What's In a Name?
A little background on her name.
Our original thought was to choose an English first name and a Chinese middle name. But we couldn't decide between two English names that we really liked so we eventually gave her both and then (with a little help from several people) picked a lovely Chinese name that at least when pronounced in Mandarin resembles the middle name a bit. Mia's Chinese name in Chinese means admire beauty. The pinyin Romanization is Mù Yán, which in English is pronounced Mu-Yen.
As I'm sure most parents desire, we wanted it to be just right, reflect her personality, ambitions of success, and to some degree her heritage, etc, etc. This meant lots of lists and paring down of said lists. It even went as far as checking out the names from the Freakonomics book. (For those of you who haven't read it, there is an interesting chapter where the authors analyze compiled data relating the education level and socioeconomic status of mothers to a child's name.) Ridiculous that I found multiple blogs and postings where parents-to-be analyzed this list? Absolutely. But a fun glance nevertheless. In the end we chose two names that we had discussed early on and became more and more convinced of over time. Here's a few other fun baby name sites we stumbled upon:
Most popular names of 2015?
Name Voyager - Fun tool to see the popularity of your name over time
Nymbler - Name generating tool
Babynamesgarden - Lots of lists, including name popularity by decade
And just for fun...All about Wayne
So with all the plethora of given names what is she called? Well in Chinese we just reduplicate the last character as a common, cute way of addressing babies, so it's pronounced "yen-yen". We gave little direction on the English names to everyone, but it appears Mia is winning out from friends and family at the moment.
Our original thought was to choose an English first name and a Chinese middle name. But we couldn't decide between two English names that we really liked so we eventually gave her both and then (with a little help from several people) picked a lovely Chinese name that at least when pronounced in Mandarin resembles the middle name a bit. Mia's Chinese name in Chinese means admire beauty. The pinyin Romanization is Mù Yán, which in English is pronounced Mu-Yen.
As I'm sure most parents desire, we wanted it to be just right, reflect her personality, ambitions of success, and to some degree her heritage, etc, etc. This meant lots of lists and paring down of said lists. It even went as far as checking out the names from the Freakonomics book. (For those of you who haven't read it, there is an interesting chapter where the authors analyze compiled data relating the education level and socioeconomic status of mothers to a child's name.) Ridiculous that I found multiple blogs and postings where parents-to-be analyzed this list? Absolutely. But a fun glance nevertheless. In the end we chose two names that we had discussed early on and became more and more convinced of over time. Here's a few other fun baby name sites we stumbled upon:
Most popular names of 2015?
Name Voyager - Fun tool to see the popularity of your name over time
Nymbler - Name generating tool
Babynamesgarden - Lots of lists, including name popularity by decade
And just for fun...All about Wayne
So with all the plethora of given names what is she called? Well in Chinese we just reduplicate the last character as a common, cute way of addressing babies, so it's pronounced "yen-yen". We gave little direction on the English names to everyone, but it appears Mia is winning out from friends and family at the moment.
posted by Todded @ 11:25 PM
