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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Interesting, But Second-Rate, 1 Nov 1998
By A Customer
Having read in the above hype about Mr. Lansky as being the "the #1 name in baby-names", I was expecting a good deal more than what I found upon actually reading this book.While having more entries than many other baby-name books, "35,000+ Baby Names" is lacking and occasional inaccurate in the details of its etymologies. For example, as a speaker of Japanese, I noticed that the name Hachi is defined as "8,000", whereas it actually means only "8". In Japanese, "8,000" is HASSEN, not HACHI. Further, many names were listed simply as "American Indian". Given that there are even now several hundred different indigenous languages spoken in the Americas, representing historically a large variety of cultures, this is like narrowing the place of origin of the name "Edgar" down to, say . . ., Eurasia! To its advantage, though, the book does include apparently useful advice and "Guidelines" to help parents decide on the best names for their children. "The Where in the World" section, which gives an idea of where the various languages from which many modern names originate are spoken is also interesting, though there are inaccuracies here as well. (Ashanti, an African language, is listed under the Native American heading.) Overall, I was much more positively impressed with the scholarly quality of the book "The New American Dictionary of Baby Names". I do not recommend this book.
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