I was quite young when I heard this so didn't think to ask. I guess if you live long enough in a different country and don't think about returning, these things might not be at the top of your head. The initial name was after a great-grandparent.
This is actually a pretty interesting problem and the website doesn't do it full justice.
Do you want the same spelling? That's easy, but the pronunciation is quite often completely different. A good example is Jules in French vs English. In this scenario, you're effectively going by two differently-pronounced names in all face-to-face interactions, not that different from the folks from China or India who are adopting "Westernized" names abroad. The only perk is that you might not have to spell it out over the phone.
Do you want the same pronunciation? This is also fairly easy in many languages, but the spelling is likely to differ. An example of this might be Hannah versus Hana (English / Czech). This option makes verbal communications easy, but may confuse people who are trying to read your name out loud or to write it down - so any interactions with customer service are going to be mildly annoying.
Do you want both? For most languages, the list will be extremely short, perhaps half a dozen names such as "Anna". If you don't fall in love in one of these options, tough luck.
There is also a softer version of this goal: have a name that isn't native in the second language, but that is easy to spell and pronounce. For most people, this is probably the best compromise. It lets you keep your national identity, doesn't limit your choices too much, and minimizes friction.
Don’t see the problem with different pronunciations… I have a first name like Jules, I like it… indeed depending on whether people are French or English speaking they pronounce it differently—but that doesn’t bother me at all! It still feels very much like they are referring to me, and it feels like two versions of the same name, not two names.
None of this is a problem in any objective sense. It's just that if your goal is to use one name across two languages, it's not exactly what you get in this scenario.
Stuff like that doesn't bother me at all, but I bumped into quite a few immigrants who had strong preferences one way or the other.
I perceive my name to be how it is pronounced, with writing being secondary. Interesting that others see it the opposite way. Maybe related: I remember stuff best when it's spoken, whereas apparently most people learn best when they read it or hear+write_along. I'm not dyslexic so it's not that I don't read well or anything, but still, audio seems to be my brain-compatible format.
When someone says luke, yeah I'll get it and I definitely don't mind, but IPA /lyk/ or French Luc is what my name is. Apparently the /y/ sound just doesn't exist in most languages I interact with and that makes it impossible for virtually any non-French/Dutch person to pronounce it properly. I don't fault them, I don't mind, but I appreciate if someone makes an effort (even if it's wrong, it's only about trying) to call me by my name rather than by a translation thereof.
(Edit: wtf, don't trust tools like http://ipa-reader.xyz that is near the top of search results. The default american voice pronounces /y/ like the "o" in "who". What's the point of IPA reader if you're going to pronounce an A like a B when your language doesn't have the A sound?! Accent is fine but don't change the sound to a different IPA character altogether... For the symbols /lyk/, I've tested all voices: Dutch, French (+Canadian), Icelandic, German, Norwegian, Turkish, and Swedish are correct, whereas English, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese incorrectly read the IPA. Some others are glitchy or mixed results between male/female voices.)
> I perceive my name to be how it is pronounced, with writing being secondary.
> When someone says luke, yeah I'll get it and I definitely don't mind, but IPA /lyk/ or French Luc is what my name is. Apparently the /y/ sound just doesn't exist in most languages I interact with and that makes it impossible for virtually any non-French/Dutch person to pronounce it properly.
The consonant at the end of my name makes it impossible for many people to pronounce it correctly. You would have a similar problem; a Mandarin speaker would have no difficulty producing /ly/, but in the best case your full name would come out in two syllables as /ly.kɤ/.
If it's any consolation, the original form of the name had /u/, and the French /y/ is a later historical development internal to French. ;D
> Edit: wtf, don't trust tools like http://ipa-reader.xyz that is near the top of search results. The default american voice pronounces /y/ like the "o" in "who". What's the point of IPA reader if you're going to pronounce an A like a B when your language doesn't have the A sound?! Accent is fine but don't change the sound to a different IPA character altogether...
