{"id":7702,"date":"2013-06-03T10:22:40","date_gmt":"2013-06-03T14:22:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=7702"},"modified":"2013-06-03T14:42:27","modified_gmt":"2013-06-03T18:42:27","slug":"baby-naming-issue-should-they-keep-up-the-pattern-of-no-repeating-sounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2013\/06\/03\/baby-naming-issue-should-they-keep-up-the-pattern-of-no-repeating-sounds\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Naming Issue: Should They Keep Up the Pattern of No Repeated Sounds?"},"content":{"rendered":"

M. writes:<\/p>\n

Hello! I’ve been enjoying your site for sometime. I’ve been a name nerd since childhood and had great fun naming my 3 children with my husband. We are not currently expecting another, and honestly do not know if we’ll stop at 3 or try for a fourth (or more…). There is one thing that has come into my mind a great deal, though, when it comes to names. I haven’t seen this on your site (though I may have missed it) and I was wondering if your or your readers could offer insight.<\/p>\n

All three of our children have different initials, that is different letters starting their names. None of them share an initial with my husband or I, which makes it easy when writing things down since there are 5 different letters to represent the 5 different people in our family. As much as my husband thinks this is silly, I’ve decided that should we add any more children we will keep with different first initials for this very purpose. We have another 21 letters available to us so that shouldn’t be a huge issue, right?<\/p>\n

Beyond this, no one has a similar consonant sound (so no Philip and Fiona, no Cecil and Sarah, etc) AND none of the kids have a similar ending to their names, all different consonant and vowel sounds. So that’s where it gets a little tricky to me. I feel like it makes perfect sense to go with a different first initial for any future children, but given our children’s names now should we keep up the big differences? Not sharing a sound at beginning nor end? We have a hard C, does that do away with a K or Q name? Does the “-on” ending of one child’s name mean we probably shouldn’t use “-yn” or “-en” for another child’s name? Or is this just over stretching? Since we tend to fall toward unplanned nicknames anyway, should we just try to control the initial and let the rest fall into place?<\/p>\n

Even if we kept up with strict differences, we still have a plethora of sounds available to us. We haven’t ended any name with and “-ee” sound yet, nor an “-el” or “-et” or “-er”. So the question isn’t really what to do with keeping these strict rules on our potential future child\/ren’s names, but rather, should we be applying these rules to keep up with a precedent we seem to have set?<\/p>\n

Thank you so much!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

This sounds to me like a recipe for intense stress—and exponentially more of it with each additional child. If it would be a fun challenge to play around with, I say, “Sure! Go ahead and try!” But in general, I think the more children in a family, the MORE flexible the parents should be about names, rather than less. I touched on this a little in Preferences vs. Requirements<\/a>. Here’s the section I’m thinking of:<\/p>\n

With two or three children, I think it might be reasonable to want not to share any beginning sounds, any ending sounds, any dominant sounds, or any vowel sounds. With four children, I think it’s time to re-evaluate that for actual importance. A family of Leo, Asher, Simon, and Ivy does not make me think “OMG, they repeated the long-I sound!! Don’t they realize their children are INDIVIDUALS??” On the contrary, I’d think what a good job the family had done finding such completely different names that nevertheless went together well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In my own family, I found it somewhat freeing: instead of thinking, “Hm, nothing seems to go PERFECTLY with the name Robert,” we were thinking each new name just needed not to stand out oddly from the group. Instead of feeling like any two names might go together too well and leave the third out, it felt like a larger group made differences\/similarities blend in. Instead of feeling like we couldn’t repeat an ending, it seemed like it was far less noticeable and far more fine to do so. I even felt like we could go a bit off-style if we wanted: people seem to expect less sibling-name coordination in a larger group—and in fact, getting the names too coordinated makes it a lot harder to remember who’s who.<\/p>\n

I did, however, want to keep different initials; it really is so, so convenient. (We do have one parent\/child initial repeat, but that one doesn’t seem to matter.) But even with that, I would have been flexible for The Best Name: if two people DID share first initials, we could have switched to using TWO initials on things, and it wouldn’t have been a huge inconvenience.<\/p>\n

I wouldn’t worry at all that you’ve set a precedent you now need to continue; I would be much more worried about the thousands of wonderful names you’d be eliminating from consideration. I am very, very interested in baby names, and yet I absolutely would not have looked at a family’s first three children’s names and thought, “Whoa, no matching endings or beginnings, and no similar consonant or vowel sounds? THAT’S going to be hard to keep going with if they have more kids!” It isn’t as if you’ve named your first three Brittany, Bradley, and Brinley, and want to know if you need to keep going with Br- and -y; the LACK of similarity is not something people will pick up on, or notice if you stop doing it.<\/p>\n

But again, while it’s still FUN, it could be an interesting challenge. As soon as it stops being fun, though, I’d abandon the idea entirely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

M. writes: Hello! I’ve been enjoying your site for sometime. I’ve been a name nerd since childhood and had great fun naming my 3 children with my husband. We are not currently expecting another, and honestly do not know if we’ll stop at 3 or try for a fourth (or more…). There is one thing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-20e","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7702"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7710,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7702\/revisions\/7710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}