I'm calling my kid Kaiser Porsche.

[bagheera_san]

I have this problem with Time Lord names. That is, I spend far too much time trying to come up with them. In my despair I have used such things as Insect genera (great source for Greek and Latin style names) and, yes, baby name sites. However. I have to say this. The "German" name list on www.babynames.com contains the most hilariously wrong list of "German" names ever, with such gems as:

Mayer (surname! You're not calling your kids "Smith", are you?)
Porsche (...)
Diesel
Jaeger
Kaiser (that'd be like calling your kid "Emperor")
Haydn
Ziggy (admittedly, a short form of Sigmund, but not German one)
Meta (???)
Duer (?!)
Seifer (that's a character from Final Fantasy, isn't it?)
Mandell (now that sounds a bit Time Lordish)
Huey (possibly the least German name ever... how do you even pronounce that?)
Durin (that's a Tolkien dwarf)


No. Just, no. Even the ones that are recognizably German are the worst German names ever, like "Helmfried" or "Kaethe". It's like this list was compiled by Japanese manga authors.

Comments

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Meet my little darling, Diesel Porsche! It's like "Ford Prefect" only less obscure XD

Huey is one of Donald Duck's 3 nephews, along with Dewey and Louie. ^^

[bagheera-san.livejournal.com]

Ah, I thought it would rhyme with things like Louie. In German their names are Tick, Trick and Track, btw. Dubbed names: always weird.

[neveralarch]

Those are really bizarre. I've used babynames.com for character names before in cultures that I wasn't familiar with - I'm glad I switched to my new method of looking up random famous people on wikipedia and stealing their names.

[elliptic-eye.livejournal.com]

I would totally call my kid Haydn. But, then, that's why I'm not allowed to reproduce.

[blindmapmaker.livejournal.com]

I had the same problem with this site and switched to a site called www.behindthename.com
ages ago.

I haven't noticed anything exceedingly stupid with Western European names and a couple of the Chinese names turned out to be pretty accurate. The site does have a high number of archaic and cross-culture names as usual, but at least the latter are clearly marked as belonging to multiple languages.

The site also has a sister site for surnames: surnames.behindthename.com