Given names--male vs. female (#2007-34)

[Charles Doyle]

There were also some anomalous Latin or Latinized male names that possessed feminine gender (grammatically), like "Thomas/Thomae."

--Charlie
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---- Original message ----
>Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2007 15:01:01 -0500
>From: Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>
>At 5:47 AM -0800 2/3/07, James A. Landau wrote:

>>Somebody wrote:

>>>Think of names ending in "-ko" as similar to English names ending in "-a", e.g. "Amanda", "Felicia", or "Brenda". They are a trend but not quite a rule: names like "Jonah" are acceptable male names.
>>
>>There are a number of male names in English that come from the Bible, e.g. Jonah, Joshua, Ezra, Isaiah, even Uriah, that end in either "-a" or "-ah".  Are there any male names in English ending in /ah/ that are not Biblical?  If not, then we can state a clear grammatical rule for English: given names that end in "-a" are feminine unless thay are from the Bible, in which case they are 1) not Indo-European and 2) of the gender of the Biblical person so named.
>>

>what about Dana?  (still unisex, and not Biblical)
Of course that ends in [@] rather than [a], but that's true of a lot of the -a(h) final names.
>
>LH

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