Thread: Dominican Names
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Old 03-31-2018, 04:18 PM   #1
joefromchicago
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Dominican Names

The Dominican Republic (DR) sends more players to the major leagues than any other country apart from the US. As such, it should really get its own nameset.

The problem, though, is that information on Dominican names is difficult to find. I'm convinced it's out there somewhere, I just can't find it on the internet. So until someone comes along with something better, I figure this will be good enough. Some comments about the sources and methodology:

FIRST NAMES: Dominican first names are .... let's just say "unique." This article gives some insights into modern naming practices in the DR. There are a bunch of portmanteau names that combine elements of the father's and mother's names. Letters that are rare in Spanish (such as "y" and "w") are frequently used to make a name distinctive. And American names apparently have a certain cachet, even if Dominicans may have a shaky grasp of English orthography (e.g. Jhon instead of John).

I couldn't find any official list of Dominican first names, so I took a list of all the Dominican players who have played in the majors and combined it with the names of all players in the Dominican Summer League in 2014 and 2017. Not the best method, I'll admit, but it does yield a list with names of actual people who actually played baseball. There are 853 individual names in the list, with a frequency range from 1 to 125 (Jose).

LAST NAMES: I started with a list of the 199 most common Dominican surnames. According to my calculations, those names represent about 60% of the Dominican population (to give some context, the 100 most common American names represent about 20% of the US population). I then added 1256 Spanish names, based on frequency data contained in this site.

As far as I can discern, the main difference between Dominican surnames and those of Spain and other Latin American countries is that the DR has a smattering of French names, undoubtedly due in large part to immigration from Haiti. Other than that, some surnames are more common in the DR than in Spain (such as Pea), while others are more common in Spain than in the DR (such as Sanz). And then there are names that are very common in both countries (such as Garcia). Names in the top 199 range from 231 (Rodriguez) to 8. Names that do not appear on that list top out at 7. There are 1455 surnames in the nameset.

INCORPORATING THE NAMES INTO THE GAME:
  1. These namesets do NOT have a nameset number. Instead, that field is marked by an asterisk (*). Go into the names files and do a search-and-replace operation, replacing the asterisk with the number that you choose for the Dominican nameset.
  2. Make back-up copies of the first_names and names files located in the OOTP database folder and move those back-ups to a separate location.
  3. In the Dominican names file, select "all" and copy and paste the names into the OOTP names.txt file.
  4. Repeat step 3 for the Dominican first names file and the first_names.txt file.
  5. Make a back-up copy of your modified first_names and names files and place them in a separate location (OOTP will overwrite your database files when it updates, so you'll want to save your work somewhere other than the OOTP database folder).
  6. In the world_default.xml file, add the following to the list of ethnicities:
    Code:
    <ETHNICITY id="*" name="Dominican" african="840" asian="0" east_indian="0" caucasian="0" hispanic="160" />
    Replace the asterisk with the ID number that you've assigned to this nameset.
  7. In the world_default.xml file, change the ETID numbers for the DR (nation ID 56) from "1" to the number you've assigned to this nameset. Those ETID numbers can be found in the NATION and ETHN PCT lines.
  8. Make a back-up copy of your modified world_default.xml file and place it in a separate location.
Dominican first names.txt
Dominican names.txt
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