I'm guessing the goal is to reproduce an accent, but if the natural language doesn't have the IPA in its phonology, then it's going to be mapped to the nearest representation. English doesn't distinguish between /y/ and /u/, so a native English speaker being asked to reproduce a /y/ sound (especially in running speech where you're not thinking about how to pronounce the sound in particular) is likely to end up with something near /u/ anyways.
For an IPA-to-sound converter, if the chosen voice doesn't have the sound that the user is asking it to render, it should: either throw an error, find an English speaker that can, or synthesise the sound altogether.
Giving you flat-out the wrong sound (not an accented rendition) should not be default behavior. There could be an option for rendering "how would an american approximate/recreate this sound after I sounded it out to them", but that's a different tool and not an IPA-to-sound converter.
I know exactly how Luc is pronounced in French, but I wouldn’t do so (unless we were speaking French) because it sounds weird to use non-English sounds in English.
Btw, this sound also exists in German and is spelled “y”. If you meet a German and want them to say your name in your preferred way, tell them to imagine it’s spelled “Lyk”.
German has the sound indeed, it's just one swapped symbol (and probably an unusual character combination/sequence), that's why I feel like they ought to be able to easily. Usually it's written ü though (ironically, in IPA /ü/ sounds like the german u without umlaut!), but they tend to forget what the pronunciation was even if we speak somewhat regularly. It's just foreign to them, I can understand ^^. Got one south african colleague who does it perfectly every time, native english speaker so it surprised me a lot (they're the only one so far) but probably due to afrikaans as second language it just clicks for them.
Lyk is an interesting option I should try with germans. It makes the vowel sound a bit too 'short' but it's very close indeed. Let's see what results that gets compared to Lüc :)
I agree with your take that the spoken version of my name is what I identify with most, not the written one. This is maybe a little more relevant to people that have names from languages with non-Latin alphabets or with Latin characters that use different sounds than in English. (Sz in Polish for example.)
> the list will be extremely short, perhaps half a dozen names such as "Anna".
Even shorter, if the languages include Brazilian Portuguese: "Ana".
(Source: In a research poster/demo session in the US, I'd named one of the example characters as "Ana", since I was recently interested in Brazil, and had been seeing that name. One of the people who saw the poster/demo wasn't a native English speaker, but they made an effort to kindly and gently point out the spelling error, with a smile, as if they were trying to save me from the additional embarrassment of showing the error any longer. I thanked them, and didn't tell them.)
> 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).
> Do you want both? For most languages, the list will be extremely short, perhaps half a dozen names such as "Anna".
As a sanity check, I looked up wikipedia's page on Czech phonology, which indicates that the vowel [æ] does not exist in Czech. That by itself will absolutely prevent the English names Hannah /'hænə/ or Anna /'ænə/ from matching any possible Czech pronunciation.
I'm kind of curious how you came up with the examples.
(Ali is a name that will transfer well across many languages.)
> 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.
People can overlook what I consider stupid obvious requirements in this kind of scenario. I knew a Chinese girl who used the English name Cynthia. It's a perfectly respectable English name; the only problem was that she was completely unable to pronounce "Cynthia", making it a challenge for her to communicate her own name to English speakers.
I don't understand why Chinese speakers don't put more [any] emphasis on using names that they are themselves able to pronounce, like Tina or Julie.
> don't understand why Chinese speakers don't put more [any] emphasis on using names that they are themselves able to pronounce, like Tina or Julie.
Some are assigned an English name by their first English teacher in school. This English teacher themselves may not really be able to speak English (e.g. this is the case for more than one person in my family). By the time they figure out otherwise, it's kinda stuck/habit.
The Spanish woman’s name Andrea and the Italian men’s name Andrea are pronounced the same, I think. It’s only the English approximation that’s pronounced differently.
There are two different pronunciations for Andrea in English. The one that's _not_ like Spanish or Italian is maybe a bit more common, but I've met people with both.
For 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.
Yes, this is a hard problem given different pronunciations etc. We actually looked for a tri-lingual name for our kids, English Hebrew and Spanish. Luckily the Hebrew alphabet is different so that wasn't a problem in terms of spelling, but we had a lot of discussions around how to spell names that have different spellings in English vs. Spanish.
We went with names that are not native-Hebrew, but are easy to pronounce in all three languages.
