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Re: Maria
My mother-in-law, an Afrikaans woman, died when her son was five. Her names were Bertha Maria. We wanted to give our first daughter her grandmothers' names as mns, but we couldn't warm up to Bertha and Maria didn't fit very well. So instead of Maria we used Mary: shorter, tidier and definitely English.For interest: MIL worked for an English company where she met my FIL. They were both perfectly bilingual in Afrikaans and English, but somehow she became BERtha instead of the Afrikaans BERRtah. DH and his sister used to visit their grandmother and when they walked to the shops with her and she met a friend, she'd always say 'Dis Bertha se kinders' (These are Bertha's children), which made them sad, but they also knew that she had probably suffered more than they had when Bertha died, so they didn't say anything.

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