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ArchivesRe: Social Security list, spellings combined, boys, top 300
in reply to a message by Cleveland Kent Evans
I love that you do this! I've done it myself the past 10 years or so. It's so hard though, to know sometimes what names go together and what names don't. I'm glad the SSA separates the spellings, so you can see that popularity, but I also like to see them put together. (Then again, people are weird -- I had a student named Hallie pronounced like Hayley, and a friend named Hallie who rhymed it with Callie. And so on with same spelling different pronunciations!)
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Well, your friend, not the student, is the one using the pronunciation that fits the normal spelling conventions of English. :)
This is always somewhat subjective, and of course there is little one can do with spellings that have two or more different common pronunciations. In the USA, Ciara can be pronounced as "see-ARE-uh", or can be an alternative pronunciation of Sierra, or can be the original Irish Gaelic spelling of Keira and pronounced that way. So there is no way to combine the girls named Ciara with anything else, even though you know most of them are being pronounced identically with other common spellings.
This is always somewhat subjective, and of course there is little one can do with spellings that have two or more different common pronunciations. In the USA, Ciara can be pronounced as "see-ARE-uh", or can be an alternative pronunciation of Sierra, or can be the original Irish Gaelic spelling of Keira and pronounced that way. So there is no way to combine the girls named Ciara with anything else, even though you know most of them are being pronounced identically with other common spellings.
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