MixedName – Bilingual baby name finder

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…

A 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"...

When our son was born, we wanted to find him a name that would work in both Japanese and English, so I created a simple command-line tool to find all those names. Now I had a bit of free time because the covid situation forced me to shut down Candy Japan for a while, so I took the time to turn that tool into this online version.