My wife and I wanted to give our son a name that would intuitively be pronounced the same by both sides of the family (who speak respectively Brazilian Portuguese and Dutch). Turns out that really does limit your options a lot (aside from the perennial names with Greek/Hebrew/biblical roots).
We had the same problem, and in the end failed. The pronunciation of E, R and I, even though similar to my ears, turns out to be quite different to the native speakers of both languages.
even in my country of origin most people are not sure how my (very regional) name is written or pronounced. living abroad, people are flumoxed my name is so weird
Nice idea but I question the correctness of the data. Looking at Arabic-English names, I see Damian, Daniel and Tobias! These are definitely not Arabic names, but there has been a recent trend among Arabs living in Europe to take on European names, but that pretty much extends to every other English name! It doesn’t mean these have now become valid Arabic names.
Islam 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…
Yeah, I tried English and Hungarian. Hungarian names traditionally come from a very short list, and are quite unique spellings. Almost 90% of the results were English names only and definitely not Hungarian. The remaining 10% might be considered Hungarian names, like Adam or Peter but in Hungarian spelling should be Ádám or Péter.
Daniel and Tobias are semitic names popularized in europe by christianity. Damian is a greek name used in the Levant for thousands of years. They are at least as valid as Arabic names as English names, if not even more.
Arabic 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.
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.
Dutch and German, met in Belgium, converse in exclusively English. I was also very much missing the tri+lingual option!
The site clearly has comparison data between all languages if you scroll down on the homepage. Feels similar to the results page between two languages, where it'll say "I've got 1234 names for Dutch and 2345 names for German" in a nice venn diagram, but then omits the most interesting information of how many names it found shared between the two! (The answer, btw, was 402. You can copy and paste them to an editor with line numbers.)
True. 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).
Yeah it's reasonably common and unfortunate for people to have to deal with but is not really an issue or funny for me personally.
Am close with a mixed race family in the USA and the dad's last name is spelled very similarly to Semen and they ended up just changing it to Simon. I get it but also find it kind of sad.
But people have been making variations of names for a long time for things like this.
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. :/
The problem is that in Russian the letter ё is used inconsistently. It's treated like a semi-optional letter. Most publications targeting adult readers use it only when needed for disambiguation (like узнаем vs. узнаём) or for foreign names. Children's books, dictionaries, the Russian Wikipedia, and writers who are big fans of ё for whatever reason use it throughout the text. And as for official documents, the rules have changed over time, so in effect there is no consistency, which sometimes causes problems in official paperwork and judicial cases.
A translator from Russian to English who feels that ё is not a real letter may transcribe it as ye or e; if he likes ё or wants to be faithful to Russian phonetics, he will write yo. Few are the translators who will consider avoiding an English reader's confusion as a goal.
But I wasn't asking about how ё gets transcribed. I was asking about how the Cyrillic letter е, from the first half of Семён, gets transcribed. Why write Semyon instead of Syemyon? Why Lena instead of Lyena? Why nyet instead of net? Why Yekaterina sometimes and Ekaterina other times?
The problem is that the Russian letter е denotes multiple possible sound patterns:
1. [je] if stressed (or [ɪ̯ɪ] if unstressed) at the beginning of a syllable
2. in the middle of a syllable, it usually indicates the palatalization or softening of the preceding consonant (the softening in Russian is phonemic and can change the word's meaning; also, a few consonants are exceptional and non-softenable, except possibly in a small number of further exceptions) which is followed by the [e] vowel if the syllable is stressed or [ɪ] if unstressed
3. but in some words, in the middle of the syllable it indicates the vowel [ɛ] and does not change the preceding consonant (i.e. it's pronounced exactly like э)
So how do you represent this when transcribing into the Latin alphabet in a way that more-or-less reflects both the original Russian spelling and original Russian pronunciation?
The typical solution is to transcribe case 1 as "ye" and cases 2 and 3 as "e", which is both not quite accurate and not consistent with how other Russian vowels are transcribed, but is "good enough" on balance. Or you can use "ye" for both case 1 and 2, and "e" for 3; this is how you get "nyet", and that particular transcription of "нет" has become traditional - since it avoids ambiguity with the English "net". Linguistic and academic publications of course have more complex schemes.
