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

[Laurence Horn]

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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