Help me with my homework

[liv]

Here's a challenge for you: can you suggest me some names, which meet the following criteria:

• Plausible for actual people (ie not sounding like a spammer)
• Not really obvious defaults or clichés like "John Smith"
• Not similar to any famous person or fictional character
• Reasonably easy to spell and make a guess at the pronunciation
• Not rude or comical
• Plausible for someone from a different ethnic background from your own
• If you're feeling really ambitious, I could do with names that sound plausible for children, middle-aged people, and elderly people.

The reason I'm asking is that one of my jobs for the summer is to help write a bunch of case studies and exam questions, and we always, always struggle with the names. We try to get a balance of implied ethnic backgrounds, (and a range of ages and genders is necessary because it's often medically relevant) but we usually end up with way too many variants on things like "Robert Johnson" and "Mary Barker". It's actually surprisingly difficult to come up with names, so what I'm aiming to do is make a list that we can select from, so that we don't keep getting bogged down in inventing names for our imaginary doctors and patients.

Comments

[marina]

Man, I can give you a ton of Israeli/Russian names, but I'm not sure that'd be suitable for your purposes? Are you OK with poeple named Agam and Sela?

[liv]

I'm fine with Israeli/Russian names, yeah. But the reason I asked for people to come up with names from a different ethnicity from their own is that I wanted the kind of names that are fairly obvious to a linguistic outsider. So you can contribute some boring white American names, if you feel like it!

[vatine]

I can give you a list of pronouncable (well, no, but mostly unambigously pronounced a single way by a native English speaker) Scandawegian names (both surnames and given names), if that would be of any help?

[liv]

Thanks for the offer. I'd ideally like you to give me names that are not Scandinavian, if you don't mind. I'm trying to get names that will mostly be used, read and pronounced by people who are outsiders to a given culture. So I'm asking people to give me names for a different ethnic group from their own, just so that we don't get too complicated. (Though if I'm mistaken and you in fact consider Scandinavians to be ethnically different from you, feel free!)

[lavendersparkle]

Luxmi Patel
Fatima Hamoudi
Mohammed Barker
Priya Bhallah
Tahir Mahmood

(I'm doing this by thinking of people I went to school with/TV characters and mixing the first and last names of two with a similar ethnicity or just thinking of some of the most common names of people with different ethnicities to my own.)

[liv]

Good strategy, thank you. I'm a bit scared to mix and match in case I get spammer names, or accidentally mix Muslim first names with Hindu surnames (not that that never happens, but the point is that the names shouldn't be distracting or look odd). But those look like a good set for Asians, at least to my uneducated eye.

[delight]

What exams, because I'm half-afraid I might offer something up and then end up taking the test. >_>

[liv]

That would be kind of hilarious! We do put some of our questions into a national bank, but most of them are only for internal use. This'll be first and second year Medicine (MBChB) exams at Keele. And lots and lots of case-studies which are definitely for internal use only.

[princess]

Jesus Delgado
Maria Cortez
Miriam Bass
Ajita Singh


If you want I can generate more Asian ones. (I'm a Caucasian American.)

[liv]

Very useful, thank you. There isn't a very big Hispanic population in the UK, but one or two of those won't hurt. If by Asian you mean east Asian, I'd be glad of some of those, because it's fairly easy to get south Asian (Indian subcontinent) names, whereas we're a bit short of east Asian. I don't think I could do it, I'd end up confusing Korean with Japanese with Mandarin with Cantonese and come up with implausible or even offensive results.

[simont]

ie not sounding like a spammer

Aww, you mean you're not tempted to sneak in just one Indescribable Q. Birdbath? :-)

[liv]

I'm extremely tempted, yes. But the main aim here is to be bland and non-distracting, without being totally generic to the point of cliché. The idea is that the students should concentrate on the details of the case, not titter because their imaginary patient is named Poon (we used that during our open day for teenagers, and it was a disaster), or get stuck on a name that they can't (mentally) pronounce.

[delight]

... Can I use that name in a play?

[khalinche]

I'm quite taken with that, actually. If I end up naming my firstborn so, it will be your fault.

[rochvelleth]

Off the top of my head...

