Noah - Noach - נח
Elijah - Eliyahu - אליהו
Isaiah - Yeshayahu - ישעיהו
Nehemiah - Nechemya - נחמיה
Note that the endings for the latter three words - “Yahu” and “Ya” - are references to God, like the “Jo” at the start of Jonathan and Joshua. “Yahweh” names are usually male.
Noah (boy’s name) and Noa (girl’s name) are spelled and pronounced very differently in Hebrew.
In Japanese, everything leans really heavily towards ending in a vowel. The fundamental unit of a Japanese word is the syllable, and they have an “alphabet” of 46 syllables that all words are constructed from. Of those syllables, every one except for the one corresponding to “n” ends in a vowel, so every word that doesn’t end in an n must end in a vowel.
Do male Japanese names also frequently end in a vowel? Don’t a lot of Japanese words end in vowels? Until you check that I’m not sure you can draw that conclusion about feminine Japanese names.
As it happens, every Japanese word ends in either a vowel or an “n”.
That’s the Patrynomic. It’s formed with the father’s first name, not surname. So it would be Irinia Antoninova Chekov. In the old days peasents didn’t have surnames, so the young lady would be just Irinia Antoninova. When a Russian woman marries she retains her patrynomic and traditionally takes her husband’s surname if he has one. But maybe they don’t always do that these days?
Icelanders also do this - Thor son of Odin is Thor Odinson. Thor’s son Olaf would be Olaf Thorson. Odin’s daughter Olga would be Ogla Odinsdottir, literally , “Odin’s daughter”.
Patrynomics are not surnames, although sometimes they become surnames with time and/or moving to a nation where they don’t use or understand them.
My admittedly limited experience (backed by some quick googling) suggests that Hindi girls’ names overwhelmingly but not absolutely exclusively end in “-a” or “-i”. Hindi boys’ names sometimes end with those vowels but not near so often.
Jewish liturgy still uses patronymics and matronymics. If, say, you go to a synagogue and ask the congregation to pray for David Katz’s health, you’ll refer to him as “David ben Michael”. Women are referred use their mother’s name (“Jessica bat Rebecca”); sometimes men and women use both their parents’ names. Surnames don’t really exist in Judaism, at least in the religious sense.
In Sanskrit, -a is masculine and -ā is feminine. For example, Rāma is a god and his wife is called Rāmā. Clear?
But in modern Hindi, -ā is masculine and -ī is feminine.
The feminine ending -ah in Arabic and Hebrew comes from Proto-Semitic -at (and still reappears as -at in the modern languages depending on the following word). That derives from the Proto-Afro-Asiatic feminine ending -t. The corresponding feminine ending in Aramaic is -tha, as in Martha and Tabitha.
In Latin and Slavic, the feminine -a ending (also Sanskrit -ā) comes from Proto-Indo-European -h₂ which was originally the ending for collective nouns. It evolved into the IE feminine gender. -h₂ was a laryngeal sound, probably [ʕ], the sound of Arabic ع ‘ayn. It has completely disappeared in the daughter languages, but its phonetic effect remains. The throaty sound influenced the vowel e to become lowered and backed, resulting in a. And there’s the real answer to the OP.
How are these pronounced? Is it like your typical macron-a in English, or does the macron denote vowel length or some sort of change in sound. Feel free to use IPA, I’m just not familiar with the conventions of Sanskrit transliterations.
It’s purely a matter of length. A vowel with the macron lasts for twice the time of one without. It’s like a half note to a quarter note.
If the last name ends in a consonant, the feminine form adds an -a. If the last name ends in the vowel I, the I is replaced by a -ya.
A Russian woman will generally use the feminine version of her husband’s family name. Raisa Gorbachev, the wife of Mikhail Gorbachev, would have been referred to in Russian as Raisa Gorbacheva.
This is also how it works in many other Slavic languages, such as Ukranian or Polish.
It’s even true for foreign names. I happened to be in Prague when one of the Harry Potter books was released, and I could see the stacks in bookstores. The author’s name was shown as “J.K. Rowlingová”.
Interesting, because one reason why many female authors go by their initials is to mask their gender, out of fear that some readers will be uninterested in a book written by a woman.
Reminds me of how Douglas Hofstadter (an outspoken advocate for non-sexist language) once related an anecdote about large numbers featuring a hypothetical “Professor Bignumska” - only for his French translator to redub her “Monsieur le Professeur Grannomersky.”
I believe the s is doubled, Odinsson, Thorsson, (but still Odinsdottir). That’s the genitive. Once upon a time, the premier of Iceland was Vigdis Finbogadottir, in which Finboga is the genitive of Finboy. My friend who explained all this to me was named Jonsson, since his grandfather was named Jon and his father took the patronymic as a surname when he emigrated to Canada (to Gimli, Manitoba that was the second largest icelandic speaking city in the world).
To add, the complete name with patronymic would be Raisa Maximovna Gorbacheva. I don’t know if she had a brother, but if she did, and his name was Ivan, his name with patronymic would be Ivan Maximovich, the masculine form.
Years ago I heard a story from a Russian friend when I asked him about the use of patronymics. One time he happened to be at a police station in a remote rural area where foreign travelers were rare. For some reason, two British travelers had to fill out forms at the police station and couldn’t put anything in the space where the patronymic was required. The police were unable to grasp the fact that Britons had no patronymics and were very suspicious when my friend tried to explain the different naming conventions. They kept shaking their heads, saying “what kind of people are these, with no patronymic?” He had to tell the Britons to just put their father’s names in that space.