Hello all,
I’d love some feedback on the name [name]Anatole[/name]. My husband is American but his mother is French, he has French citizenship and has lived in the country and speaks French fluently. I, on the other hand, can barely speak it and have no personal connection to [name]France[/name]. We have no plans at the moment to move to any Francophone (or Russian-speaking, where the name is also popular) country. So…how would a little American [name]Anatole[/name] go over? [name]Do[/name] people know how to pronounce it? It is too weird? Does it instantly conjure up the image of a stereotypical Frenchman, with a beret, clutching a cigarette at a cafe? I mostly know it from the kid’s book [name]Anatole[/name] the Mouse, in which, yes, the mouse rides around on a bicycle in [name]Paris[/name] and wears a beret.
On the other hand, it means sunrise, has attractive sounds (though possibly feminine sounding in the US?) and would certainly be unusual. On the other other hand, I have a newfound respect for boring names, after I named my older daughter [name]Adele[/name] right before the singer [name]Adele[/name]'s career blew up. Now everyone says “oh! Like the singer!” Whereas if her name was something common like [name]Jane[/name] or [name]Mary[/name], people wouldn’t say “Oh! Like [name]Jane[/name] [name]Fonda[/name]!” or “Oh, like [name]Mary[/name] [name]Queen[/name] of Scots!”
My boring backup is [name]Nicholas[/name] (which my Francophile husband wants to spell [name]Nicolas[/name]).
Thanks so much in advance for your feedback! I really feel like I need a sense of how it would strike people. It seems risky! Fun, but risky.
– [name]Emma[/name] R