Estonian names are close to each other

Back in university, we used to amuse ourselves with figuring out combinations of words at a Hamming distance of 1 from each other. In non-nerd speak, this means words that in a somewhat arbitrary way differ in only one letter.

To my frustration, Estonians have an amazing amount of names which are very hard to tell apart. Neither of these names are made up, we know of people called each of these names! :

• Raimo
  
• Reimo
  
• Raido
  
• Kaido
  
• Raiko
  
• Reiko
  
• Radko
  
• Raivo (two of them)

• Aire
  
• Aira
  
• Airi
  
• Aido
  
• Aivi

• Kadi
  
• Kadri
  
• Katri
  
• Katrin
  
• Katre

• Urmas (two of them, with last-names also with distance 1)
  
• Urmet
  
• Urmo

• Ainer
  
• Einar
  
• Janar

• Silver
  
• Silvar

• Arvo
  
• Ardi
  
• Ahti
  
• Ahto
  
• Aare

In comparison, these are all the Swedish similar names I can come up with:

• Marie
  
• Maria

• Peter
  
• Petter

• Caroline
  
• Carolina