't show Josef. Most likely because they don't steming when doing the comparison