I heard a lady call in on a local radio station here that was a nurse in a nursery of a hospital and she said a lady named her daughter "La-a" Pronounced "Ladasha"... ha ha!
I can't stress enough, give her an unusual name but NOT and unusual spelling. All that does is sentense her to spell her name for everyone her entire life.
I totally agree with this.I can't stress enough, give her an unusual name but NOT and unusual spelling. All that does is sentense her to spell her name for everyone her entire life.
My name is Kira. I get called K-eye-rah or Kara(my name looks nothing like Kara!!!) I hate it! I love my name, but just hate it being mispronounced. Now that I am married I get my first and last name mispronounced. That is probably why I went with Hannah. I thought surely people won't say her name wrong.I sort of agree with this, if the only reason to spell a name in an "unusual" way is to be different. We actually did spell our daughter's name differently than it's typically spelled, and she LOVES it (she's 12, so the fact that she loves having a name that's spelled a bit differently is no small thing). We chose an Irish spelling of Keara (people usually want to spell it KIRA) to honor my husband's paternal grandparents, so there was a reason beyond just wanting it to be different. Our daughter does get called "Kee-AIR-ah" a lot, but it doesn't seem to bother her.
Good luck!
Oh, and I wanted to add, I made a list of names, passed it to my dh, who crossed out anything he didn't like and added to it. We went back and forth until we came up with the name we both liked, which was about two days before she was born!!
What is your daughter's name? I don't think you said.I'll throw out a situation for you: a few days ago I picked my DS up from school, and as we were pulling away a group of 4 girls waved to him. <blush, blush> As he turned beet red, I asked who the girls were. His answer was: Maggie, Maggie, Maddie, and Maddie.
DS is 12. These girls are all in his class of 21 kids. Margaret was nowhere in the top 100 for girls the year he was born, but he has 2 of them in his class (he transferred schools this year, and he had had two in his previous class, too.). The other two are named Madison and Madeline; those names WERE in the Top 100 in 1997.
The moral of this story is, pay attention to where you are when it comes to the popularity issue if it is important to you, because the nicknames can trip you up. I live in a very Catholic community where the majority ethnic groups are Irish, German, and Italian. We have what seem like endless permutations of Katie, Molly, Maggie, Ella and Bella. These can come about in unexpected ways: for instance, a neighbor child is known as Molly, but her name is Amalie. (It's a German name in this case, pron. ah-MAHL-yuh. If the person is French, however, it's ah-meh-LEE, with an "e" in the middle instead of an "a".)
Which brings me to the other point I wish to bring up: when spelling ethnic names correctly for their languages, be aware that people WILL decide that the name is properly spelled or pronounced a different way if they know a similar-looking or similar-sounding name from another language, because "it's the same thing." You need to look realistically at whether or not that is going to drive you batty. After two years I have gotten to the point that I can ignore most of the people who call my daughter Ashley, though I'm afraid it still grates on my nerves to hear her called that.
What is your daughter's name? I don't think you said.
Just wondering.