Male:

Tariq Fahid
Carlo Perna
Markus Stein
Karol Zymek
Daniel Gershon
Yannis Satraki

Female:

Pilar Sanchez
Olga Sacconi
Hedvig Lindgren
Beatrice Olivier
Annelies Hausberger
Io Fappas


P.S. I have this problem coming up with names for characters in stories! But this was a really interesting exercise. One of the main things it taught me is that for the most part I feel quite uncertain when trying to make up names from outside of Indo-European onomastics - indeed, for FNs I didn't venture into non-IE territory at all. Though if you asked me to come up with plausible ancient Semitic names, I think I could manage that :)

[liv]

Those are brilliant, and much more varied than a lot of the lists people come up with. Many thanks! I think ancient Semitic names are kind of inherently implausible, unfortunately, because I would love to use some of those. But even within Indo-European you've got a very good variety, and hit some ethnic groups that nobody else has thought of yet, so those are going to be very helpful.

Names from the Indian subcontinent

[403]

Rashaad Kumar
Nura Patel
Suniti Das
Antony Philip Anoop
Sunitha Chemmanoor
Nabela Kundapur

This game is harder than it looks!

Re: Names from the Indian subcontinent

[liv]

Much appreciated, thank you. And yes, it is surprisingly hard to make up names that fit all the criteria we used. That's why it's such a bottleneck in our planning meetings, and why I decided to crowd-source the exercise. If a few of my friends can give me a handful of good names each, we'll have a list we can just pick from, rather than having to think of something from scratch every time.

[synecdochic]

http://names.mongabay.com/most_common_surnames.htm is the list of most common last names in the US, which is what I use most often when I'm naming characters!

[liv]

Useful, thank you.

[ex_rising236]

Typically white-person names:
Gregg Waters
Jesse Meyers
Harrison Moran
Deacon Callahan
Ronald Mueller
Lance Sterling
Marianne Booth
Roger Glenn

Names that seem to me a little more Jewish, mainly Ashkenazi:
Isaiah BenCohen
David Boesky
Evangeline Lehrer
Bethany Siegel
Avichayil Tucker
Sam Loew
Amit Efron
Zachary Bashevis

Spanish names:
Eugenio Vasquez
Arturo Cruz
Cristóbal Rosales
Evelia Jimenez
Graciela Navarro
Jessenia Peralta

That's about all that I can come up with in a few minutes off of the top of my head, but at some point in a little bit I can check some things and have some Native American but easy to pronounce and grok names, as well as some French names.

[liv]

Ooh, that's a great selection, thankyou. I'm surprised you think of Evangeline as a Jewish name, but then again, at one point I was part of a minyan with three guys all named Kristian.

[ex_rising236]

Cherokee names, female:

Ama Copland
Woya Keaton
Awinita Martin
Ahawi Hilderbrand
Kamama Harlan
Jessica Goingback
Yona Snow

Cherokee names, male:
Atohi Vann
James Walkingstick
Dustu Archleaf
Diwali Bell
Wesa Lattimore
Billy Turnover
Ed Wohali Blackfox

[liv]

Way cool, thank you. I am not sure I'll use those, since we have essentially no Native Americans in the UK, but I'm impressed you can make up plausible names for those cultures.

[alextiefling]

The are just off the top of my head, and I apologise if I've inadvertently named someone locally famous that I've not heard of, or picked a name that's less common than I thought. A few of them really need diacritics, but will probably be understood if presented without, as shown:

Iorwerth Probert (OK, that does kinda match my ethnic background, but not much)
Eileen Macallister
Ruadhri O'Donnell
Marc Ferrier
Luis Dacosta y Sanchez
Joao Silva
Elena Figueroa
Gudrun Zoller
Marieke van Horst
Ryzard Lublinski
Jadwiga Sikorska
Jens Karlssen
Julieta Rasmussen
Göran Malmberg
Maria Lundkvist
Oleksandr Ilyich Sergeyenko
Kazimieras Kalvelis
Grete Petrauskiene
Elizaveta Petrovna Markov
Guraprit Kaur
Ravi Patel

How's that?

[alextiefling]

Hm. Looking at those again, some of them - especially the Lithuanian and Polish ones - may be a bit difficult to spell.

[azurelunatic]

Amy Huang

[azurelunatic]

And alas that my brain doesn't quite feel up to generating more, but there seems to be, at least from 1980 on, a trend in bits of the US that I've been in, for some Chinese families to give children a typical Western-sounding given name, with the Chinese family name. So this pattern might work for Chinese surnames and people say, under 30 or so.

