ADS-L Digest - 1 Feb 2007 to 2 Feb 2007 (#2007-34)

[James A. Landau]

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.

    - Jim Landau

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