Great response! I forgot to mention that we struggled much more with cognate names that that were more linguistically distant than within ones that were closer

Great response! I forgot to mention that we struggled much more with cognate names that that were more linguistically distant than within ones that were closer. e.g. Matthew, Mattieu were likely to be within the same lexical set, but Matityahu may have been a bit to far for us. It's interesting how some names tend to have more conserved features than others as they transit across larger distances in terms of language families. I worked later in genetics and was able to reapply many of the learning from names into gene sequences. I used to test our own software with my given name. It's rather common, but our ruleset would produce some rather wild variations of it. We thought it was an error, but it turned out to be a completely valid name in Finnish!