Samantha, Rebecca, Olga, Anna, Luna, Michaela, Isabella, Claudia, Maria, Sarah, Victoria, Alexandra, Carla, Svetlana… across many different Western languages, the “-a” suffix for feminine (or feminized) names is quite common.
Linguistically (if it even is a linguistic phenomenon), why is this so? Is this a Proto-Indo-European thing, or something that subsequent languages came up with on their own (a sort of convergent evolution)?
We had a question about this back in 2006, but it seemed that all we learned then was “it’s probably Latin”. Do we have more info now?
Bonus question:
Are there similar parallels in other language groups (whether ending in -asound in particular — sorry, don’t know the phonetic spelling of it — or just having one or more common suffixes for feminine given names)?
^This stub talks about Latin and making female names by adding -a to a male name. Doesn’t help with the origin of Hebrew or Arabic names, though.
^This blog floats the idea that it derives from Indo-European grammatical convention for gendered nouns. Still no help with Hebrew or Arabic.
You might look for a proto-Semitic source to explain that branch. As to why two branches of language might both use -a as a female/feminine ending, I don’t know. Could be parallel development, could be cultural/linguistic influence, could be…?
Those are all names, typically (but not exclusively) male given names, but NB Noah does not end in an -a [if you follow me, in Hebrew; though “Noa” aka the daughter of Zelophehad does], and the others end in “ya” = theophoric.
So, on one hand, we have the Latin (+ Russian, etc.) First Declension— most of those are feminine.
As for Hebrew (not Indo-European), the original feminine indicator is -t; the ending -a is (maybe??) derived from it, but not the other way around. (Cf. in Arabic, the pausal form of -at is -ah.) Egyptian is also in this family: sn = brother [perhaps some original weak ending has been lost], snt = sister.
Well, Hebrew and Arabic aren’t part of the Indo-European languages at all, they’re in the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. The reason for the abundance of -a ending feminine names in Indo-European languages would be unrelated to those in Afro-Asiatic languages, although coincidence is a possibility.
Just want to emphasize that, as the OP mentions, this is largely an issue of Western languages. I don’t know a whole lot about Asian languages but what I do know is that Chinese, Japanese, and Korean don’t typically use the suffix -a to indicate feminine names.
I looked up female Japanese names on Wikipedia, and did notice a pattern: they lean really heavily towards ending in a vowel. Perhaps vowels just come across as feminine to people?
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean do not even have grammatical gender.
If you look at a list of currently popular Japanese names, many girls’ names end in -ko (literally meaning “child”, or figuratively a kind of diminutive) so, evidently, many parents think it seems feminine, is all there is to it, but there is no reason a boy’s name could not end in -ko.
Super feminine names like Akira or Hiroshi? You must understand, with exceptions like “-n”, all Japanese words end in a vowel!
A language like Korean has vowel harmony— how that may or may not influence names I would like to hear from someone fluent in the language…
It’s not from Ancient Greece, where women’s names ending in a aren’t in the majority. Many women’s names ended with e, is, or o, which sounds male to us, such as Sappho, Calypso, Hero or Callisto.
My guess is that those names that not end in A tend to be of more recent vintage and refer to actual things/concepts, while the names that end in A usually are inherited from older languages.
So:
Veronica, Patricia, Carina, Roxana, etc = do not mean anything in current day Spanish.
While:
Rocio, Consuelo, Celeste, Soledad = Do mean Dew, Consolation, Sky Blue and Solitude in current Spanish.
It may be true anyway: Noah, Elijah, Isaiah and Nehemiah are the English versions of those names, in Spanish they are: Noé, Elias, Isaias y Nehemias.
I don’t know remotely enough Hebrew to know the last letter of those names in their original language.
In Russian, I think it works like this: females are given a feminine name of their father, ending in -a (or maybe -ka). So Antonin Chekov’s daughter would be Irinia Chekova (or maybe Chekovka). I don’t know what happens when she gets married.
On the Japanese practice of naming their daughters —ko, I knew a Japanese woman named Yukiko (Snow Child) and one named Momoko (Peach Child). Simply beautiful, in both languages.
You must understand, with exceptions like “-n”, all Japanese words end in a vowel!