Fnac stands for:

Fédération nationale d'achats des cadres

It was some kind of mail order association for executive at the beginning I guess.

For naming your kid, I don't think there was really a list, since there was no problem to give muslim names. But the officer could just refuse a "bad" name. Now he has to call on the judge who will refuse the name if it's not in interest of the kid.

Tell your friend to just give up trying to find a name that's pronounced exactly the same in both languages. Like you say, there'll always be differences of emphasis and subtle vowel differences. The kid will end up preferring one pronunciation over the other and half the people will always fail to say it with just the right accent. (That happens even with Merkin pronunciation of English names.)

My advice would be to choose a name that is translatable between the two languages but is pronounced completely differently in each. That way people on each side of the linguistic divide will pronounce it perfectly for their own. That's no more difficult to cope with than having different nicknames among different friends. I suggest Jacques/James or Pierre/Peter.

It was in NZ that the kid was named "Lula does the Hula in Hawaii".

Katia, I think you might want the use different methods for finding names for children vs cats.

I know this was a few podcasts ago but:

I don't know where the fallacy that zombies can subsist solely on brains was born -- but according to George A. Romero's "Night of the Living Dead", they ate not just the brain -- but consumed the whole human.

So perhaps zombies need a balanced diet too or they could be subject to irregularity, irritable bowel syndrome, hemorrhoids, bloody stool, and colorectal & bowel cancer.

Maybe Jeffrey Dahmer was actually trying to get a fledging Zombie Fast Food Restaurant off the ground when he was exposed.

oh my god i sound like such a nerd! lol

oh and i've heard people say "F - nac" as in F pronounced as the letter... ekk!

ps the link is wrong ;-)

I call FNAC "la keufna". You see the trick?? ;)

For the names, I think a bit like Nicolas-Guillaume. It's like my own first name, Mathieu. The french call me Mathieu, but my english speaking friends call me Matthews, and that's all right for me! (Or like an Olivier will be called Oliver, Pierre Peter, Jean John etc.)

An other solution would be to choose a foreign name, neither french nor english! Like that it'd be pronounced the same way. Pablo, Paolo, Matteo, Boris, Ludwig, etc.

I just happened to listen to episode 1.

Somewhere around 24:51 kyliemac speak about the feenac :)

Time passes by apparently :)