> it usually indicates the palatalization or softening of the preceding consonant
This is another area where I think something strange is going on between the traditional terminology and the reality.
So, I read (without direct personal experience) that Spanish speakers feel strongly that there is a real difference between "ñ", the Spanish spelling of a palatal nasal stop, and "ny", which would be the spelling of an ordinary dental/alveolar nasal stop that just happens to be followed by a palatal glide.
A doubter might suspect that "ny" would be reduced to "ñ" in fluent speech. In either case, this is not a difference that an English speaker can hear.
I watched a series of "learn Russian" videos on youtube, from a native Russian, and her example of consonant softening was to draw a contrast between the English words "beauty" (with 'soft B') and "booty" (with 'hard B'). But this is much less ambiguous than the case of Spanish ñ - there is no possible way that the place of articulation of the /b/ gets drawn back to the hard palate. That would sound nothing like a /b/. It seems mandatory, to me, to analyze what is called a "soft B" as being an ordinary /b/ with following or partially coarticulated /j/. [This suggests an obvious followup question: is it possible for a Russian word to end in "вь"?]
So it seems more natural to me to say that "е" always includes a /j/ before the vowel, and that /j/ may combine with a preceding consonant to produce a palatalized consonant, if that preceding consonant allows. This analysis would be greatly strengthened if the /j/ continued to be present in words where a letter "е" was preceded by the hard sign, but I don't know enough to provide an example of that or to say that it can't happen. [Actually, that particular analysis would fail in that case, but it would strongly suggest a new analysis in which "e" is always a two-phoneme sequence /je/, and the preceding consonant is completely independent of the glide, but consonants that are already palatalized may absorb the glide, such that there is an automatic reduction of тье -> тьз.]
> but in some words, in the middle of the syllable it indicates the vowel [ɛ] and does not change the preceding consonant
Does this happen with preceding consonants that are not inherently soft? e.g. my understanding is that ш is hard while щ is soft (and the sounds are otherwise equivalent) - on this analysis, ще would involve no change to the consonant because the change is already baked in to the spelling, and ше would be more or less nonsensical.
> So how do you represent this when transcribing into the Latin alphabet in a way that more-or-less reflects both the original Russian spelling and original Russian pronunciation?
I don't think this statement of the goal can explain why it's standard to transcribe the name as "Lena". That fails to reflect the spelling, which in Russian uses "е", and it also fails to reflect the pronunciation, which is not equivalent to Лъэна. When the spelling calls for some kind of palatalization, and the pronunciation involves some kind of palatalization, how do we get a transcription that calls for no palatalization?
And as you note:
> which is both not quite accurate and not consistent with how other Russian vowels are transcribed
Why is the transcription of е so different from the transcriptions of я and ю? What goal is that serving?
> add dictionary definitions ... to help avoid these issues
It doesn't give definitions, but it kinda already does that by showing you it's a word in the other language (rather than just a name), so you know you'd better look it up before use.
I would hold off on naming your son Adolph if you're going for a name that works in both English and Swedish... It's a name, sure, but it kind of fell out of fashion.
Statistics Sweden are publishing some statistics:
> 131 men have Adolf as a first name normally used
> The average age for the name Adolf is 74 years amongst men
I 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?
As a Bilingual person, the biggest thing I care about is a name that is in my language/culture but is easily pronounceable by others who have never heard of that name. Nothing wrong if it is tough to pronounce of course but as an American Citizen (Indian Origin), my wife and I named our kids keeping that in mind and we have a 95% success rate :) where non Indians can still pronounce it correctly.
Don't get sidetracked by the call-to-action inputs, scroll down for what is, for me, the most interesting part!
(Feedback if the author is here: can't link to a section!)
In a div with the class top_names (there's no ID or a[name]), it shows the names that occur in most languages: Sara and Maria (21 languages) and Adam and Daniel (18 languages). There's also second and third places with 19, 18, and 17, 16 languages for female and male, respectively.
There's also this near the bottom, leftover testing or just seeing if anyone notices?
