I’m pregnant with our second daughter right now and we’re having troubles finding a good name. My first daughter is named [name]Audrey[/name]. My husband really likes the name [name]Kaiya[/name]. He lived in Japan for a while so he wants to use the Japanese spelling. [name]Do[/name] these names go together at all? And what is a good middle name?
Thanks
Not sure if it’s [name]Kay[/name]-uh or [name]Keye[/name]-uh (rhymes with eye)
Its not very matchy with[name]Audrey[/name] but that doesn’t bother me.
If it bothers you try mns that have vintage elegance…maybe [name]Faye[/name] or [name]May[/name]?
[name]Kaiya[/name] may not be the original spelling of [name]Caia[/name] but I think it is equally understandable in romanji and English, matches [name]Audrey[/name], and is pretty straight forward. There is no “Japanese spelling” using English letters, only hiragana, katakana and kanji, so this is as close as it gets. The spelling [name]Caia[/name] was the [name]Roman[/name] goddess of fire, so there is that connection to romanji.
I like both names, but I don’t see them as being the same style for a sibset.
As a sidebar, as someone who just had to pick a Korean name for my soon-to-be daughter (who will be half-Korean), I strongly suggest learning a lot about naming traditions or hiring a professional namer (it’s an actual job in [name]China[/name], Japan, and Korea), if you want to use a Japanese name but are not Japanese yourself, because names there are very, very different than Western names. Westerners pick names from a definite list of “names,” and we pick them mainly because we like the sound or the meaning. But in Chinese and Korean (and I believe Japanese), names are frequently entirely unique and based on a variety of factors. To give you an example of how different the naming practices can be, here is what we had to do in order to pick our daughter’s Korean name, Jinhee:
(1) Understand that all Korean given names are two syllables, with one syllable indicating which generation within the clan the person belongs to and one syllable being a personal name. Everyone within the generation in the family/clan (which might consist of thousands and thousands of people) has the same generational name. The position of the generational name/syllable alternates with every generation… so, for example, in my husband’s generation, it is the first syllable in his Korean name, and in our baby’s generation, it is the second syllable (Hee).
(2) Find out the generational name assigned by the family council. These names were picked by a clan council hundreds of years ago, and they are written in ancient Chinese characters (not Korean characters or modern/simplified Chinese), so even people who speak fluent Korean and Chinese may not know what they mean. Also, these generational names follow a certain pattern or philosophy, which is different for each clan but generally follows ancient Confucian or Chinese philosophical principles; for example, in my husband’s family, each generational name is tied to elements like water, wood, fire, and soil… and they proceed in a certain order, so that the father’s generation is always “building” the next. That means my husband’s father is the water generation, since water feeds trees, and my husband’s generation is the wood generation, since it can be burned to create a fire, and our baby is the fire generation, since fire creates ash that improves soil… and so on. However, since the MEANING of the names is written in ancient Chinese characters, and Chinese characters are pictograms, the name doesn’t actually MEAN water, wood, fire, etc… the pictogram for the name only contains the characters for that element. For example, “Hee” means “bright” or “shining,” not “fire,” based on the Chinese character used. However, in order to draw the character for “bright,” you have to include the character for “fire” as part of the strokes. (It also matters what order the strokes are drawn in.)
(3) Pick a personal name syllable that means something appropriate in ancient Chinese characters AND make sure no one else within that generation of the family/clan has used it. I told my in-laws that I liked the sound of “[name]Jin[/name],” which was one of the Korean sounds I favored, but I had no idea what it meant. It turned out that although “[name]Jin[/name]” is represented only one way in the Korean language, which is an alphabetical or phonetic language, it can be represented by upwards of 30 ancient Chinese characters, all pronounced exactly the same. My in-laws spent a long time determining if any of the characters that represented the “[name]Jin[/name]” sound created a strong meaning with the generational name “Hee.” [name]One[/name] of them meant “treasure” or “gold,” which they said was a “good” pairing with “Hee”… thus, our daughter’s name will be Jinhee, which will mean “bright treasure.” However, even though I know other Korean people with the name Jinhee, their names may sound the same but mean something entirely different; it all depends on which Chinese characters were selected to represent the name. This is why there are generally NO baby name books written for Korean/Chinese names, because there is no “list” of names to choose from, and one name (when Romanized) can literally mean hundreds of different things… some appropriate, some not.
(4) Determine whether the name is “auspicious,” based on the lunar cycle the baby is born in. This is tied into Chinese astrology and part of the reason there are professional namers in this region of the world, to determine which names are auspicious or not auspicious for a given birth date.
(5) Make sure the name hasn’t been used by someone else in that generation in the clan. We had to contact relatives in Korea and find out what other names had been given to people in the baby’s generation (some of whom might be in their 80s or even dead… the generations began counting around 800 A.D., so people within a generation are not all the same age) to make sure we weren’t duplicating someone. Technically, there are more than a quarter million people in my husband’s clan, but there are many different branches, so we had to find out about his branch, which still contains thousands.
(6) Determine how to Romanize that name. We could spell Jinhee several different ways, all of which would be “correct” and mean the same thing: the generational name can be Romanized as Hee or Hui, which are pronounced the same, and there could be a hyphen or a space between the personal and generational names… or not. Thus, the names Jinhee, [name]Jin[/name]-hee, [name]Jin[/name]-Hee, [name]Jin[/name] Hee, Jinhui, [name]Jin[/name]-hui, [name]Jin[/name]-Hui, and [name]Jin[/name] Hui are all the same; the difference is not in the name, but in how they are Romanized.
As someone who is not Korean, married to a Korean-American who does not speak Korean well and definitely doesn’t speak Chinese, I know that it would have been impossible for us to pick an “appropriate” Korean name without help. We are lucky and did not have to hire a professional namer, because my FIL is the head of the clan and thus not only had the clan books which listed the names, but had a grandfather who had insisted he needed to read and speak classical/ancient Chinese and paid for him to have a special tutor as a child. (My [name]MIL[/name], who has a PhD and is a native, fluent Korean speaker, is not able to read these things–even though she can read some modern Chinese.)
However, even though that process took a long time and was hard for me (an English-speaking WASP) to wrap my head around, I am glad we did it… mainly because I wouldn’t want anyone Korean to hear our daughter’s name and think that we were uneducated or laugh at the name we had chosen. I feel confident that I’m not naming my daughter the Korean equivalent of “Cheddar,” or something else ridiculous, by accident.
I suspect that Japanese names are equally complicated, although I am sure the rules are different there than in Korea. So… be careful and really research Japanese names before just selecting one. It isn’t like hearing a name on TV–“oh, she named her baby XYZ–I like the sound of that!” in that region of the world.
My Japanese teacher told me they usually like to name after the father and make the baby seem important. [name]Ichiro[/name] means “first born son.” However, they also have nature names (Kaede, Miyuki), color names ([name]Aoi[/name], [name]Midori[/name]), and virtue names/names to live up to ([name]Hiro[/name] - “generous” and [name]Akira[/name] - “intelligent”). Different combinations of kanji can create different meanings. Natsuki, for example, can be written (in kanji) with either natsu and ki, or na and tsuki. I don’t know if there are any traditions, like we have here - naming after grandparents, for example, BUT, keep in mind, this baby probably won’t grow up in Japan, so you can pretty much do anything you want. [name]Just[/name] do some research.
[name]Kaiya[/name], I believe, translates to “forgiveness.” It may or may not be a surname, and it may or may not be a town name.