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Comment by moultano | Hacker News Reader

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/1Vy1dQunG4iie4H67En9T...

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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.

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.

The Norwegian bureau of statistics used to have a brilliant bank of historical name trends, where you could input any name and see how popular it had been throughout the years.

One of my favourites were Vidkun, which fell off a cliff in the mid-forties.

(Vidkun being the first name of our head collaborationist honcho during the Nazi occupation - his last name may be known to you. Quisling. Yup, he coined the phrase 'Quisling' for a traitor and even had a verb - to quisle, for committing treason - enter the English language.)

Names that went unpopular also include Katrina, Isis and.. Adolf https://www.huffpostbrasil.com/entry/unpopular-baby-names_n_...

It's a shame that Isis (the Egyptian goddess) is now associated to the Islamic State. It's a beautiful name.

The Archer TV show had a similar problem. (Minor spoilers ahead.) The show pre-dates Islamic State, and the heroes' spy organisation was named ISIS. I was a little disappointed by the way they escaped it, they just did away with the spy organisation as they mixed up the later seasons of the show. It would have been a bold move, but it could have been played for laughs.

Tbh I’ve never heard those words before.

Well I guess no one is naming their kid "Karen" for a while...

I never thought clearly about this, when deciding my kid's name I thought about people who I really admired and picked up the name I liked the most. But of course, I'd veto any name that reminded of someone I don't like.

What hit me hard about your comment is that I know a bunch of couples who have kids with my name, and it's not a common name. I will sleep happier today :)

I know. I came up with some very cool names that my wife immediately vetoed for that reason!

> 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."

Native English speaker from the Pacific Northwest, I would pronounce those "Ri-yuh" and "Are-rov"(I think your intended pronunciation) or maybe "A-rav", depends upon whether I knew they were of Indian decent, i.e. Rohan is "Roe-hon" not "Roe-han".

Forgive my "colloquial" phonetic annotation, I don't know how to do it properly.

I think they're saying the names are easy to pronounce once you've heard them. They contain no non english sounds or tongue twisters.

I agree pronunciation is not 100% obvious from the spelling.

"A A Rav"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd7FixvoKBw

"Of" is actually pronounced with a "v" phoneme, despite the spelling.

I know a Riya whose name sounds like Ri-yuh, so I don't think you are completely wrong.

Isn't "Ri-yuh" how you'd pronounce "Rhea"?

The webapp didn't work well for English/Chinese. This type of bilingual naming isn't that common for that combination, but some people do it, and it's much tricker than in most other languages because you're dealing with both different naming cultures (e.g. Chinese names are almost never more than 3 syllables including surname) and different phoenetics at the same time. A few examples of common given names that work are 安妮 (Annie) 麗娜 (Lina) 瑞 (Ray) 凱亮 (Calvin), all appended to a Chinese surname of course.

What IS much more common, though, is Chinese parents picking a Chinese name that happens to be easy to pronounce for English speakers and forget the need for an English name. For example most native English speakers have no problem pronouncing a character pronounced "ting" or "fei" or "wei" but may get tripped up by "xie/hsieh" or "xuan/hsuan".

Yep, that was my feeling as well. Same for Chinese / Dutch. At first I tried suggesting some names that matched but none of them really stuck for me and my wife.

In the end we picked an original Dutch name. Which could be easily pronounced and shortened to English, and turned out to be easily translatable to three Chinese syllables, with nice meanings for the hanzi as well. All grandparents immediately were able to go with it.

I worked on a project with similar motivations; in my case, I had a list of criteria in mind, one of which was the number of syllables in a name. I couldn't find a good source for name syllabification, so built an n-gram language model trained on the CMUdict corpus.

https://github.com/cloudkj/ngram-syllables

Also did something similar and generalized it across languages by using Metaphone phonetic encoding (which is biased towards English pronunciation however):

https://github.com/zigam/ginkgo/blob/gh-pages/README.md

Both are very nice names but Aarav is the new "gaurav/neha" in India. 3 out of 10 children are named Aarav ever since Akshay kumar named his son that.

A friend of mine named his daughter meghan, which translates to megha meaning rain in hindi and megan in English of course.

Yeah we've encountered that. We've heard of at least 3 friends of friends named Aarav.

My older child is 11 years old, and since a few years before she was born, everyone we knew in India had been naming their children starting with the sound of "Aa" ... We know quite a few kids named "Aarav" and "Aadya" among others. So any names with that starting sound were immediately discarded. We wanted her name to sound significantly different from all contemporary names, and we decided that the best way to do it was to go retro. So "Surabhi" is what we chose. It has a very nice meaning, and it's just sufficiently old to be fashionable again. And it also reminded us of a favourite TV serial from our childhood.

We are Saivites living in an English speaking world so I tried to make our names "short and sweet" - e.g. for my son Mahesh instead of Maheshwara

You wouldn't happen to have a similar spreadsheet with a boy's name list, would you?

The Hindu men I know whose parents wanted to give them names easily pronounceable in English are called Neel and Kiran.

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