given names

[Giorgio Francesco Arcodia -- ============================================================ Ljuba Veselinova, Associate Professor Dept of Linguistics, Stockholm University, S-10691 Stockholm, Sweden Phone: +46-8-16-2332 Fax: +46-8-15 5389 URL : http://www2.ling.su.se/staff/ljuba/ "We learn by going where we want to go." Julia Cameron ============================================================]

Dear colleague,

In Chinese (and Sinitic in general) many names are 
gender-neutral, but not all of them. For instance, 杰 jié 
('outstanding') is a very common name used both for boys 
and girls; very often the only clue to the gender of the 
name-bearer is the usage of certain characters/morphemes, 
the meaning of which is associated with feminine or 
masculine 'images', let us say.
Note that Chinese does not mark gender on adjectives and 
nouns; I suspect that there might be a connection between 
this characteristic and having gender-neutral names (see 
the jié example above).

Please let me know if you should need more data on that. 
Best,

Giorgio F. Arcodia

-- 
Dr. Giorgio Francesco Arcodia
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
Dipartimento di Scienze Umane per la Formazione
Edificio U6 - stanza 4101
Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo, 1
20126 Milano

Tel.: (+39) 02 6448 4946
Fax: (+39) 02 6448 4863
E-mail: giorgio.arcodia at unimib.it


On Sun, 22 Jul 2012 10:04:00 -0700
 Frederick J Newmeyer <fjn at U.WASHINGTON.EDU> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have a question posed to me by a non-linguist friend 
>that borders on trivia, but is perhaps deeply interesting 
>nonetheless. Does anybody know of a culture where no 
>distinction is made between male given names and female 
>given names? That is, cultures where if somebody says to 
>you something like "I'd like you to meet Gkz'itfo some 
>day," you have no cues as to whether Gkz'itfo is a man or 
>a woman. English and some other European languages have 
>SOME names like that (Lee, Kim, Sandy, etc.), but I 
>wonder if there are places where ALL names are 
>gender-neutral.
> 
> Thanks. I'll summarize.
> 
> --fritz
> 
> 
>Frederick J. Newmeyer
> Professor Emeritus, University of Washington
> Adjunct Professor, U of British Columbia and Simon 
>Fraser U
> [for my postal address, please contact me by e-mail]