Normally an literate English speaking person is usually able to tell a female from a male first name just by the way it sounds even if they have never encountered that exact name before. I have found this even holds true to some degree for other Germanic and Latin oriented languages. Obviously there are some scenarios where there are names that can go either way Like “Leslie” for men used in the first half of the 1900’s or more recently “Taylor” for girls etc. , however, in the main it’s pretty easy to sort female from male first names with a fairly high degree of accuracy.
With respect to this differentiation what is it language-wise that allows this determination to be derived given all the utterly different possible names available. What makes a first name more male or female? Combinations of A’s and O’s, stresses, simply that we’ve heard similar names and unconsciously make that gender association?
Ending in a vowel is huge indicator for female names. Look through this list of most common names, and you’ll see that males names predominately end in a consonant, while female names end in a vowel. This cuts across many cultures & languages.
No, it really isn’t. I think you’ll find a huge number of names that have done that.
It’s much more common than you think, so I think it’s mostly a matter of time and custom. Interestingly, names generally go from male to female, not too many go the other way.
There’s also the issue of masculine & feminine nouns still existing in Spanish, Italian, French, and maybe German? English dropped noun gender centuries ago and I only first heard about it when I started middle school Spanish. Even there it doesn’t always follow common sense rules, like the word for ‘dress’ in Spanish is masculine. I assume it dates back to Latin and other archaic root languages…
There are a fairly significant number of names that were previously used mostly for boys that have now largely become girls’ names. Other examples are Kelly, Shirley, Ashley (c.f. Ashley Wilkes from Gone with the Wind), Beverly (the author of Anne of Green Gables wrote a now-fairly confusing parallel series about a boy named Beverly that you keep forgetting is actually a boy because he speaks in highly flowery and poetic language and is, y’know, named Beverly), Paris, and Allison.
I think that Nicola, Dana, Sasha, and Andrea are more likely these days to be used for a girl rather than a boy. At least I can think of several women with those names off the top of my headbb
Depends on the language the name comes from, of course. Lots of foreign names get incorporated into English due to immigration, so we’re probably more confused about this than most.
Plus there’s a difference between ending in a vowel and ending with a vowel sound. We don’t just judge a name by how it sounds when spoken; what it looks like in writing is a consideration too or we wouldn’t have the varied spellings we do.
Japanese names aside because O and A conventions seem reversed and Slavic names where A is frequently male, you can often tell the gender of a name from several cultures based on a vowel ending: A is typically a girl’s name, O is typically a boy. I and E can be either, though I personally can think of more girls names that end in E than boys.
Monstro:
Enzi - boy
Goma - girl
Issa - girl
Salene - girl
Koffi - boy
Dinka - dunno, it’s a type of people and place names are unisex but seem given to girls more often than boys
Does thinking of that word as “clothing” sound more like it could be masculine/neuter? Remember that until PC got invented, in Spanish the masculine was the neuter (and it still is, officially).
Sometimes the same name is masculine in one language and feminine in another, such as Andrea: (m) in Italian, (f) in Spanish.
I find that the Japanese names in my son’s manga and manga-like shows reverse American gender naming conventions. Many male names end in -a (like Akira, etc). Many of the female names end in -o, and these usually sound more masculine to me.
I have read books with Japanese characters that flipped these conventions, so I am not sure if these are actually a trend in Japanese naming convention.