[ex_rising236]

And more, now that I'm awake again and such.

Italian names:
Valentino diPietro
Aurora Genovese
Desiderio Greco
Emanuela Arcuri
Constanzo Trevisan
Brigida Panicucci
Luca Beneventi
Natalia Rivera
Fernanda Endrizzi
Bartolomeo De Luca
Ettore Castiglione
Annalisa Pirozzi
Milena Giachetti
Oria Lotito
Ignazio Vecoli
Lelia De Marco
Luisella Costa
Arianna Li Fonti
Cosimo Sagese
Noemi Gaccione
Patrizia Aiello
Rosabella Camísso

[ex_rising236]

Some Basque names, too (male):
Beñat Uriaga
Eneco Miguelena
Aresti Olazabal
Jakome Izquierdoo
Barea Casares
Danel Salaberri
Mikel Navascues
Koldo Onaindia
Xabier Balerdi
Markel Arambel
Joseba Dicharry
Todor Errekart
Alesander Letamendi

Female:
Amaia Kareaga
Dominica Legarreta
Edurne Martinena
Elizabete Gaubeka
Katerin Urrutia
Argi Loisate
Therese Mytorena
Mirari Irazoki
Eneca Labarde
Guerechene Segura
Angela Sarasketa
Lide Zozaia
Arima Ganborena
Maite Azanza
Zuri Carrere

[liv]

Basque, woah! I'd temporarily forgotten that Basque names even existed. It's interesting, cos some of those are obviously related to Latin languages, but some are properly original. You're impressively good at this!

[ex_rising236]

Lastly, some Vietnamese names, in Western order, all of which chosen to be doable and not too confusing without diacritics, though the diacritics are included here. Not that many of them though, because I'm trying not to get too repetitive.

(Male:)
Huynh Văn Chung
Trang Văn Lâm
Danh Quang Phạm
Hien Sinh Cao
Nhung Hai Trịnh
Cuong Đức Hoàng
Minh Cả Lý
Sang Hai Lưu
Chinh Năm Lưu
Trai Văn Kim

(Female:)
Nguyet Thị Chung
Long An Dương
Ngoc Mai Phạm
Nhung An Phan
Chau Thị Đinh

[redbird]

I've got these meta thoughts, about things like age: Hannah and Amelia are currently popular names for girls in the United States. When I was growing up, the only Amelia I knew was my grandmother (born, I think, in 1904), and the only Hannah was her sister. Everything old is new again. And mix-and-match: I'm thinking of a girl I knew a long time ago, named Mika Hoffman. Blonde, Scandinavian-American, and I have no idea why her parents called her that.

OK, that said, here are a few: Rajiv Chowdhury
Elias Crawford
Alva Petersen
Susanna Fitzgerald
Franz Hauser
Laura Milbank

[liv]

Thanks, those are a good set. And I've definitely noticed that about names coming round again after a century or so. In England flower and jewel names (Poppy, Daisy, Pearl, Ruby) are coming round again, whereas until a few years ago they were a pretty clear indication of people in their 80s. Also OT names; my brother was named for our grandfather, also born 1901, and was the only Jacob around for the first couple of decades of his life, but suddenly it's one of the most popular names for kids. The gap's just a bit too long to be accounted for by a lot of kids named after grandparents (my grandfather married in his 40s and my father in his 30s, so we have unusually long generations on that side of the family).

Absolutely, people do mix-and-match; it only takes parents from different cultures getting married, or people just choosing a name for a kid that doesn't come from their particular heritage, or immigrants changing a name to fit in with their adopted culture, or or or. The problem is that too many names like that together start to sound as if they were random-generated, or coming from a mediocre near-future SF novel which is making a point about how there's no more racism in teh future!!!1 (while not actually addressing race issues at all).

Also, while in real life you basically can't tell someone's ethnic background from their name, having names where the immediate association will be other than white anglo is I think a positive thing. Firstly because it should send a message to the students from immigrant and foreign backgrounds that they are welcome and just as much part of the medical school, and minimize the problems they may experience due to stereotype threat. And secondly, to help condition the anglo students that a doctor is not always a white man and a patient is not always a white woman. (It's slightly scary how some of them, even female, will automatically default to male pronouns for doctors, even when the case study they're working on explicitly uses female ones.)