08.20.07

Name

Posted in General News at 1337 by SeismicMike

So the name we’ve picked for our baby is Ioan Michael Lewis. It’s pronounced Yo (as in yo-yo) an (as in peon). We picked it for several reasons.

1. We didn’t want an extremely popular name. It’s not necessarily that we don’t like the names that are popular, we just want to avoid giving our children names that everyone else also has. I, for example, have a very popular first name. Don’t get me wrong, I love my name. I love what it means and I love how it sounds. But I hate that other people have my name. So we would like to spare our children this kind of agony.
2. Since the largest part of my blood ancestry is Welsh, I thought it would be cool to give our kids Welsh names. Now the majority of Welsh names aren’t all that odd. Most of them just look funny b/c the Welsh alphabet is so cool and so they’re spelled differently. So we figure that could help accomplish #1 without being too weird, and help them get in touch with their heritage… although I really wasn’t raised Welsh… By the time it got to me we had all been melted into the pot of America.
3. Ioan is the Welsh equivalent of John (similar to Johann in German.)

Now what’s really cool is that Ioan is really easy to transliterate into Korean. In Korean it is: Now this is really close to the Korean equivalent of John: which is actually just a transliteration of the German Johann - as in JS Bach.

So without even trying we came about an 1/8th of an inch away from picking an absolutely perfect name for our baby - one that would sound and mean the same in both Welsh and Korean.

Oh well. I guess we’ll have to settle for 98%, and seeing as how we weren’t even going for this initially anyway, I’m pretty satisfied with our choice.

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