<script>document.write("hello");</script>
Edit: from the author's website "I used to run a subscription box called Candy Japan". Oh, it's that guy! To me this feels like an HN celebrity though I have no idea whether it's just me who remembers seeing that on HN. (I'm not actually interested in Japanese candy, for the record.)
Always worth remembering that there's no law that you have to use the same first name that's on your birth certificate. You can introduce yourself to people as whatever you want and people will call you that, they won't ask for ID.
So you might as well choose the official name name that the average bureaucrat in your jurisdiction is unlikely to misspell, and use other name(s) in different cultural or linguistic contexts.
Yes. 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?
While 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.
How 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?
It is very rare that anyone truly cares. I’ve only had this be a real issue with flights when someone uses my preferred name even though I tell them not to, and it inconveniences me while I try to fix it.
Most people get it when I tell them, “no one calls me Xitij, it’s impossible to pronounce.”
My legal name is close enough to my preferred name and my surname is pretty unique in the UK, so they believed my explanation. I'm not sure what I would've done if they hadn't...
It would be awesome if there was a mode in which the pronunciation of the names is also same in the two languages.
For example, in french there is the name "Arnaud", which exists in German as "Arno". For a bilingual child it's much more important for the name to sound the same that to be written the same.
> 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.
> I have this issue within English. There are several ways to Matthew. If misspelled, it is usually Matthew. Occasionally, some spell it Mathieu.
For Michael, there is only one spelling, but people nevertheless frequently misspell the name.
My favorite comment on this topic came from a Michael who, when consulted about the spelling Micheal, observed "people named Michael don't spell it that way".
> My favorite comment on this topic came from a Michael who, when consulted about the spelling Micheal, observed "people named Michael don't spell it that way".
> For a bilingual child it's much more important for the name to sound the same that to be written the same
Maybe when they're a child, but once they become an adult, having the same spelling becomes important to avoid bureaucratic headaches, especially now that KYC is becoming so strict. Are you sending money to yourself or someone else when the name is spelled differently on the two accounts?
Took me a while to understand, so to make it explicit for anyone else:
Arnaud and Arno sound the same! (in this language pair.) In Dutch, I know both an Arnaud and an Arno, and it's pronounced correctly^W like you read it (IPA: /ɑrnʌud/ and /ɑrnoː/) so that threw me off probably.
Anyway, your request is a bunch of human labeling work if there isn't already IPA conversions for every name (and if LLM can't already guess correctly 95% of the time and that's good enough for an initial comparison), but from an algorithmic standpoint shouldn't be hard: use the same comparison but on phonetic spellings of the names rather than language-specific spellings. Example: in Dutch, we pronounce "u" like IPA /y/, whereas German pronounces it as /ü/, so any name with "u" in it will automatically be incompatible pronunciation-wise.
"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.
You'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.
Why 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.)
You 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.
Ugh. English <-> Mandarin names are just a mess. Most of the suggestions can't even be expressed phonetically in Mandarin.
English <-> Russian is much better, but it misses the mark a lot. It also offers a lot of names that are too informal (e.g. Tanya is an informal variant of Tatiana).
It does not seem to work very well for Italian-French names.
I'm Italian and my partner is French and we searched for names that would be identical for Italian and French.
We did it manually and the trick is for each partner to look at names of the other language and write down the ones that are the same in theirs.
For example I'm Italian and so I read a list of French names and could easily spot the ones that are identical in Italian too.
Also my partner who is French red a list names in Italian and could easily spot the ones that are identical in French.
eheh 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.
The dataset seems pretty unreliable. For example this page claims both that "Kai" isn't a name used in German: https://mixedname.com/name/kai. But then half of the "celebrities named Kai" are... German.
I wonder what the source for the names is. Kai is #289 in at least one list of the most popular names given to German kids in 2022: https://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/jahrgang/j2022/top-500-2022. So I'm surprised that it wouldn't show up in a list of >1000 "German" names.
