What's in a name?
Juan and Keisha
Who doesn't love a unique name? No matter where you go, no one can ever say it right or they think you spelled your own name wrong, or they just refuse to call you by your correct name... We love our names, but we thought we'd spare our child the annoyance of teachers struggling to say it during roll call. So we stuck to some very basic guidelines:
- It had to be easy to pronounce in any language.
- It had to be easy to write or spell in English.
- It couldn't have a weird meaning in other languages.
We both wanted to try for a Chinese name but they can be difficult to say for a non-native speaker and even more difficult to write it. But we found something that fit all our criteria and felt perfect for our little bean.
Kai
"open"
Since we live in Maui, many people assumed his name is Hawaiian. Kai means "saltwater" or "ocean" in Hawaiian is also a common root word for many Hawaiian names like Kaimana (power of the ocean), or Kainalu (ocean waves). But his name is actually Chinese. It's a word that means "to open" or "open". It's not normally seen alone and is usually combined with another character to make names that have meanings like "open-minded (開通)" or "happy (開心)" or "easygoing (開朗)". We liked that it was the root character for many good qualities we hoped for Kai so we kept it simple. :)
We did make sure Kai didn't mean anything weird in other languages, especially ones that our friends and family speak. To our surprise, we found that it had many good meanings in other languages like "fire" in Scottish or "unbreakable" in Burmese or (my personal favorite), "food" in Maori.
