Am I the only one who thinks this is sarcasm?
Just searching on names with “den” in them:
Kaiden
Kayden
Cayden
Jayden
Aaden
Rayden
Raiden
Brenden
Holden (OK, that one is at least different from the others…)
Eden (male and female)
Khaleesi did rank pretty well (Shame GMM doesn’t get royalties from that!)
Then there’s the ever popular trick of unusual spellings (ee vs ie vs iegh) and/or substituting Y for I (or vice versa):
Jurnee
Hailee/Haylee/Hayley
Charlee/Charley/Charlie
Harlee/Harley
Brynlee
Bailee
Rylee
Zaylee
Kynlee
Zoie
I’m stunned at how many of these variants make it into the top 1000 (Jurnee and Zoie somehow really boggle me).
You can actually download lists of names from SSAm at Popular Baby Names. Some of the rarer ones are very oddbal spellings like Abbiegayle vs Abiageal, Amilea vs Amileah vs Ameilya, and so on (There are also 5 or so girls named Caleesi).
Lots of attempts to get painfully “cute” with the spelling - I’m rather surprised and dismayed at the 6 Peightyns out there (though Peytynn isn’t much better).
Aliveah and Aliceson are going to to have a great deal of fun making sure their names are spelled right.
Some “normally spelled” names surprised me with their rarity: Awesome, Amabel, and Bronwen and Jet.
Lots of variants on the Braden / Cayden sort of names there as well.
One of my nieces is going to court to change her official first name to her usual name, which was rejected at birth because it had potentially derogatory connotations. I like it much better this way. Children shouldn’t go through hassles because their parents have fancy ideas. The desire of parents to give some ludicrous name to their children should carry exactly zero weight when assessed against the best interest of the child.
I agree completely. I’ve known plenty of people with odd names who were never bullied, simply because they were not the kind of kid who could ever be bullied.
Right now I happen to know a little girl with a very strange name, the kind of name that might make people here say “What were her parents thinking?” But she is a champion figure skater for her age, and she also has a black belt in a martial art. Nobody would dare bully her.
You know the research done on employers’ tendencies and reactions on seeing “stereotypically black” names on resumes? I’d be kind of interested in seeing similar research done with “stereotypically privileged white” names and comparing the results…
I have a very common, classic first name that is in the Bible and has two standard spellings, and probably some non-standard ones as well, and I’ve experienced the same thing. :smack:
When I was in college, I wrote a letter to “People” magazine which they printed - and guess what? THEY SPELLED MY NAME WRONG, both first and last! :mad:
I love the name Bronwen. I believe it’s either Scottish or Irish.
At least it’s pronounced the way it’s spelled, unlike some other names like Siobhan (sha-vaun), Niamh (nee-ev) or Aoife (ee-fah).
Welsh feminine name.
I find the suggestion that Irish orthography is less phonetic than English faintly amusing, along with the complaints above about variant spelling of names as if there were some sort of definite standard.
IMHO, though, if you are going to make up a name from scratch successfully, you had better have a firm grasp on your bardic poetic powers. Unfortunately, the Dunning-Kruger effect applies here.
They should have named one of the girls
“Gladys Happy”.
I know Juan as a Spanish name, but I’d never heard it pronounced like ‘joo-un’ before.
I don’t know how you would pronounce “joo-un”, the international phonetic transcription of the standard Spanish pronunciation is \ˈxwan. Ivan is the same as Juan as well, by the way.
It’s an old anglicized pronunciation.
It can be found in Lord Byron’s poem Don Juan, where he rhymes it with ‘true one’, and where it affects the meter to pronounce it as a single syllable. (Not that this tells us how the J is pronounced, but it does tell us it’s two syllables, and thus neither the Spanish, nor more modern anglicized versions.)
Ever seen this clip? I love it: Saoirse Ronan Tries To Teach Stephen Colbert An Irish Accent. They go through several Irish names at the end.
The variants on spelling are all too often a parent’s desire to make their kid’s name “unique”, for reasons that escape me - and that desire is so strong that they go further and further outside common spellings and cross over into the absurd. Think of 1950s cars with fins on them and how THAT evolved.
The problem I have with, say, Irish orthography is that you’re basically spelling a word from one language, and attempting to sound it out using English pronunciation rules. In English, a sound is spelled using certain letter; in another language, those same letters sound different (e.g. Paris vs Paree).
Note: the following is written from an American perspective and might not apply to someone in London or Sydney.
English-speakers have learned rules for what a combination of letters should, generally, sound like. “Siobhan”… well, a lot of words I’ve learned have “sio” being pronounced “shuh” like “dissension” and “ascension”. “bh” being pronounced as “v” isn’t anything an American-educated person would expect. “Aoife”… I’d expect to be something like “Ay-oh-eef” or maybe “Ow-eef”. The “Ao” at the beginning just seems to be a waste of printer’s ink. I listened to the Outlander books via Audible and one character was named “Lira”; it was years before I saw it in print as “Laoghire”. I’d have pronounced it “Low-geer” had I not heard it first. It’s hard for me to see how “aogh” affects the pronunciation at all.
But someone educated in Scottish or Irish orthogrophy would likely look at those and scratch their heads and say “of course it’s pronounced Lira, what’s your effing problem?”. And I could sort of see mumbling / sliding those “extraneous” letters and coming up with Lira or Eefah.
Now, writing Polish using the English alphabet is another thing entirely. I swear they throw all those extra consonants in there as a joke, just to laugh at us Westerners. I can’t imagine how anyone knowing “English” spelling could possibly have heard the sound “Shuh” and decided to spell it “Krzy” (as in former Duke coach Krzyszewski, pronounced “ShuhSHEFsky”).
In any case, I just roll with it, do my best, and reserve the right to laugh (inwardly only!!!) at poor Ab-siddy and Peightynn.
To clarify: I’m inwardly laughing at the parents in this case.
Haven’t read the whole thread, but this is an issue that dates back to at least the 1960s. For example, 9 months after an incident that happened once, in 1967, for 20 minutes, Duran Duran lead singer Frank Zappa named his daughter “1920s-style Death-Ray” (the hyphens are silent). There is an urban legend that she goes by “Ray” for short - actually she legally changed it to “Hi, Opal!” shortly after age 21, after her first two submissions (“I burning your dog” and “Pan-fried semen”) were rejected.
A solid showing - 8.4
(The judges deducted marks due to the omission of “Masturbating like a motherfuck” and “penis ensues”)
Frank Zappa was the lead singer for Duran Duran?
Don’t fight the hypothetical.
OK, I’m still a newbie here. Someday I’ll learn.