I had a go at something like this when my kids were born. We were after names that could be pronounced in both Danish and Gujarati. After grabbing name lists from various websites, I generated phonetic translations of each name, and then looked at the names that had the shortest edit distances in the phonetic representation between both languages. It was a great exercise in taping bits of software together, and I ended up coming down to a shortlist of 7 names. I very proudly showed this list to my wife, and she showed me her list of names that she had written down.
Turns out two of the names were on both the lists, so we went with them. I have a feeling that it wasn’t so important that they were on my lists.
While this website seems great in theory, finding English-Hindi or English-Bangla names is a lost cause (especially masculine). I'm not sure how it "finds" the results but the names appear to be of either language and not "common" to both.
"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"
You might at least be able to find a name that is easily pronounced in both languages. For example I have a friend called Pavit, which is not an english name. But is nevertheless easy for english people to say.
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'.
The word is obviously foreign, so a lot of people wouldn't even consider applying that style of pronunciation.
The standard way to pronounce "a" in foreign words is as in "father". But this one makes me curious; Hindi is like English in that a written "a" is often pronounced reduced. (Compare the traditional spelling suttee to the "reformed" spelling sati, which more closely reflects the Devanagari spelling, or the spelling of the English word "jungle" to the Hindi word of the same pronunciation, jangal.)
So it's possible that a highly nativized pronunciation of "Pavit", if stressed on the second syllable, might be correct!
I think it's just taking the lists of approved/used names in each country. Denmark has a ton of technically approved names, to accommodate refugees and immigrants, but they don't work well in Danish, because they are Arabic, Somali or whatever in origin.
Perhaps easier to understand examples are Kathy and Abigail. Pretty names in English but they will get completely butchered in Danish. Kathy will pretty much lose the h, and become Cat-i. Abi works, but gail will sound like the German "geil".
I tried it for English and Polish and the results seem quite mediocre. It gave me some names that are misspellings in Polish (like Carolina, Joanne, Veronica; those would typically be spelled Karolina, Joanna, Weronika, but bad parents can of course pick the wrong spellings). And some names don't feel very English to me.
My 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.
He made this site because he wanted to find a Japanese-Finnish bilingual name… many Finnish surnames already sound vaguely Japanese (Raikkonnen, Suutari, Makinen, Harju)
First suggestion I got for English/Japanese masculine names was “Hide”. That doesn’t strike me as a very common name in English. And the Japanese pronunciation (he-day) would constantly be mispronounced by English speakers who would read it like “hide”.
It'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".
Hah, funny to see this here. When our daughters were born we were a French and German living in an English speaking country so we tried to make sure that the name works in 3 languages. Actually when we finally decided on a name for our first daughter (Tia) we chose a long form of the name (Tiahana) because my mother in law is half Spanish (Tia means Aunty in Spanish).
Incidentally most of the names we considered don't seem to be on the list returned by this website (and we didn't go for very uncommon names).
It seems the algorithm selects on names that exist in both languages (judging by the graphic in the results). I'd argue that's often not really what you want, as they might sound very different.
It 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 ;-)
Is there something like the opposite of this, that allows you to find names that don’t have meanings in any other language? Specifically, names that don’t have rude or controversial meanings.
That's gonna be tough with phonetics across several thousand languages... not to mention regional slang and other subculture stuff. I think the surest bet is just to avoid short names. If it's four or five letters, the likelihood of a collision is high. Stuff like Josephine, Gabriella, or Nathaniel is probably pretty safe.
Most of these are commonly shortened and then you're back in the danger zone, but then, at least you have the option of reverting to the long form without jumping through any legal hoops.
these results are absolutely hilarious for chinese, where names are almost entirely freeform, gender is determined by character choice (not sound), and there's only a limited set of suffixes to choose from in the first place.
i think these are probably scraped from historical figures, since i see some very recognizable ones (i.e. enlai, zedong, jianguo), but there's also a data integrity issue because a lot of the masculine chinese names show up with , or £ in them.
In practice, what happens in many cases is that you have a separate name for each place. For example, your English passport will say “John” but your Polish one will say “Jan.” The Polish one won’t actually let you have the name “John”, or at least it will be translated by default.
So it isn’t always necessary to have a single name that can translate into X languages, but that there is a version of the name in the languages you care about.
Giving your kid a name that cannot be pronounced in many other cultures is a great reminder to these cultures that there's something else in the world than "insert culture which has trouble pronouncing that name".
I've got a family with "all the colors" (my daughter's nieces/nephews are white, black and asian) and yet we picked a very french name, very hard to pronounce for native english speakers and native japanese speakers (we've got japanese family).
And it's a conversation starter, for example: "It's easy: the sound 'ance' (part of my kid's name) is exactly the same as how french people pronounce the 'ance' in 'France'".
People are curious. And they try to say it right. And they succeed very quickly.
New school this year: two months in several teachers and kids can already pronounce the name correctly.
I can tell you that this is not always the case. I have a relatively old (and uncommon) German name and have many friends from English speaking countries who can't pronounce my name correctly even after knowing my for many years (it contains the German "ch" sound which most English speakers and several other languages struggle with). I can't count the number of pronunciations I have heard and I have largely given up except for the most extreme mispronouncations. It's fascinating what people make up when seeing an unfamiliar spelling, often it does not even resemble the straight-forward English pronunciations, which is straight forward although not really correct.
I only encountered this as an adult and I'm not easily bothered, but I can imagine a kid or teenager feeling quite different about their name being a conversation starter after years of the same.
In my experience, the name just gets converted to whatever is the closest equivalent in the target language. Or gets horribly mangled if the two languages are different in phonetics and syllable repertoire, which they usually are.
Yep which is why it's the smart play to make the spelling in the target language just whatever will make a speaker of said target language say it right.
I've always considered my name to be the sound, the spelling is just an implementation detail.
As the born and raised local, I enjoyed it when colleagues would run by ethnic names under consideration for their kids when trying to do a bilingual name. That’s real trust.
Also have no idea why how/why a few Canadian-Italian families named their daughters “Andrea” which is traditionally a male name in Italy.
Data 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.
Didn't seem very useful when I tried English and Vietnamese. It suggested a lot of words that aren't names in English.
It's still interesting to me though. I have a daughter due in February and we're trying to come up with names now. My initial idea was to take the female name list that I downloaded from the US Census, and try to come up with a set of rules to screen out names that sound good with our family name and chosen middle name. For instance, our family name starts with a G, so i don't want to choose a name that also starts with G. I also don't want a name that rhymes or sounds silly with our family name.
Others might care less about this than we did, but we were also thinking about popularity of names we were considering, including changes in popularity over time. There are names that feel very natural to me because they were common among my peers but that are actually pretty uncommon among children now and vice versa.
For the US, I found it helpful (and fun) to download the social security data on frequency of names for each year, so that I could then plot the popularity of a given name over time. This was also helpful for considering how unisex a name is or isn't.
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.
I 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.
I’m Indian and I’ve got a name that’s super common in both Arabic & Hindi, almost everyone I meet from the Arab world comments on it, but it didn’t show when I chose those 2 languages.
Don’t mean to be uncharitable but all the examples of “bilingual” names in European languages aren’t that impressive. Names shared across language families are way cooler!
I 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.
This 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.
I tried with French/Korean and it yielded nothing. However we have two kids and gave them similar-ish sounding names that are both common/hard to mistake/unambiguous in each languages:
- Mireille / 미래 (Mirea/Milea)
- Sarah / 사랑 (Sarang/Salang)
I think this website isn't as capable or imaginative as it would look.
I once worked with a man of Bashkir-Estonian descent.
His name is Aivar which I suspect is bilingual:
- it sounds Turkic ("ai" is "moon" iirc)
- on the other hand there are mentions of Aivor/Aivar from Scandinavia and so on
I tried mixednames.com but Bashkir or Tatar are not available
It'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.
This 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!
Neighbors 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.
Cool 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.
My own name is actually only used in the very country I live in. Unexpectedly, my daughter's name is apparently also used in Arabic countries, it means something like "Gift from Allah".
"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?
Matthew 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.
Interesting idea - maybe gives you a starting point. However, you also need to consider pronunciation. Most likely you want a name that sounds fairly similar in both languages.
Having 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.
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"...